Sarah: Hi, my name is Sarah, and I'm
going to try to sum up my battle with candida in as short a story as possible. In my early
20s, I had a lot of stress happening for a couple of years, and the way my body responded was I got
tonsillitis. I ended up getting chronic tonsillitis,
I don't know, every month for two years. So I went on a lot of antibiotics for two straight years,
different antibiotics, because some of them wouldn't work
after a while. And at the time I was also on pill birth control and had been on that for
eight years or something. So that combination is what I think started my candida problems.
So not knowing that, I just went along with my normal life,
stopped getting sick, moved away, changed my life. And about 10 or 12 years later,
my digestion had slowly started getting bad over those 12 years.
I became lactose intolerant, and I thought, it's normal, it happens to a lot of people. And then
I just had an upset stomach all the time after eating, or I would feel really bloated and
uncomfortable, crampy. And again, I just thought, "Oh, it's that thing that I ate", or whatever.
Then I remember one day I was talking to a friend and I kind of referenced, "You know how you feel
terrible after you eat food." And my friend was like, "No, I feel great after I eat."
And I turned to some other friends and said, "Do you all feel great after you eat a meal?"
And all of them said, "Yeah." And that just blew my mind. I just thought that eating
meant feeling terrible afterward for a while. So I started going to a naturopath and trying
to figure out, "Oh, how come my digestion is so finicky?" Did that for maybe a year or two,
trying different Chinese herbs and whatnot. I went to some Western medicine doctors to say,
"Hey, here are all the things that happen to me when I eat food, something must be wrong."
Got tests. All of them said it's just stress. And they just sent me packing, basically.
So I continued with the naturopath that whole time, trying limited diets,
and more Chinese medicines, and none of it really made a difference. And then in the summer of 2018,
things went really, really badly, things went downhill very quickly.
I started getting really extreme symptoms and health issues that were just...
It was very clear that something else was going on. This is the list of symptoms.
I kept a list at the time because I was sure something was very wrong with me.
Over the course of that summer, some of the symptoms that I had, just to give an idea:
dizziness, I was dizzy all the time. If I closed my eyes, I would almost fall over.
Reoccurring ear infections. I had ear infections every month for the entire
summer. At one point I had ear infections in both ears and a sinus infection, sinusitis.
I had sinus infections for pretty much four months straight.
I had a patch of skin on my ribs that had sort of lost pigment. It was like a white patch.
It wasn't like flaky or itchy or anything. It was just like a part of my skin that had lost pigment,
and it was getting bigger over the summer. I was very foggy and not very quick. And I was
sneezing constantly, just all the time sneezing as if I had allergies. I was getting headaches.
I was bloated all day, every day, pretty much. I would have sudden bouts of amnesia where,
a couple of times I was driving and I just suddenly completely forgot where I was going,
what I was doing, what my name was, what city I lived in. It was absolutely terrifying.
And I would pull over and just cry. It would last for, I don't know, maybe three minutes.
Long enough for me to hold my phone and feel really panicked and not know what was going on.
The inside of my ears were itchy. I had absolutely no libido, no interest, no sex drive.
I would get extremely depressed. I would just wake up and start crying. And I have a history
of being a very happy, happy person. I never was clinically depressed in any way, and sadness
would pass pretty quickly for me. And I was just crying all day, every day, and couldn't really
handle that very well. It was really hard for me.
It was just constantly constipation or diarrhea, constipation, diarrhea, back and forth,
in one day sometimes, both of them in one day. It just didn't make any sense.
Obviously, I was craving sweets and carbs really badly. My mouth would water thinking
about a donut. I had itchy skin on my legs. They would just start itching sometimes
after I would eat certain things. And I couldn't quite figure out the pattern of what things.
And obviously, my immune system was terrible because I was getting sick all the time.
And a bunch of other little things, but those were the really concerning ones.
So that was summer of 2018. So after that, I think I went to one more Western medicine doctor and
cried to them, "Something is wrong with me." And again, they just said,
"It's stress," and sent me packing. And I remember leaving and saying, "I'm never going
to a doctor again for the rest of my life." So I decided to do the thing that you're
not supposed to do and dig on the internet. And I mean, I had time, I could barely really get out of
bed, I was very weak all the time, because I was eliminating things out of my diet that I thought
were upsetting my stomach. And I was just very weak and fatigued a lot. So I sat in bed all day
one day and did a lot of internet research. And I'd remembered my naturopath at one point saying,
"It sounds kind of like you have candida, but I don't think that's it." And so I just started
there and I thought, "Well, whatever that thing is she thought maybe I had, I'll look into that."
And I started finding people's lists of symptoms, and I was like 99.9%
of all of the symptoms just checking all the boxes on all of them. And I just started crying because
I thought, "This is what I've got." And then I looked up the skin pigment thing separately, and
it led me to candida as well. So then I started looking for a specialist in the area that I could
go to. I was willing to pay anything to see the right person. And there isn't one here. I couldn't
find anybody. I couldn't even find doctors that listed it in their things that they treat.
So eventually, somehow I found the Eric Bakker
YouTube or website, I can't remember which one. And I wasn't convinced. I'm kind of a skeptic
about things on the internet and people that have cures for things and whatnot. I don't really go
for that kind of stuff. So I thought, "Well, I'm just going to watch this person's YouTube."
And just during the course of a few days, I just had the YouTube channel running all day,
and I would just listen to it while I was doing things. And it was mind blowing
because I realized, "I found somebody who knows what they're talking about, who knows
what's wrong with me." It was such a relief. Just thinking about it makes me emotional. But I mean,
this is something I had been dealing with for years, my whole life basically.
So I don't remember the exact order of things, but I ordered CanXida, and I think I ordered
three bottles of each. How much to take and all of that and for how long is really ambiguous.
And I felt like I had a pretty bad case. A lot of the peoples that I looked at just had
a lesser case than me, lesser symptoms or less intense. So I thought, "Great, I'm probably going
to have to be doing this for a long time." So I started taking them December in 2018,
and within a week, one week, every single symptom of mine was gone except for, I think one or two,
like the gas and bloating, and maybe the diarrhea, constipation or something. I don't remember.
But every single other thing was gone in a week. And I was up and moving and could go for walks,
and was smiling and laughing for the first time in six months.
I was just like blown away, absolutely blown away. Then I knew that a harder point was coming,
because I know that as the albicans die, or however it goes, they release 80-something toxins
that make you feel all these terrible symptoms. So I knew that that was coming. But for the time,
I thought, "Okay, I've found it." And it did, that did come. I think, over the next
nine months I was taking that stuff, and I think I started small and then took more,
and then would stop for three weeks, and then go back to it. I read on the website or something in
one of his videos that was talking about that, and I followed those kinds of things as best I could.
Those nine months were really, really dark for me, because I had to do the strong
elimination diet, to not eat carbs and sugar, and all the other things,
there's many things on there, starch and all that stuff. It was a lot of stuff that I couldn't eat.
It was an extremely limited diet. And every meal was just eating anti-candida foods.
I mean, I worked up to it at first, but then did that. And I mean,
I got all of the symptoms, not all of them back, but most of them back very, very intensely
for, I don't know, three or four months, I was bedridden. I had just basically really
extreme allergy symptoms, just constant mucus and sneezing, and eye-watering, and itchy skin,
everything. It was just very, very intense. And I was extremely weak because I wasn't
having any carbs or starch or sugar. So I was just really weak. I remember I would go for walks
around my yard with my partner and he would hold onto my arm and we would just walk around the yard
for 10 minutes and then I would be exhausted and go back to bed for the rest of the day.
So I spent nine months pretty much living in my bed. I had to quit my job.
I quit my job. It was a lot. And then nine months passed. And I
don't remember when it was, late spring or early summer or something, and I started to
feel a little bit better. I was reintroducing small amounts of things into my diet. So this is
now last year, 2019, and I was reintroducing small amounts, and that was really tricky.
Sometimes I would eat two spoonfuls of something that would absolutely destroy me and
give me all of the crazy allergy symptoms and all bloated and all that stuff. And sometimes
I could eat something a few times before it did that. So that was a real guessing game.
I had to get a job again. So I went back to work. I only worked four hour shifts a day for
this other job. So that was good, because that was my maximum energy output. I was still really weak
because I was still on a very limited diet. Did that. And now fast forward to now, which is
2020, quite the year. And I'm still sort of on and off taking CanXida Remove and
Restore, the probiotic. So I'll take them for two or three months, depending on how I've
been feeling, that will depend on the amount I'll take, and then I'll stop for a month or
two or three. And then usually symptoms will slowly start creeping in, and I'll say, "Hm."
I just got some in the mail the other day because I had been more relaxed about reintroducing things
into my diet, trying to test it for once, and say, "Okay, let's see how relaxed I can get
with my diet, and let's see what happens," to find out where I'm at. Because that's the only
way to find out where I'm at with progress. And I started getting upset stomachs, and diarrhea and
constipation, and bloating, and a little bit of sneezing, which I don't have any other allergies,
so I always know that's what it is. So I'm taking them again now for a few months.
I mean, I'm not better at all, it's for sure. I still have an extremely limited
diet. I still can't eat, I mean, not even a drop of sugar, no sugar in my diet, no sugary
fruits, nothing like that, and very little carbs, and usually brown rice or quinoa,
sometimes sourdough rye bread, but very small amounts. So I still don't really get
a lot of energy. And I'm a big backpacker hiker person, and I was a circus performer
before I got sick in 2018, so I had to quit that, I had to quit backpacking. My whole life basically
was physical. I was an athlete and I'm not anymore, and that's difficult. But now I've
started painting, so I do more calm recreation. And I do try to go on hikes and stuff now and
then, but it's very tricky, I have to bring very particular foods and a lot of it,
and be eating constantly, and take a lot of breaks because I still just don't have a
reservoir of energy, since I'm not constantly intaking carbs and have a storage of it.
I don't really know where to go from here, but I do know that I am a thousand times
better than I was. And taking CanXida has saved my life. I don't even know what would
have happened to my health if I hadn't started taking it. So I really, really appreciate it.
I think that's it. I think that's the story. I'm hoping to eventually be able to
eat a donut someday. I'd just like to eat one donut. Anyway, thank you for listening.