Every once in a while, someone asks me about how it is that I’ve been able to reclaim my health after eight years of struggle. What was the magic bullet that brought you back? What was the secret sauce? There has to be a simple answer, right?
Sometimes these questions come while standing on the sidelines watching one of my kids’ games. Sometimes they come when I bump into an old friend at the dump or the grocery store. They also come at times by text or email, when a friend or someone who read my book saw a picture I recently posted of the latest mountain adventure. What’s changed? How can you do this now?
Well, there is no one answer I can give. When something takes eight years (and still has some kinks to work out), there’s no single thing I can point to. And some of it can’t be explained in a single post. Maybe, someday, when me and my family are ready, I’ll write the book that explains all of it. I’d like to, but it’s almost too painful to write and relive right now. But when I get these questions, there is one thing I will gladly share because it probably helped me more than anything else and it’s simple.
One Clue: It has to do with the earth.
The Genesis
Now this is going to sound a little crazy, but crazy shit happens to people, and you’re just going to have to go with me here. Three summers ago, I took a trip with my extended family to Alaska. In the month leading up to that trip, I got another covid vaccine and also had to get the rabies vaccine from a suspected bat bite-yet another ridiculous occurrence in the annals of my life. Despite the ongoing issues with my central nervous system, those didn’t seem to cause a problem at first, but I was warned that if the rabies vaccine was going to cause any ill effects, it would be around the time of our Alaskan cruise.
The trip started off fine, but on the second or third day, we took a canoe ride out to a glacier. Something happened on that canoe I never told my family about. We were paddling along, taking in the sights, and my heart skipped. Not just one beat, but several. My chest felt heavy and as I looked at my daughter who was telling me a story, I gave her all the attention I could muster as I went to feel my pulse. One, I counted. Then, two Mississippi, three Mississippi , four Mississippi , five — boom. Five seconds. For one heartbeat.
That Can’t Be…
I counted again. One, two, three… four, boom. Better, but not good. My heart was beating once every four seconds. Holy shit I’m going to die in this boat. I worked on my breathing and lessened my effort on the paddle. Deep breaths through the nose. In and out, in and out. I counted again. Three seconds. Maybe two. Stay calm. Breathe. The crew paddled its way across the lake to a spit of sand near a waterfall and we got out. Stretching my legs seemed to help. I moved slowly. I forced a smile. All the while, I was fully expecting to pass out right there in the middle of a family vacation — one that I surely didn’t want to ruin because it had been so long since I had even been able to do anything like this. Just smile and breathe. Hopefully it will pass.
It did. My beats started to go up and by the time we got back to the canoe, I was getting a beat almost every second. Sometimes more like two. When we returned to our original launch site, I confessed to my wife that I was feeling weird, but I didn’t tell her just how concerning it was. I have put her through enough over the years already.
A New Low
When we returned to the cruise boat, it was the beginning of a new downward slide into a place far below any abyss I had sunk before. A couple of family members got covid as the trip started, and I picked it up from them. On the flight home, I was running an incredible fever, but because of my CNS problems, I couldn’t take Advil or Tylenol — they both caused me incredible pain. So, I rode the fever out.
At home, the fever ran for a few days, and it felt like it was eating my frontal lobe. A swirl of tingles and throbbing pulses kept circling in the center of my forehead. When the fever subsided, something went haywire, and I couldn’t sleep. Worse, my body temperature started running at 94 degrees for two weeks straight. Almost three. It was the damndest thing. I went to the ER and they told me my temp was in the “normal range” and that this was all in my mind. They also told me that my kidney GFR rate was dropping to the 50% zone, but I didn’t quite need surgery or dialysis yet, so I could go home. Normal range? Kidneys operating at half capacity? All in my mind? Like I can make myself 94 degrees at will? Huh?
They gave me the minimum prescription for zoloft and sent me packing. “Come back when you are at 93,” they said, “and then we’ll worry about hypothermia.” That one-degree difference was what they needed in order to tell me if I was really sick versus “it’s all in your head.”
Doctor’s Orders
I took the zoloft and my body went bonkers. My wife was away and I asked my dad to come help out with the kids and keep an eye on me. I didn’t know what else to do. The zoloft made me feel wired and I stopped sleeping entirely. I told my dad, “I’ve never done cocaine before, but I imagine this is what it feels like. I need to walk.” And walk I did.
It was the summer, so the weather was great and because of my low body temp, I welcomed the heat. I circled my neighborhood ten times while focusing on steady breatbing, but it wasn’t enough to calm me down. So, I did ten more loops. I came home and was still amped up, so I did twenty more. I was gone all day, walking, trying to slow my heart down. In Alaska, I couldn’t get it to run fast enough. Now it felt like a car engine with all the pistons firing at Mach speed. The loop I was walking was about .7 of a mile, and I did it over 40 times in one day. Holy shit, I thought, I just walked a marathon, and wanted to do more.
That was it for the zoloft. It took about two days after my last pill, but my heart calmed down after that. Doctors wanted me to keep taking it to push on through, claiming it was impossible that the drug did that to me, but the correlation was clear. I was sick and freezing before it. On it I was sick, cold, and out of my mind. Off it, just back to being sick and cold.
Looking for Answers
The body temp thing was really getting alarming and I still couldn’t sleep. After another visit to the ER, where doctors ridiculed me again, it felt like there was no place left to go other than God. And Instagram.
One night, after I had been — and I am not kidding when I say this — awake for a little more than two weeks straight, I was on the family room couch at 1 a.m., trying to distract myself from the shivering, wondering if this was how it was all going to end. Scrolling Instagram, I came across an ad that made me pause.
“Have you tried everything for your health?” it asked. Yes, I thought. Sure have. “Do doctors not believe your symptoms are real?” Yes, you have my attention, go on. “Are you at your wits end, trying to come up with an answer for why your body is in pain?” Yes. “Can you not sleep at night?” Yes, that’s why I’m looking at you right now. “Have doctors told you it’s all in your head?” YES. YES. YES. They had me. Instagram was speaking to me when no medical professional would. I waited while the ad ticked off a few more items I answered “yes” to until it asked its final question: “Have you heard of grounding?” Oh man, what quackery is this?
The benefits of walking barefoot outdoors are well documented, but this was something else.
What’s This All About?
I was desperate, so I listened. According to this ad, one of the reasons for all of our modern health maladies is that we are no longer connected to the earth. That we are electrically charged beings and that we need to get grounded in order to dampen the signals that cause us inflammation and pain. Years ago, the ad continued, we used to sleep on the ground, or on mattresses made of natural materials that conducted the earth’s energy. We walked barefoot and reaped the benefits of living in community with nature. Now we live in homes with radio frequencies and constant electrical currents, buzzing through the walls. True, but if you tell me I need to wear tinfoil on my head, I’m out.
But that’s not what this ad was selling. Instead, it wanted me to try a grounding pad. It claimed it could calm the inflammation in my body and help me sleep. Seeing that I was in desperate need of both, I figured what the hell, I’m at the end of my rope here. I found a cheap pad for thirty bucks on Amazon and placed the order. The worst that could happen was that I lost thirty bucks. I had already lost my dignity dealing with all of this craziness years ago, so there was no risk of losing that.
A Shot in the Dark
The next day, the pad arrived, and I hooked it up to an outlet. It’s a really easy set up. I stuck the pad under my body and put my bare hands on the pad. The manual told me that direct contact to my skin was important for it to work. Skeptically, I did what I was told, and went back to watching my Netflix show to distract me from my misery. Fifteen minutes later, I was asleep. For the first time in over two weeks. Asleep. I woke an hour later. It was the middle of the day, and I had to go to the bathroom, but my first thought on waking was what the hell was that? On the pad, my whole body relaxed. Even more amazing, the persistent nerve pain I’d been living with for almost five years seemed to mute as well. Was that real?
I went back to the couch and grabbed the pad. It ocurred to me that I may have woken up because my hands slipped off the pad, and they were the only bare parts of me connected to it. Instinctively, I lifted my shirt and wrapped the pad around my torso. Okay, let’s see what you do with that. I went back to watching my Netflix show, still skeptical this did anything, and fifteen minutes later, I was out cold again.
I woke up two hours later at around 4 in the afternoon. Holy crap, what is this? Two weeks without a single wink and now three hours in the middle of the day after touching this stupid grounding pad for thirty bucks? What wizardry is this?
A Changed Life
That was three years ago and I have been sleeping with all sorts of grounding materials since. I have a pillowcase and a mattress pad, and I get a minimum of seven hours a night. Every night I lay down on it, I’m out in fifteen minutes. It also numbs all my nerve pain and calms my entire body. When I first discovered it, I wrapped pads around me for a few weeks to sleep — and sleep I did. After a few days of it my body temp started to rise. After a few weeks, my kidney GFR rose back from 50% up to 80%. And because of this discovery, the nerve pain that had plagued me for almost five years, was starting to get relief. I felt like I had discovered a miracle.
And I had, but one that’s been around since earth’s birth. It’s just packaged now in a way that I can benefit from it while I enjoy the modern comforts of a bed raised off the ground. I know it sounds weird and I promise you when I say that I didn’t believe it would work either. But the cycle has been repeated for over three years now. I lay on a pad and I’m out cold in fifteen minutes. Every. Single. Time.
The Biggest Factor
In the last three years I’ve recovered 99% of my health. Kidneys that they once thought they were going to have to operate on again, or need dialysis, now function better than they ever have in my life. All the soft muscle tissue around my spine has healed except for one little part that feels more like a tickle than an all-out electric shock. I have more energy for physical exercise and greater muscle recovery from workouts. It’s amazing.
Along the way I have found a lot of other things that have helped my health — Qigong, prayer, gratitude writing, Vitamin C, long walks, lifting weights, hitting the boxing bag to relieve the stress, breathing techniques, and probably a hundred other little things I’m forgetting right now, but nothing has helped me like grounding. If you’ve tried everything and haven’t gotten relief, give it a shot. It’s not like you can get a side effect from it like you can by taking one of the many supplements on the market that can often do more harm than good.
I’m not paid for promoting this practice and am only posting this because it truly worked for me. If you’re curious about it, drop a note and I’ll be happy to answer any questions about it. I just wanted to post about this because I know how much it helps me and if it can help someone get half the relief it’s given me, then it’s more than worth it to share.
You can’t sleep on the grass at night unless you want to freeze. Grounding pads give you the same benefit you can get from the earth during the day, but from the comfort of your own bed.