The Crash
Adrenal Fatigue – Part 2
Adrenal fatigue does not appear overnight. There are subtle things that can fester over the years. There can also be one event that will throw your adrenals over that threshold into fatigue.
11/24/2016: Thanksgiving morning after our gym’s Fire Bird WOD; enjoying a Starbucks run in the 4Runner owned for 4 months
My husband and I got in a bad car accident on Thanksgiving last year. The asshole ran a stop sign and slammed into us. Within a few seconds, he threw his truck in reverse hitting the guard rail, into drive hitting the other guard rail and sped off down the road. The next few hours were spent trying to get the police to come down and help control traffic on the semi-busy back road (in the middle of nowhere PA) as well getting AAA or some tow truck to come on Thanksgiving night (I’m sure we weren’t the only drunk driver casualty that night). I was uncontrollably shaking the rest of the night, which for me isn’t really new, I’m usually freezing so I didn’t think much of it.
The accident left us pretty shaken up, we both slept until 9am the next day (usually don’t sleep past 7am, even on the weekends) and I could barely get of bed or eat all weekend. It was comparable to a bad hangover, except for the fact that I had a glass of wine that night. The whole weekend we were both in pilot mode.
Over the past few years I have developed seasonal allergies and my face has started to breakout. I never dealt with either growing up and never experienced a pimple. Over the next few weeks I developed this rash around my mouth that was red and bumpy. The look of it didn’t bother me so much, but it ITCHED like a major bitch and it hurt to touch it. I went to the dermatologist who diagnosed it has “rash around the mouth” (there was some fancy medical term for it) and prescribed me 2 ointments. I asked her why this happened and how could I avoid this happening again, and her response was that it would take weeks/months or more to determine the root cause and that there were antibiotics that I could take if the ointments didn’t work. Needless to say, I was not thrilled with the response I received. The ointments didn’t work. I got the antibiotics. I broke out in hives. So I stopped all treatment then and cancelled my follow-up with the doctor. No thanks.
12/8/2016: These little, sensitive bumps appeared all around my mouth. They don’t look like much but they itched and “burned”
Well guess who figured out the root cause? ME. All by myself. Okay that’s a lie. I figured it out because of NTA and the NTP course.
By December 2016, I had been putting my body through the ringer. The constant demands and stresses of work, planning a wedding/honeymoon, house renovations, working out multiple times a day, etc. all caught up to me. My adrenals crashed HARD after that accident. At the time I didn’t realize the effect, but that accident was the tipping point. My adrenals were unable to respond properly so that I could bounce back.
Can you recall a stressful event where afterwards life felt like it was unraveling? Next I’ll explain why I believe these things happened.