Hi there,
Sorry, but this is going to be a long one.
It was back in 2016. I think it was winter in North India but I’m not quite sure. We were probably chilling outside the college cafe or finding cheap lunch places around the college to skip the terrible ‘arhar dal’ lunch.
I don’t think I completely processed what it meant for our friend to be diagnosed with autoimmune hepatitis so I don’t remember the exact details of when I heard the news.
We knew he was in the hospital so we made plans to go meet him and in the days to come, along with my other friends, we learned that he was not in good shape. He had to come to terms with the fact that his immune system was attacking his body.
The doctors told him it was genetics. But neither of his parents had that disease. This friend also has an identical twin. He (thankfully) didn’t have the disease either.
When he asked the doctor what caused it, the doctor casually responded that the actual cause of such diseases was unknown.
Mind you, he was one of the most physically active and fit people I knew back in college.
I don’t know if you have the time or the space to process what’s happening in a situation like this. I know he went to hell and came back.
Some five years later, when consulting one of the country’s best doctors on the course of treatment and taking a second opinion for the first time, the doctor didn’t ask him what he ate, how much water he drank and how often he exercised.
He asked, “How was the environment at home before you first got the symptoms?“
Later, around 2019-20, another friend was also diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, also an autoimmune disease. I knew she had moved across continents at a very young age.
I figured it was not easy to start a life all on your own when you’re only about 17-18 years of age in a new country, a different cultural setting, and a new society, after having left your friends and family miles behind. It can get very real and very brutal, all too soon.
The doctors told her also that while the actual cause is unknown to medical science; it was probably just stress.
Just stress? We’re not talking of a minor inconvenience but a life-threatening disease where the immune system of the body fails and takes the position of an attacker instead of a protector. It cannot differentiate between a cell of the body and a foreign cell and attacks every cell simultaneously. These diseases can be managed but can never be cured. It was “just stress”.
Or was it?
I recently finished reading ‘When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress’, authored by Gabor Mate. Mate is a doctor who treated multiple patients for medical illnesses and addictions. In his 20 years of practice, he worked with patients who suffered terminal diseases like cancer, ALS, arthritis, multiple sclerosis etc.
While examining patients, he started noticing patterns: people with immune system illnesses, whether autoimmune or immunodeficiency, had often experienced trauma before their diagnosis.
So he started talking more to his patients about these traumatic experiences and narrowed down these traits in his patients:
- People pleasers (you can read about people pleasing and stopping it here)
- Emotional repressors (more about self-regulation here)
- Emotionally responsible for everyone
- Perfectionists
- Non-confrontational
- Hyperindependent
To cut the long story short for you, their bodies gave up because they simply couldn’t take it anymore. I was tired of trying so hard all the time and constantly being in fight-or-flight mode. So it stopped trying.
Small changes in your life can save your life.
Love, JKD
