Popsticks To The Rescue

In today’s episode I’ll be sharing an example of how when dealing with severe and prolonged stress, we become more vulnerable to experiencing and developing disease, illness and injury.

We can experience symptoms suddenly or insidiously and very unexpectedly. And how we must be mindful of what we’re eating when we’re experiencing stress. One morning in August in 2016 we sat down for breakfast. I had a bowl of Freedom maple crunch with plant milk, nothing unusual about that, as it was something I regularly ate back then.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t just another ordinary day. Just a few spoons in and suddenly I felt an almighty pain in my right jaw. My jaw had locked in an open position, and I couldn’t close it. After a few minutes of thinking about what was going on and catastrophising that I may have dislocated my jaw, I managed to force it closed but then I wasn’t able to open again without severe pain; it was hard to speak and I could only drink through a straw.

With no idea at all about what just happened and why, I got straight in to see my GP and was sent for an MRI which revealed a right anterior disc displacement. I was prescribed anti-inflammatories, a soft diet, and referred to a dental surgeon for further investigation.

Whilst waiting to see the surgeon I was still having to manage several teaching and therapy commitments. How I got through it looking back, pure determination and not wanting to let my customers down. The way to see my surgeon seem to take a lifetime and when I got there was nothing he could offer.

Surgery wouldn’t have solved the problem so the only thing that could was to get my dentist to make an occlusive splint, and to see a physiotherapist to help me get my mouth to open with exercises and physical therapy.

I had never had anything like this happen before, it was totally unexpected and had no blueprint of how to manage it. We were in the middle of growing our hypnotherapy and NLP training academy in 5 major regions in Australia and I had commitments to be teaching most weekends, yet I could barely open my mouth, how was that going to work?

Talking for any length triggered fatigue in my face and jaw and I couldn’t eat or drink anything that couldn’t fit through a straw. This wasn’t something which was going to be a quick fix, but I felt in good hands with a physio who was a head and neck specialist and familiar with the condition and hopeful we could make some good progress together. Each session he would start by measuring the gap between my upper and lower jaw, and we would aim in session to increase it as much as we could.

His treatment in session was great and he could really empathise. He was excited as much as I was that we were making progress each week and was amazed at how effort I was putting it to getting better by speeding up progress with the exercise of outside of the sessions. I had to do several exercises each day to increase the opening of the jaw.

He gave me a pack of pop sticks or paddle pop sticks as they are often called, and this became my main go to exercise each day to get more opening in my jaw. The idea was I start with a bunch of them piled on top of one another, put them in my mouth and then keep slipping in one more at a time to gently force the mouth to open wider.

It worked surprisingly well alongside my physio’s treatment each week and soon I was getting less pain and more flexibility back in my jaw. I never did get back to my full potential due to the displacement of the disc, but it was good enough and it became my new norm. So what happened here for a spoon of cereal to trigger my jaw to lock?

We weren’t sure but all the evidence was pointing to tension in the jaw triggered by an abundance of stress! The food I was eating at the time was quite hard but having ate plenty of bowls of it up to that point without any injury suggested the cereal wasn’t the cause of my problem but rather a vulnerability in my body brought about by a series of incidents that were severely bothering me and

I wasn’t necessarily using the right kind of coping strategies to manage them. I knew I had taken on a lot but what I didn’t realise or wasn’t in a position to acknowledge at the time was I wasn’t looking after myself as well as I should have.

Despite teaching about stress and its effects to others, I wasn’t taking a dose of my own medicine and stopping off to realise how what I was doing affecting my own health. I was at capacity looking back; dad was adjusting to losing his leg above the knee due to Peripheral Artery Disease and living life from a wheelchair, mum was becoming less mobile, relying on others to take her places and for her everyday needs, experiencing severe unmanaged chronic pain, and becoming more housebound, I was growing the training businesses, and we were building a new online marketplace for business owners.

With my parents both being in the UK and concerns that they were aging fast with complex chronic illness, and not being cared for as much as I would like them to be, I was spending a lot of time worrying about them and trying to support them from afar.

There was a lot of stress and family dramas happening over there and I didn’t feel they were necessarily getting the care and access to resources they needed or deserved. It was a week or two before my mum’s birthday and I was seeing that her hair had been unkempt for some time and needing a cut.

No-one was making any efforts to help her with this and so I suggested I book her an appointment at a local hairdresser and pay for it for her birthday. The only person who was able to take her was my brother as he had taken over her main caregiving duties and had a car.

So, I asked if he would take her if I booked her in. His belief was he was doing enough already and refused to help her out. I felt angry with him and very sad for mum, and this lead to a series of toxic interpersonal interactions with him on chat which culminated in us not communicating at all which just made the situation for mum worse.

What was intended to be a kind gesture for mum turned out to create more friction than ever in an already frayed sibling relationship. Not having influence and ability to be there for my parents in person to help out with the day-to-day challenges they were having was playing on my mind more and more each day, and whilst I loved where we were and wouldn’t change it for the world, I just wish the timing and circumstances could have been so very different.

It also turned out that the overwhelming amount of stress I was experiencing in 2016 was affecting me more than I could have ever thought. I know from teaching stress and working with people who are suffering from it, that when we’re experiencing persistent and prolonged stressors, all our bodily systems; nervous, hormone and immune systems become elevated as our body settles in to adapt to stressor.

There may be few outward signs of stress but our body is working hard to keep everything regulated. Our organs (adrenal glands, kidneys, and liver) release substances such as catecholamines; adrenaline and noradrenaline, and cortico-steroids (cortisol) that increase blood pressure, fight inflammation, enhance muscle tension and increase blood sugar levels. The overall effect is to generate energy to deal with the stressors.

This process can be very costly to our body, gradually using up the energy reserves, and the capacity to resist becomes depleted. Chronic and persistent stress has been found to cause inflammation, immune dysregulation, and imbalances in gut health, and can be critical in the development of several chronic diseases including autoimmune disease, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and metabolic syndromes.

When we’re stressed, we also tend to typically eat unhealthily by reaching for comfort or ultra-processed foods and fail to adhere to behaviours and treatment which mitigate the effects of stress such as taking exercise, medication, or seeking out positive support and strategies to help us cope better with stress.

Tension in our muscles, especially in our neck, head and jaw, coughs, colds and infections we can’t shake off, or unexplained aches and pains in our body, are sure early signs telling us we need to take a step back and recognise a need to slow down. As Eva Selhub, MD suggests we need to “Listen to your body's whispers before they become screams".

Unfortunately I failed to heed my own or Eva’s best advice. Around the time my jaw locked, I was starting to experience very dry eyes, especially my left one. My ophthalmologist put it down to prolonged overwearing of my contact lens. So, for 2 years we just monitored it, I was advised to wear my lens less and use my glasses and lubricants more to give my eye a break.

This seemed to make no difference and 2 years later in 2018, I also started experiencing a lot of irritation in my left eye. The irritation was due to eyelashes turning inwards and rubbing on the conjunctiva. So, we had to start epilating my lashes. This continued for another 2 years with the intervals becoming more regular between treatments.

This was inducing a lot of insomnia and more stress and so I requested my ophthalmologist refer me to someone to have them permanently removed since plucking them out only meant they were inevitably simply growing back.

At that first appointment with my eye surgeon, I got so much more than I bargained for and instead of leaving with a clear lid of lasered lashes, I received a diagnosis of mucous membrane pemphigoid; a chronic, rare, and incurable, most likely stress induced, autoimmune blistering disease! I realised I was taking too much on and trying to take too much control in areas I couldn’t, and the more I couldn’t the more frustrated I would feel if I tried.

My body and the symptoms I was experiencing were telling me to take a step back and care, but care less, and only about the things I could influence without friction. I had to choose my battles and know where to back off when interpersonal conflict and overwhelm could be predicted. If you want to learn more head over to www.karenbartle.com where you’ll find lots of free resources and support to help you get you started to eliminate harmful or overeating.