The Next Episode

I absolutely couldn’t wait to get out of high school!  I was a poor student at best.  I was uninterested and even if I tried my hardest, I had such a hard time focusing and retaining what we were taught.  Unless of course, it was something I was interested in, then I absorbed the knowledge like a sponge!  The classes I actually excelled at were in a program called ACT, which was learning about things like architecture and drawing our own blueprints, designing and marketing our cereal, whales, astrology and music anything music!  Real world interactive learning was where I excelled.  I never knew exactly what I wanted to do, but had so many things in life I wanted to accomplish!  I felt like the next step was to head off to college because that’s what everyone did.   I tried it for 3 weeks at the local community college, but after waiting 1hr for parking each day to learn what we just learned in high school, I decided college wasn’t for me….I had things to do!

Roaring 20’s

I was free from high school with youth, drive and ambition on my side.  I decided to climb the corporate ladder at one of the largest mortgage companies at the time.  Back then it was hard to get a quality job and nearly impossible to get into this company.  So I went in through a temp service, excelled at my job and was offered full time employment.  I was then promoted to a job in the mortgage acquisitions and corporate support area where I’d handle escalated complaints.  Your know then ones that go round robin in the phone system 20x with challenging needle in a haystack kinda issues.  My job was to diffuse the situation and take ownership of the issue until resolved.  I enjoyed the challenge and the reward was helping the customer with a frustrating stressful situation.   I was also responsible for transferring tens of millions of dollars of loans to mortgage companies that were acquired.  It was all manual, a massive stack that would be done one-by-one and would days and days to do.  I had an idea to streamline the process and worked with a tech who was just a few years older than me.  Together we designed a system that could do 3 days of work in 30 minutes.  Shortly after that, I felt unchallenged and bored; I decided resign to do other things.  During that time, I met my future husband.  We were always active and spent our time doing anything outdoors like fishing, jet skiing, camping, and hiking.  But shortly after getting married something shifted.  I started to gain weight and couldn’t lose it no matter what I did.  I lost strength and became obese gaining 75lbs mainly in my trunk and face while my arms while my arms and legs became thin.  I had a hard time with my moods and sleeping, my motivation and zest became nonexistent…..I was far from the person my husband had married 2years earlier.  I struggled for years, and saw multiple doctors that offered no real help or answers.  I took to the internet desperate for answers because I didn’t recognize who I was anymore.  It was my roaring 20’s I was in my prime, or what should have been, but I was struggling.  I stumbled upon a condition called Cushing’s Syndrome.  Cushing’s is an over production of the steroid cortisol which leads to a host of symptoms, including all that I had.  I dove into the research to help myself.  Over the course of years trying to find a doctor who would listen, consider the possibility and test me, I was deep into the weeds of understanding this terrible disease.  It took finding the best specialists in the country, flying to Oregon, flying to another specialist in California, having a leading brain surgeon at MD Anderson review my MRI scans and finding the pituitary adenoma that was causing my issues.   Finally in 2008 I had surgery in Pittsburg with a world renowned brain surgeon and found my cure.  I don’t ever take it for granted; there are many people who suffer a lifetime with this disease and others who die because of it.  In the process I learned an incredible amount about the disease, the HPA Axis, hormones and the production of cortisol.  The HPA axis in basic terms is a feedback loop between your brain and your adrenals.  Your brain secretes a hormone called ACTH which stimulates the adrenals to produce cortisol.  Cushing’s can be caused by several things.  Mine was a pituitary adenoma that secreted too much ACTH thus creating too much cortisol but sporadically, which made it very challenging to find.  Others have a tumor on their adrenal that produces too much cortisol.  Some have a hidden tumor somewhere in the body that produces too much ACTH.  And some even have what they call Psudo-Cushing’s caused by excessive alcohol use or depression.  Cortisol is the stress hormone that is meant to save your life in a life or death experience.  Good if you’re being chased by a bear, but too much in the form of an illness like what I had, or chronic stress and it can have a host of negative effects on the body and mind.

Lavender Lemonade

I’ve always been a self proclaimed finder of silver linings!  From going through a “rare” mystery illness during the prime of my prime of life.  To going ridiculously deep into the weeds of medical research and case studies to understand hormones with the hopes of helping myself.  To having brain surgery and it’s transient effects on my hormones, and all of this changing some trajectory on my life, doesn’t seem fair in many ways.  It may not be….but using the knowledge I’ve gained going through it to help others, to me, is taking lemons and making lemonade.  I’ll have mine with a sprig of lavender please!  I’ve experienced firsthand issues with sleep issues which led us to create our bestselling Magnesium Lavender Sleepy Cream.  I’ve dealt with pain, which led us to create our Lavender CBD Cream.  I’ve dealt with stress and understand how it over stimulates the HPA Axis when it becomes chronic.  I’ve dealt with anxiety and can understand how it triggers the fight or flight response in your sympathetic nervous system.  Our passion is to thoughtfully pair herbs and other natural compounds with our lavender to create top shelf goods to help others and lavender has been researched and shows it’s effectiveness in these areas.  I’ve been asked if I have a background in chemistry or the medical fields.  No, but going through these hardships personally, has given me first hand experience and understanding, which we feel helps us in creating goods we hope will help many.   Who better to create goods to help people, than those who use them to help themselves!