The Physicality of Grief - My Hormone Healing Journey

Nobody talks about grief. People barely touch on the emotional and mental ramifications of loss, but they certainly don’t discuss the lingering physical effects. Sure, there’s the dramatic TV and movie moments that show very acute grief – in the hospital, by a grave at a funeral, someone dropping their phone and doubling over after receiving the phone call nobody wants to get. But this is grief right in the immediate aftermath of loss – which I will admit, is the worst part. It’s awful and so intense that you feel like you’re possibly going to die too. People show up in that first week, or even the first few weeks - they come to whatever service you’ve arranged for your person, they set up a meal train, they send flowers, they call and text. And these are all lovely things – please do not stop doing these very kind and incredible things for your grieving person. There is no way a person in grief can make it through without these gestures. The sheer amount of paperwork and decisions after someone’s death is such a logistical nightmare that it is impossible to function without people in your corner those first few weeks and months. So please don’t stop being there in the beginning… or really ever to be honest…

Because what about the long-term effects of grief? Yes, there are articles and books on complicated grief and the difference between prolonged grief disorder and depression. But these are written in medical terms and studies in a very clinical manner, not in layman’s terms. And of course there’s the 5 stages of grief by Elizabeth Kubler Ross – but this was written more in relation to what someone experiences when they themselves are dying. So what I want to know is why aren’t we talking about this more among our friend groups and in our communities? The simple answer is because people are terrified of grief and of death. To sit with, TRULY sit with, someone in their raw grief can be very intense and it reminds us that profound loss can happen to us. And it reminds us of our mortality which nobody really wants. I get it. I’ve said it before on this blog, death and grief are not exactly everyone’s favorite topic of conversation at the dinner table…

But what if that grief impacts literally everything you do – not just emotionally and mentally, but physically? What if it literally makes you sick, for years? I’m not here to discuss the general terms of prolonged grief disorder, complicated grief or depression after grief in the medical sense. I am here to tell you MY singular story. It is unique to me, as everyone’s grief is unique to them. But I want to share my physical grief experience after my dad died, not just the mental and emotional part, in the hopes it may help even just one other person to navigate what they're feeling if this happens to them after a stressful life event.

My dad died when I was 34. I spent my 35th birthday, which would otherwise be sort of a milestone birthday to celebrate, in a ball hysterically crying in the hallway of a hotel in Atlanta after trying to be social that weekend. It was only 6 weeks after he died. I was not prepared for how awful that day would feel and I wish I had just been alone instead of pushing myself to do remotely anything. Now we have to rewind a little bit for some context, as I was already experiencing extreme fatigue for a few months before my dad passed and had been tested for mono a few months before his passing. The mono test came back negative so I just figured the stresses of everyday life was getting to me and it was normal to feel absolutely exhausted all the time. I mean, to the point that if I even sat down and was still for 2 min, I would fall asleep. I literally could not stay awake. I would be up for maybe 1-2 hours in the morning and feel so tired I'd just want to go back to sleep, even after sleeping 8 hours.

Anyway, the debilitating fatigue continued in the first 6 months or so after my dad passed, which is to be expected. Grief is beyond exhausting. But then fast forward that fall and winter of 2017 and I started experiencing other crazy symptoms. I developed Reynaud’s, impacting the circulation in my fingers and toes and they would go completely numb and white if they were even slightly cold. This is a pretty common condition, but I just thought the timing of developing it was interesting. I started having chest pain and tightness along with heart palpitations. This was the scariest part, as I thought I was going to have a heart attack too. I went to the cardiologist in 2017 and early 2018 at least 3 times for EKGs and stress tests and everything came back "normal." But I knew what I was experiencing was not normal. I would feel dizzy to the point I couldn’t even hang on to my exercise bike (in a SEATED position) without feeling like I was going to fall off of it, even while completely stopping the pedals. There was no way I could actually truly exercise if I couldn’t even just sit on a bike while it wasn’t moving. I would often stand up and the room around me would go completely dark and I would feel dizzy and have to catch myself on something. Then came my skin – I started getting random rashes on my face and developed horrible melasma, which if you’re not familiar with it, is a condition in which large brown patches appear on the face. It appears like dark patches from too much sun exposure, except it’s not from the sun. It typically happens during pregnancy and well, I wasn’t pregnant. BUT this was the tipping point for me to start to figure out what was going on – having previously been an esthetician, I had studied melasma and knew it was caused by a hormonal imbalance and wasn’t due to just too much time in the sun.

So I knew I had to get my hormones tested, specifically my reproductive hormones, as these are usually related to melasma, and I decided to see an integrative doctor that practices both “mainstream” Western medicine but also holistic and/or Eastern medicine. I didn’t want someone to just say oh here’s some skin cream to slap on my melasma or here’s a pill or hormone shots and good luck. So I decided to check out Thrive Carolinas - my doctor suggested I get my cortisol tested too along with my sex hormones given I had experienced a stressful life event. And lo and behold, my cortisol levels were high. My C-reactive protein (CRP) level was also very high, which is a marker of inflammation and an indicator of potential heart disease, which is terrifying since my dad had just died of a heart attack and was why I was probably having chest pains, palpitations, etc. (not to mention, my anxiety about his death wasn’t helping these symptoms). Anyway, our stress response in the brain sends a signal to the pituitary gland to secrete adreno-corticotropic hormone (ACTH) which then tells the adrenal glands to secrete cortisol (which is the body’s stress hormone). If the body is under chronic stress (which really we all are in today’s society), the adrenal glands can’t keep up the output of cortisol. Humans are meant to have short bursts of cortisol for acute stressful situations, not prolonged stress where cortisol is always high. So since the adrenal glands can’t keep up the output of cortisol needed for chronic stress, the body converts pregnenolone into cortisol, ultimately limiting what is available for producing sex hormones (this is called pregnenolone steal). Then testosterone and estrogen levels can both get out of balance due to this limited availability of pregnenolone and there is a domino effect on how the reproductive hormones operate. This is also called "adrenal fatigue," a term a lot of mainstream doctors won’t acknowledge and I had heard about, so I knew when my doctor would actually acknowledge this term (more commonly accepted as HPA dysregulation), I knew I was in the right place. I won’t keep going down this rabbit hole, but it explains why my skin was going crazy, I felt so fatigued all the time, and was having other weird symptoms.

Fast forward to years of various efforts to balance my hormones – the first being that my integrative doctor suggested an elimination diet to see if anything was causing inflammation or if removing anything may help with the fatigue (I knew the usual culprits of gluten, dairy, sugar). It did. Second, she GREATLY stressed other lifestyle changes such as slowing WAY down, starting a meditation practice, not overcommitting my schedule, increasing my yoga practice, reducing caffeine and alcohol intake, saying no a lot, etc. It’s not every day a doctor doesn’t just write you a pill and send you on your way, so I loved this approach. This has led to me increasing my yoga practice and ultimately deciding to become a certified yoga instructor, as my practice has greatly helped me manage my stress levels. For something I got into years ago for the physicality of it, it has become the mental benefits I enjoy more now. Third, my doctor suggested I get off birth control to see what my body and hormones would do naturally on their own and to see if they would naturally balance back out. This was terrifying to me as I do not want children and have been on hormonal birth control for years and years. But I trusted her and started learning about fertility awareness, a natural method to birth control. More on fertility awareness in another post, but I was so floored by what I learned about the simple natural workings of my body as well as what hormonal birth control does to the reproductive system. I was also so mad that we aren’t taught more about our bodies or the effects of birth control when we’re young that I decided to get certified to become a FEMM educator and fertility awareness method coach. I want people to be able to understand the natural rhythms of their bodies and be able to live in line with them. If this interests you, you can work with me here!

After years of quarterly hormone testing and also ultimately working with my melasma skin coach, Jenn Csaky, I’m happy to say my cortisol levels are within range, my hormones are (mostly) balanced and my skin is much more clear. I’m still off birth control and tracking my cycles naturally - it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made to help my body balance itself out. Both my skin coach and integrative doctor think I was just already under stress from simply doing too much (socially, work engagements, family commitments, etc.) before my dad died and his death just toppled this mounting tower over so my body decided it had enough. I say all this because we live in a society that rewards busyness and stress – it’s like a stress competition out there, who is doing the most wins – and we are paying for it with our health. My body quite literally could not physically handle any more stress and it let me know that by making me sick. If we're constantly on alert, with cortisol constantly pumping, and then a major, stressful life event happens – this can be a health diagnosis, a family loss like me, the birth of a baby, a divorce, job loss, a PANDEMIC, you name it – you can bet you'll likely end up sick or even worse, dead. Stress literally kills. This is not a new concept, but until you actually experience the terrifying physical side effects of stress, you may think stress is only mental. The body knows more than the mind can ever know sometimes.

I just share this story in the hopes that my healing journey may help someone else out there who is also stressed to the max. And really, who isn’t these days? We don’t have to give in to the societal pressures to do and have it all. We don’t have to glorify hustle culture at the expense of our health. Just say no. It is so liberating. I think the pandemic had so many people thinking about what they truly do and don’t have to commit to since we’ve all been forced to slow down - there is a universal awakening happening. Are you going to be a part of it? Or will you continue to perpetuate the myth that busyness is best?