This Is Uncomfortable August 29, 2024 Transcript

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Reema Khrais: Brittany Walsh has always been really close to her older sister. She’s the first person she calls when she has a problem or just wants to talk. But back in 2014, the two were starting to butt heads. 

Brittany Walsh: It’s really hard to be fighting with the person you’re closest to, the person you share all of your secrets to…about something they’re doing to themselves. 

Reema: Brittany’s older sister Nicole O’Neil was dealing with some mysterious health problems. And she was going on overdrive trying to find a fix. Trying everything from vitamins and supplements to holistic practitioners and extreme diets. And this new lifestyle wasn’t cheap. Brittany could tell that it was destroying her sister’s finances. 

Brittany: I noticed the most, like, how much this was all costing, um, when she stopped asking for gifts for Christmas and started asking for a grocery store gift card.

Reema: But Brittany felt too nervous to question her older sister Nicole, she didn’t want to make things worse. And it wasn’t until we all sat down together, that she realized how much Nicole had spent in her quest to get healthy 

Brittany: I don’t like to fight with you and  approaching you about any of this would turn into a fight.

Reema: Nicole, have you ever shared with Brittany how much you were spending on your new lifestyle?

Nicole O’Neil: Probably not 

Brittany: No, I don’t think so… I’m honestly afraid to know the number. 

Reema: Well, do you feel comfortable sharing it now? 

Nicole: Yeah, it’s hard for me to, like, there were just so many instances it’s hard to know, like, how much at any given time. But I mean, on bones alone I was probably spending a few hundred dollars a month. Um, and that didn’t even include the other ingredients that went in. That was just strictly on the bones.

Reema: I’m Reema Khrais, you’re listening to This is Uncomfortable. 

Family can hold an especially fraught place in our lives. These are people we might feel responsible for, but whose actions we have no say over. We can’t control how they spend their money or how they take care of themselves. 

This week, we have the story of two sisters and how a desperate search for a cure tested their relationship. Nicole just wanted to feel better, to not be sick anymore. It’s something she refused to put a price tag on, and the world of alternative medicine seemed to have the answers. 

Meanwhile, Brittany wondered when or how she should step in – what’s the right thing to do when you fear the person closest to you might be losing themselves? 

Reema: So what’s the age difference between you two?

Nicole: Almost exactly 12 years.

Reema: Oh wow.

Brittany: Genuinely almost exactly 12 years.

Nicole: She was born three days before my 12th birthday. 

Reema: That is a big age difference. 

Nicole: It is. 

Reema: I also have like a 11, 12 year age gap between me and my brother, so I get it. It, I, if anything, I’ve always felt like more… 

Nicole: Like a parent.

Reema: Yeah, like a parent. Yeah. Yeah. 

Nicole: That was, um, a big part of our relationship, until more recent years, really.

Reema: When they were younger, Nicole would watch over her little sister. She’d buy Brittany things that were outside of their family’s budget. Here’s Brittany: 

Brittany: I have a vivid memory of being, like, on the playground with another girl. And she asked if I was, if I was rich. And I was like, “What, no, like, why would I be rich?” 

Nicole: Far from it!

Brittany: And she was like, “Well, you wear, you wear really nice clothes.” And I was like, “I don’t like these clothes. My sister bought them for me, and she makes me wear them.” 

Nicole: I would buy her, for Christmas and her birthday every year, I’d just like go crazy and buy her like a whole new wardrobes. 

Reema: Now that they’re older, Nicole is 44 and Brittany is 32, they see each other not just as sisters, but as best friends. They do have their differences though. Here’s Nicole. 

Nicole: I’m the creative, Brittany is like, very, you know, of course she’s a scientist, so, it’s definitely different.

Brittany: Very literal.

Nicole: Yeah, I’m a photographer, she’s a scientist, so you can imagine.

Reema: So Nicole, the older sister, is artsy, creative – a professional photographer. And Brittany is the younger, logical one. She’s a marine biologist and the only scientist of the family.

Nicole: Science has historically been the thing that sets me apart from the rest of my family. I remember, like, coming home from school, my mom would be watching, like, the ghost shows on the travel channel. And I’d be like, this is, that’s not a real meter, like what, what is that measuring?

Reema: For most of their lives this difference was no big deal. Some people believe the supernatural can be measured on special devices, others think a room is just drafty. But things got more complicated between the sisters in 2013.

At the time, the older sister, Nicole, was living in Boston. She was near the finish line at the Boston Marathon, part of the crowd cheering on runners, when two bombs exploded. Three people were killed and hundreds were injured. Nicole was less than 100 feet from the second bomb. Nicole didn’t get physically hurt, but she was surprised that in the weeks and months following the bombings, she couldn’t shake this feeling of perpetual anxiety. She knew – rationally – she was safe, but her body was still in fight or flight mode. 

Nicole: You know, I could be in the middle of a panic attack and trying to tell myself like, it’s okay, like you’re safe right now. And, and it just, you know, wasn’t working. It was really difficult to, to face all of that and wonder, you know, am I going to feel like this forever? How do I, how do I move forward from something like this? 

Reema: And that trauma only compounded other issues she was struggling with. She was 33, and not where she wanted to be in life. She felt low and spent most days sleeping. And to make things worse, Nicole started to feel physically ill. Eight months after the bombing, her stomach hurt all the time. 

Nicole: So first I started to have, like, really severe bloating, um, it felt like most things I ate made me feel really just sick. Like I always felt crappy.

Reema: And she felt constant fatigue and body aches. Nicole didn’t know why she was feeling this way. Like, was it connected to the trauma? Was it something else? And look– we’ve all felt bloated at some point, maybe it doesn’t seem like a big deal. But what Nicole was dealing with– it was constant and painful. She avoided going out with friends, her clothes didn’t fit, she couldn’t even eat her favorite comfort foods. 

Meanwhile, work felt impossible: Nicole would have panic attacks in the car just before a photoshoot with a happy family. She was doing the bare minimum to be able to pay her bills. So Nicole made an appointment to see her primary care doctor. But as she started explaining her symptoms…

Nicole: Never even discussed with me possibly seeing a GI doctor. I felt almost like she just thought that I –it was in my head, or… 

Reema: like oh you’re being dramatic? 

Nicole: Yeah and um, I just sort of, um, questioned whether I needed to find other options.

Reema: The doctor suggested that maybe it was irritable bowel syndrome, but couldn’t explain Nicole’s intense fatigue and body aches. After a few appointments without any answers, Nicole started to question whether conventional medicine could help her at all.

Meanwhile, her symptoms got worse. Everything she ate made her feel sick…except for peanut butter and bananas. On Thanksgiving, she showed up to her family’s house with just a big jar of peanut butter. 

Nicole was getting desperate. And it was around that time that a couple of her friends told her that conventional doctors were the problem…they told her: “They want to keep you sick. You need to see a different kind of doctor.” 

Nicole: They didn’t want to actually help us, that they only dealt with symptoms and they didn’t try to help you find the root cause, and that naturopaths and functional medicine doctors had answers that basically medical doctors didn’t want you to know and that they didn’t really know themselves.

Reema: Mm and yeah, that was alluring.

Nicole: Yeah it was alluring because I really felt at my wit’s end. 

Reema: Nicole was dipping her toes into the world of alternative medicine. A bunch of practices fall under that big umbrella: naturopathy, new age, chiropractic, functional, and herbal medicine, the list goes on. Many doctors say that using the word “medicine” in relation to this at all is a mistake. Because medicine is studied, peer reviewed, tested, and regulated by the FDA before it reaches pharmacy shelves. Most treatments popularized in alternative “medicine” haven’t gone through that rigorous process. And interestingly, this world also has their own diagnoses, ones that doctors aren’t taught in medical school. Which can give people like Nicole explanations for frustrating sets of symptoms that their conventional doctors aren’t able to diagnose. 

For Nicole, the first step to getting better was reaching out to a doctor she knew who was big on alternative treatments. He told her that she had something called “leaky gut.” It’s a condition that some people believe is caused by weak intestinal walls that allow bacteria and toxins into the bloodstream… Some alternative practitioners say this can cause bloating, indigestion, fatigue, anxiety and a slew of other symptoms. For Nicole, leaky gut explained all her health struggles. It felt like a revelation. The doctor recommended that she get on probiotics. After a few months with no results, he then recommended something more extreme, the Gut And Psychology Syndrome or “GAPS” diet. 

When you go on the GAPS diet, everything about how you eat changes. First, you’re supposed to eat only bone broth, fermented foods, ginger tea, purified water, and stew. Everything has to be organic. But you can’t eat raw fruits or vegetables, or grains. Of course, no processed foods either. Slowly, you can start to introduce other food back into your diet, like olive oil and honey. The creator of the diet recommends that you follow it for at least a year.

It’s intense, so Nicole visited a nutritionist who could guide her through the process. On the day of her first appointment, Nicole pulled up to the woman’s house, which is where she saw clients. 

Nicole: She was friendly and welcoming. but I think at the same time, there was a part of me that was like, this doesn’t really feel, like, professional. Like, it feels a little weird to be walking through her house and her kids are here. And, um, but then I  kind of pull myself back into this whole, like, “Oh, well, maybe this is the way it’s supposed to be.” Right?

Reema: It was kind of a refreshing change from the cold doctor she’d visited before.The nutritionist sent Nicole home with a cookbook for the diet. And she cautioned Nicole: deviation – any processed food, anything not organic – could undo any progress she’d made. But in the end, it would be worth it. Nicole had been sick for over a year at this point. 

Nicole: I was really excited to get that, you know, this recommendation from her and how useful that would be, um, and never really thought about the cost of it all…

Reema: Well, that’s what I was going to ask. How much was this appointment initially? 

Nicole: So her, like, initial one was, like, 250, and then, um, my follow ups  were I think like $175.

Reema: And why weren’t you thinking about the cost at all?

Nicole: I think I was just desperate to feel better, and at that point, I don’t know how I am going to, you know, have money to do this, but I need to do it. Um, you know, it was, there was no question in my mind that this was, that this could help me.

Reema: Yeah, so what was your financial state like?

Nicole: It was bad. 

Reema: She was barely working, but to save money she moved in with a friend and was paying just $500 a month in rent. Meanwhile, her grocery bill skyrocketed. Her nutritionist recommended she order fresh food from this local Amish farm – eggs, meat and produce that cost at least three times as much as you’d find in a grocery store. And each week, she had to go to Whole Foods and buy bones from grass-fed cows to make bone broth. Her monthly grocery bill would come out to about 800 dollars. 

Nicole: And I bought a deep freezer that was filled with bones, because I had to drink like four quarts of bone broth a day. 

Reema: Whoa. 

Nicole: And I didn’t  leave the house without a cooler. Like, if I went, if my friends were going out to dinner, then what I would do is bring a, um, a thermos full of soup or something else, and I would literally eat it in the car and then go into the restaurant and sit there while everybody ate. 

Reema: Meanwhile, Nicole’s younger sister, Brittany, was watching all of this all unfold… and was like…are you good? 

Brittany: I’m a science, logic-based person. I don’t fully understand the draw to holistic medicine. 

Reema: But at the same time, Brittany figured, OK, my sister went through a traumatic event and this is just how she’s coping right now…

Brittany: T his time will pass. She’ll, she’ll seek actual medical care, um, and //then she’ll  maybe go back to a new semblance of normal?

Reema: Yeah. So it’s just, it’s a phase.  

Brittany: Exactly, it’s a phase. 

Reema: Plus, what she’s doing can’t be that bad, right? Like, yes it’s expensive, but bone broth is not going to harm you, it’s got nutrients, protein. But then, Nicole’s nutritionist introduced her to a new treatment… and when Brittany heard about it, she couldn’t contain her reaction.

Brittany: Woah woah woah… WHAT are you doing?!

Reema: This is what Nicole was doing…

Nicole: my nutritionist told me that I had to buy a, an enema kit and do my own enemas.

Reema: What is that?

Nicole: It’s a, It’s a tube you put up your butt… 

Reema: Oh.  

Nicole: to cleanse your, your colon. 

Reema: Whoa. 

Nicole: um, and it comes with, like, a bag that you’re supposed to fill with, like, sterile, not warm-warm, but, like, a certain temperature of water, and my nutritionist actually had me doing coffee, um…

Reema: Wait what?

Nicole: which, at the time, she had convinced me that was something that I needed to do, and…

Reema: Wait, coffee?

Nicole: Coffee enemas. 

Reema: I did not real- what?  

Nicole: Yeah.

Reema: She was doing this five times a week. When Brittany first heard about it, the way she reacted sounds a lot like how I react to my siblings when they do something I absolutely cannot get behind….

Brittany: Oh my god…I …the uhhhh…and coffee!! Coffee! A stimulant! You’re putting… [sigh]

Reema: That’s the sigh of a sibling who knows it’s game over. No conversation from there will be productive. Especially when you’re talking with someone who’s convinced that they know something that you don’t. 

Nicole was steeped in a new world that promised transformation, she’d joined a club of people with similar stories and perspectives. She started following influencers on social media who shared similar health journeys. They got what it was like to be sick all the time, to sit and watch other people eat processed foods, to have their symptoms dismissed by friends and doctors alike:

Nicole: Scientists don’t actually, people in research don’t actually want to help people, right? It’s all part of this big scheme of big pharma and the medical community. And um, and so I’d have this sort of like smugness.

Reema: And Brittany would be like well yeah… we do have like a profit-driven healthcare system, but that doesn’t mean that medicine doesn’t work.

Brittany: I can’t tell you that you’re, like, entirely wrong. Like, is there a modicum of truth that capitalism still exists? Of course! Um, but me being like, I…  If I got too baffled by the conversation, I would exit the conversation. 

Reema: She’d already noticed how Nicole was pulling back, how their relationship was starting to change. Before, they could talk about anything. Now certain topics, like health and food and medicine felt off limits. 

I don’t envy Brittany’s position. How do you tell someone you love, hey I support you, but I don’t support what you’re doing, you need to stop. I mean, is it possible to do that without driving them away? 

There’s this concept that Brittany and Nicole shared with me: it comes from this sociology professor, Janja Lalich. She has this metaphor about a shelf. She says that when someone is caught up in a strict worldview, it can be hard to shift their thinking, but there is this shelf in the back of their mind. Every doubt, every question, every concern you raise – even if they don’t seem fazed by it at the time – it gets put on that shelf. And if you’re lucky, over time enough doubts will be put on the shelf that it breaks. And that’s when the person will realize their whole worldview was flawed. 

So Brittany being like, “what the hell’ about the enema or whenever she gave Nicole a hard time about her diet…

Nicole: Those things all went on the shelf 

Reema: But they were still too small to make any real difference in Nicole’s point of view. She was feeling better, less bloated, lighter. Maybe it was working! So with the help of her nutritionist, she doubled down on healing her “leaky gut.” Nicole spent hundreds of dollars on supplements…on codfish oil, digestive enzymes, hydrochloric acid, probiotics, soil-based probiotics, glutamine, collagen, the list goes on. Each day she’d take at least a dozen supplements. Nicole was convinced that with her new diet, with these new pills, with her new perspective on life, that it’d only be a matter of time before she felt whole again. 

As you’re listening to this you’ve probably wondered, “Is there any validity to the medical advice that Nicole was getting?” And to be honest, we could do a whole episode just on that. But for the sake of this story, here’s a quick rundown. Leaky gut is not currently a recognized medical diagnosis. And the GAPS diet is widely criticized. The doctor who invented the diet claims that it’s a natural cure for a long list of conditions including autism, ADHD, schizophrenia, depression and eating disorders, which is pretty wild. There’s no published research to support any of those claims. And experts we spoke to said that following a diet like this can actually lead to disordered eating and malnutrition. 

I also learned that if you want advice on eating, you should go to a registered dietitian. To earn that title, you need a graduate degree, to pass an exam, and continue your education throughout your career. Nicole was seeing a nutritionist, not a registered dietician. Anyone can call themselves a nutritionist: there’s no degree or certification attached to that title. So the person advising Nicole to get on this extreme diet, to do a coffee enema, had no credentials to back that up.

In terms of supplements, that’s trickier because it depends on what you’re taking. Like doctors do often recommend supplements with clinically proven benefits like iron, Vitamin D, calcium.  Soil-based probiotics, not so much. But there are tens of thousands of supplements out there, and the FDA does not test or tightly regulate them for their safety and effectiveness. Manufacturers are free to make bold claims that are not backed by research. 

And last, but not least, the coffee enema: surprise surprise…there’s no scientific evidence behind this innovative approach. It will not boost your immunity. It will not alleviate constipation or remove toxins. But it will lead to potential inflammation down there… and to your little sister roasting you.

About a year into Nicole’s journey, she was sinking more and more money into these things she was convinced would heal her. She was now spending $1,000 a month on groceries. And then one day, Nicole’s roommate announced that she was moving in with her partner. Suddenly Nicole had to find a new place to live. 

Nicole: And I freaked out because I was like, I can’t afford to go anywhere.

Reema: She weighed her options. She couldn’t maintain her new lifestyle and afford rent. Nicole is the kind of person who hates relying on anyone, let alone her sister, who she used to care for like a parent. But she needed a place to live. So Nicole swallowed her pride, and asked her little sister if she could crash with her for a while. Here’s Brittany. 

Brittany: I won’t say, like, I was jumping for joy. But at the same time, like she’s my sister. Of course, if she needs to go somewhere, she’s gonna come to me.

Reema: Mm hmm. And Nicole, how did you feel about moving in with your younger sister? 

Nicole: Um I hated it! [laugh]

Reema: Up until this point, they could for the most part avoid the topic of Nicole’s health, But as roommates that would prove to be near impossible. Brittany would wonder, what is the actual cause of all Nicole’s symptoms? Was there anything she wouldn’t try, any amount she wouldn’t spend to heal herself? How many things would Brittany have to put on that metaphorical Shelf before it would come crashing down? What if it never did? That’s after the break. 

[AD BREAK]

Reema: Brittany had told herself that Nicole’s new diet was weird, but not a huge deal. With Nicole moving in, she wanted to be supportive. She even cleared out a section of the kitchen for her sister’s supplements and crock pots. But once they were living together, Brittany realized that her sister’s diet was more than a little weird, it was taking over the house. 

Brittany: It’s near impossible to look away when the crockpots are frequently, um, popping open and overflowing onto the counter.

Reema: One part of the set up was particularly annoying to Brittany.

Brittany: It was the, the deep freezer in our dining room. Completely full. And this is probably like a four-foot unit, like what, six cubic feet. And full to the brim with bones. 

Reema: Even in rooms without croc pots and deep freezers, the smell of bone broth permeated. Maybe you’ve been in a situation like this before: stuck in a small space, trying to keep the peace with someone who has a PhD in pushing your buttons. Brittany would go between feeling frustrated by her sister’s choices one moment, to the next telling herself there wasn’t anything she could do. Nicole felt fiercely defensive of her lifestyle. They each moved around the apartment, privately stewing. 

Brittany: Why can’t you take a break? Why don’t you take a break from the bone broth, and you could try some foods.

Nicole: This is the food that that’s going to help me. 

Brittany: I don’t want to infantilize. I don’t want to talk down. 

Nicole: This is just what I have to do.

Brittany: Maybe it’s just not my position to say something. Why can’t you stop?  

Nicole:  I shouldn’t be eating that anyway, and it would just make me more sick, so why would I eat that?  

Brittany: Maybe it’s not my place. If I, if I push too hard, will she? Will she leave?  If she leaves, where is she going to go? 

Nicole: This is what’s going to help me. Like, I’m working with somebody who knows what they’re doing. 

Brittany: Why did you buy more bones?

Reema: But those are all things they never actually said aloud.

Brittany: It was absolutely the elephant in the room.  And it was super, it was convenient to, to let the elephant just sit there.

Reema: Yeah.

Brittany: We’ll both pretend it isn’t there. And you can reach for your cooler as we drive. And I get, um, McDonald’s. [laugh] Um, and we won’t talk about it.

Reema: And even living with her sister wasn’t enough to keep Nicole out of financial crisis. So Brittany would bail out Nicole when things got tough.  

Brittany: I would just transfer money to her account, um, or I’d write her a check and I’d be like, like, you’ll, you’ll get me back eventually. 

Reema: How did you respond to that, Nicole? 

Nicole: I mean, I’d accept it because I needed it. But… and also hating it. There’s always been this sense of, like, feeling like a failure or like, you know, why do I need help from somebody else? But, um, definitely with my younger sister, um, fresh out of college, it was harder than, than if it was anybody else.

Reema: Things came to a head when Brittany dared to question Nicole about her spending habits: like she’d ask… Do you have to buy these special, expensive lentils? Can’t you start to slowly bring some regular foods into your diet?

Brittany: And you were crying and telling me that you wish you could, you wish you didn’t have to do this, but you have to do it.

Nicole:if I try even the smallest bit of anything off of this diet and I do not take all of these supplements, then.  I could just be making my condition worse or backtracking. 

Reema: At times she was feeling a lot better, and then one off day would send her spiraling again. Nicole wasn’t ready to confront the idea that the miracle cures weren’t working, but she was finally admitting that they were making her miserable. She was no longer pretending to enjoy drinking bone broth in her car before dinners with friends. And that was huge. 

That shelf we talked about earlier–the metaphorical one holding all the doubts Nicole had about her belief system? It was getting a little more crowded, a little heavier. 

Nicole and Brittany lived together for about a year, before Nicole moved in with another relative, where she’d have more space to herself. When she started dating her now boyfriend, things started to shift even more. On their dates, she found herself wishing she could actually eat.  

Nicole: I was starting to feel like I just want to eat normal. Like I just want to go, don’t want to have to think about bone broth ever again. I want to go to any restaurant I want to go to and just order something, like, that I haven’t eaten in years.

Reema: So one day at dinner, she reached over to her boyfriend’s plate, and grabbed a french fry. It was crispy and hot in her fingers. She popped it in her mouth, savoring the salt and starch and fat. And the world didn’t come crashing down. 

Brittany: Oh, I remember the first time you told me you had french fries. [laugh] You had some of Doug’s french fries. And I was, I, like, internally screaming. Internally, like, alarm bells: “Oh my god, she’s eating a french fry!”

Reema: We like to imagine that these transformations happen overnight, but they happen slowly. Nicole might have had the occasional french fry, but she still hadn’t changed her worldview. And who knows, maybe til this day she’d be drinking bone broth and experimenting with different supplements …if it wasn’t for the baby. 

Brittany: I was confiding in her about, like, trying to get pregnant, confiding in her about being pregnant, she’s the first person I told.

Reema: Brittany and her husband were expecting their first child, which came with a lot of medical decisions. 

Brittany: I remember when I was, I think I was 32 weeks. And my doctor said, who’s going to be involved with the baby? ‘Cause they should all have a Tdap booster.

Reema: Brittany and her now husband got their booster shots immediately. That left Nicole, who Brittany hoped would be with her every step of the way through her pregnancy. But over the years, Nicole had become convinced that vaccines did more harm than good. Like many people, she was pulled in by social media influencers sharing medical misinformation. Nicole was afraid that one shot could throw her body into chaos. All of this was alarming to her scientist sister. For so long Brittany had held her tongue so many times in favor of keeping the peace with Nicole. But the conversation about this vaccine was too important to avoid. It protects babies from diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough – illnesses that can be deadly for newborns.

Brittany: I believe when I called you, I told you that you couldn’t see the baby if you didn’t get the shot. 

Nicole: I remember the feeling that I had like this sort of like, um, like some dread or like, what do I do because there’s no way I’m not seeing this child, but what, what will this to me. You know, will this cause me any kind of harm? Will it make all of my issues worse?

Reema: Nicole contacted one of her many medical advisors who told her:

Nicole: I don’t think it’s gonna do anything like bad to you, and it was somebody that I trusted, and so I was like. “Okay then, I will do this.” Because I couldn’t, I couldn’t imagine… and I didn’t even know the connection I was going to feel to him the day he was born. But I knew that I couldn’t not see her baby. And so I had to do it and, and hope that it would be okay.

Reema: Nicole got the vaccine. For the first time in many years, she was making medical decisions with other people’s health in mind, not just her own. And when she got the shot, her health didn’t suffer. Which opened up a conversation about vaccines with her sister. Here’s Brittany.

Brittany: We were at the Grind, we were at the coffee shop near my house, and she was asking about the flu vaccine. And she was like, “Well, well, why do they always change it?” And I was like, “Well, it changes based on the data that they collect ahead of producing the vaccine.” And it was the first time that it felt like she was open to hearing any of it. 

Reema: It was a heavy addition to Nicole’s shelf of doubt. She was curious. She was beginning to question if the influencers she followed weren’t right about everything. 

Nicole: That, that part of the conversation I remember vividly because I remember being like, Huh, okay, so there must be more to all these other vaccines if there is to this one. And starting to think about illness in a different way, like um, which definitely was enhanced when the pandemic came, like this, um, thought of, you know, protecting other people.

Reema: As COVID-19 spread, Nicole was determined not to get infected. She wore a mask to protect herself and others. And she found herself eagerly awaiting a COVID vaccine. The alternative medicine practitioners she’d trusted for years now weren’t behaving the same way. 

Nicole: I saw all these people who I had been following for so long and listening to start to, you know, be anti mask and not talk about like things that I believed in. And I, and so I started to really pay attention to all those things, and the shelf just came crashing down.

Reema: Nicole began letting go of her extreme diet. For the first time in six years, she considered that maybe the conventional doctors she’d seen in the past weren’t part of a grand conspiracy; they just weren’t very good at their jobs. 

Nicole: I was like, there has to be something else going on here, and I have to, I have to go to find a good medical professional that’s actually going to listen to me. I started to think that that was the problem with my doctor back 10 years ago. 

Reema: Nicole made an appointment with a doctor. Walking through the door, she was nervous that history would repeat itself, but she sat down and explained what she’d been going through: years of fatigue, bloating, and pain. 

Nicole: I remember just sobbing, honestly, in the, um, because it was the first time I ever. I felt really heard, and she was, she really spent a lot of time with me. 

Brittany: It sounds terrible to say, but when she called me crying after going to the doctor because she had felt heard, she had felt that they were actually going to address, they were going to investigate her symptoms, I don’t think I ever felt more proud of her? That she had done it: she had gone to the doctor.

Reema: And after that appointment, Nicole kept seeing more doctors until finally one of them gave her some long awaited answers: 

Nicole:  He said, it’s actually fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome

Reema: Fibromyalgia is an autoimmune disorder. Symptoms include chronic pain throughout the body, fatigue, anxiety, depression, bloating and other digestive problems. Finally, she had peer-reviewed explanations for so many of the symptoms she’d experienced over the years. Symptoms she’d spent thousands of dollars trying to alleviate. This diagnosis was a huge relief for Nicole and Brittany. There’s no cure for fibromyalgia, but there are treatments, none of which involve crock pots, that can make it less disruptive to day to day life. It was empowering for Nicole. But of course, it’s hard not to think, “what if?” 

Nicole: I wish I had  caught it sooner and addressed it sooner. I, you know, if I had seen a doctor five, six years ago, um, you know, who knows? Like, maybe it wouldn’t have gotten to the extent that it’s gotten to now.

Reema: If you could go back to that time when you all were living together, what do you wish you could have said to each other?

Brittany: I wish I had put more pieces on the shelf sooner. I wish I had questioned the bone broth harder. I wish I had, you know,  questioned all of it. I worry that we, we enabled it for how long it went on. Yeah, I wish I had helped to break the shelf sooner. 

Nicole: I don’t think I could have been reached at that point. And I think that’s something that people, as frustrating as it is, have to understand when going through this; when they, someone they care about is know, kind of stuck in these mindsets and beliefs, um that there’s a certain amount of time that, that you can’t reach somebody. And it’s really just about those breadcrumbs and those little things that get put on the shelf.

Reema: Today Nicole hosts a podcast about misinformation in health and wellness and is working on becoming a therapist. Brittany now has two children, and Nicole adores being an aunt. She’s still a bossy older sister, worrying about health. 

Nicole: I started getting regular flu shots, and I had never done that in my life.

Brittany: And how she now calls me and makes sure that I got mine, too. 

Reema: Wait, really?

Brittany: Yeah. Are they, did the kids get their vaccines yet? 

Nicole: Did you schedule them yet? 

Brittany: Did you schedule the kids’ vaccines yet?

Nicole: It’s actually, yeah, I’m on top of everybody!

Reema: Alright that’s all for our show this week… If you have any thoughts about this story, or just wanna shoot us a note, you can always email me and the team at uncomfortable@marketplace.org, we love hearing from you all. Also don’t forget to sign up for our weekly newsletter if you haven’t already. There’s always great recommendations in there for things to cook or listen to or watch. You can sign up for that at marketplace.org/comfort. 

Alice Wilder: This episode was produced by me, Alice Wilder and hosted by Reema Khrais. We wrote the script together. The episode got additional support from Caitlin Esch, Hannah Harris Green, H Conley, and Marika Proctor. Zoë Saunders is our senior producer. Our editor is Jasmine Romero. Sound design and audio engineering by Drew Jostad. Bridget Bodnar is Marketplace’s Director of Podcasts. Francesca Levy is the Executive Director of Digital. Neal Scarbrough is Vice President and general manager of Marketplace. Special thanks to Dr. Elizabeth Ortiz and Dr. Jen Gunter. And our theme music is by Wonderly.

Reema: All right, I’ll catch you all next week.

Brittany: Oh my god…I …the uhhhh…and coffee!! Coffee! A stimulant! You’re putting a.. [sigh]