Podcast 526: Sleep Better, Not Longer: The Science of Restorative Sleep

MARTIN: Hey, everyone. Martin Pytela for Life Enthusiast Podcast and with me today, Jessica Faulds, a warrior, if you want. She is one, and Jessica's story is compelling. My story, I was destroyed by, well, medical injuries. I don't know how Jessica has came by, but we'll find out in this conversation, the important part is that she has overcome and let's find out how.

JESSICA: Thanks for having me.

MARTIN: Yeah, it's a delight. And so Jessica, let's name the problems that you've had, and how did you get into them?

JESSICA: So I was diagnosed with MS or multiple sclerosis one month after my 15th birthday. So I'm one of, at the time, I think about 2% of people are diagnosed before their 18th birthday. I woke up one morning and my left eye had stopped moving. It was frozen in place, and my other eye was moving normally, and I hid it from my mom for the day, and my dad was out training because he's an Iron Man. But eventually, by the end of the day, she took me to the emergency room in our hometown. They said they thought it was a lazy eye if it hadn't gone away by Monday, go see your eye doctor on Monday, obviously it hadn't gone away. So we couldn't get into our family eye doctor, so I went to see a different eye doctor who then told me that I had a brain tumor. 

MARTIN: Not a bad guess, really.

JESSICA: Not a bad guess. He was kind of examining me, and he just kept saying: “Oh no, oh no, no, no.” And then he said, “I think you have a brain tumor, or you're diabetic.”

MARTIN: Or maybe there's a gerbil living in your brain.

JESSICA: Yeah, and this was before cell phones. So he actually took my mom then, so he left me alone at 15 in the exam room and took my mom away and gave her a phone book and told her to find our family doctor's number, and then called him and said, “I have your patient here. She has a brain tumor.” Our family doctor very quickly reassured my mom that there's no way to diagnose a brain tumor just by looking at someone's eye. They got me in for MRI. 

MARTIN: Yep.

JESSICA: Got the MRI. We never got the results. All we were told was they were trying to get me into Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto, but I have been the same height. I have been the same build. At the time I was 15, I could have passed for 22. They said we don't know if Sick Kids is going to take her, but Sick Kids did end up taking me, because on paper, I was a pediatric patient, and I got diagnosed with MS. And then from that point on, through my journey.

MARTIN: Yeah, did you progress with that?

JESSICA: I did. So MS, how it works. The very title is Multiple. So to get diagnosed, I went away, it was in April, and they said, based on the MRIs, we're 90% confident that you have MS based on where the lesions were and how many I had, and what it was looking at. But they're like, but we're not allowed to say that until something else happens, or your MRIs progresses.

MARTIN: Because it will be a single rather than multiple.

JESSICA: Yeah, it's a single event. And there is actually something that they called CIS, which is Clinically Isolated Syndrome. And there are some people who have one episode and nothing ever happens again. I went back three months later, I got another MRI, which showed more progression, and then they're like: “Okay, multiple. This is two separate scans. We've shown the progression.” And that's kind of when I started the rabbit hole of different treatments. I have had four treatments in my life. One of the treatments, a side effect I got, was Legionnaire's Disease and Necrotizing Pneumonia. So I ended up in the ICU for two weeks. I don't remember that. I was very knocked out for a good chunk of that because I only had about 10%,

MARTIN: How are you coping emotionally? Like at 15 being told that you're I don't know, how do you how did you do?

JESSICA: I was okay. I was more sad for my mom. My mom was quite devastated. My mom was crying. My dad and I are very similar personality types. So from the moment I was diagnosed, they gave us all of this literature, and they said, “These are your options. This is what you should do.” And my parents, they read it all, and they said, “You need to read it all, and we're here to support you, but you get to pick what you want to do.” And so I picked a medication. I had to give myself an injection every other night. That was for the first couple of months, not a fun time in our house, because every night I would cry, and there was this whole thing, and we didn't want to do it. But you kind of, you adapt. And it becomes, you get used to it. It becomes normal. And my parents from day one, have always been there saying, “This is your life. It's your body. You get to choose.”

MARTIN: So you're now, what, 30 something?

JESSICA: I’m turning 33 in three weeks.

MARTIN: Okay, so this is now an 18 year old journey.

JESSICA: Yes, so I'm actually in my 19th year with MS right now.

MARTIN: Alright.

JESSICA: Based on when everything was.

MARTIN: Okay. Did you ever get to the symptoms that so many people have, like lack of stability, lack of balance, lack of this and that whatever?

JESSICA: Yes, I have. I had a very cool purple cane when I was in university. My MS was very active when I was in university, I have a degree in Health Science. I have a degree in nutrition and dietetic sciences. I did a two year holistic nutrition course, and I'm actually now doing my MBA. But when I was in university, I did try to be a normal university student who's like, “Let's go drink it! Let's do all the fun things.” I found out very quickly that I couldn't do that. I could go out once a week, maybe once every other week, not three times or four times a week. I couldn't live off Kraft dinner, and so when I was in university, I had, I do have lesions at T8 and T10 on my back that have affected my trunk. I lost feeling in my legs. For several years I couldn't feel temperature or any of that with my feet. I did have a cane that I would use. I have run a couple half marathons and 10Ks, and done some major bikes. And it was always, there's actually, there's a girl in the States, and there's a video called ‘Catching Kayla.’ So as long as she was running, she was good, but when she crossed the finish line, she's down. And I have done races where a family member or friend has had my cane, and as soon as I cross the finish line, they'll throw me my cane, and I actually use the cane to walk through the end. 

MARTIN: So, running is okay, walking is not.

JESSICA: Once you stop, that moment for me, at least at the time, I was very lucky with my stem cell transplant. I have not had any progression or symptoms since,

MARTIN: Oh, you mentioned stem cell? 

JESSICA: Yes. Okay, so I did. I failed off of four treatments. So I started with a drug called BetaSeron. They're all interferons. I did BetaSeron, and then I did Tysabri, which is one of the first infusion medications. That was great. I didn't have to do injectables anymore, but if you have an antibody positive in your bloodstream, it puts you at a higher risk for brain infection. And so I eventually said “I don't want to be on this medication just to make things go wrong.” So then I did a drug that was the first oral call that I could take, called Gelania. I failed off of that, I was still having active relapses, and at the time I was a student, so it was really important to me that we get my medications covered while they're still under my dad's health plan. And so I decided to do a drug called Lemtrada. And how Lemtrada works is you do an infusion all day for five days, so you're at an infusion clinic for like nine hours for five days in a row, and then the next year, you go back and you do an infusion for three days. And at the time, I believe they've said it helps progression of MS in like, 80 or 90% of patients.

MARTIN: Interesting. Is it a toxic thing or what's what?

JESSICA: I called it ‘chemo light.’ If you look it up, it was used as a chemotherapy for other,

MARTIN: Alright. So it's trying to kill stuff that

JESSICA: Yeah, the way it was described to me is, your immune system, go home, you're drunk, you're all being fired. So it kind of plummets your immune system, you build it back up. And then the next year, they said “You're doing better, but you're still not great. We're going to reset you again.” So I did that. That's the one that gave me Legionnaires disease and necrotizing pneumonia after that.

MARTIN: Yeah, yeah, because it's killing you.

JESSICA: Yeah. It wiped out everything. And I just happened to be exposed to Legionella at some point. We have no idea where, and then I moved,

MARTIN: You could have been harbouring it all along. Just keeping it in check. And when you shut the immune system down, it just is allowed to go.

JESSICA: Yeah, it comes up. So I sat down with an infectious disease specialist, we have to figure out where you got exposed. And I'm like, “I'm living in London, Ontario, at university, so we don't know where.” And so after that, I had a couple years where I didn't have to do anything. This was supposed to be it. I ended up moving 3600 kilometers away, to the other side of Canada, because I'm originally from Ontario, and I had an MRI here, and my neurologist, who's a very young neurologist, he's pretty progressive. He really wants to be aggressive with his treatments, said, your MRIs are showing that the Lemtrada didn't work. Your MRIs are progressing, and I want you to have a stem cell transplant. And I said: “Go to hell. Well, I don't want to do it. I'm 27 and I don't want to be bald. I still want to have kids. I don't want to do it.”  And then my parents flew across the country, and we all sat down together, and we talked it through and I ended up deciding to go through with it.

MARTIN: Now to me, stem cell transplant does not require you to go bald. I thought that it was a injection of pluripotent cells or something like that. What have I got wrong?

JESSICA: So for me, what I underwent was called, it's called HSCT, so it's an Hematopoietic Stem Cell transplantation, right? Autologous means it's my own stem cell.

MARTIN: So where did they get those out of fat cells?

JESSICA: Nope, my blood. So hemopoietic means it's from your blood. And so basically, this is what I believe the term is Myeloablative, so they completely wipe everything out from your system.

MARTIN: So this is an immune and stem reboot?

JESSICA: Yes, currently in Canada, you can have it done in Ottawa, and you can have it done in Calgary, and those are the only two it’s being studied. I think I remember the doctors here telling me I was like patient five in Calgary to have it for MS. It did start in Ottawa. I think the first study was from like 2007, so they've been studying it for a while up here. So how it worked was, first I did a fertility harvest, so I was able to successfully harvest 27 eggs in one go. So I learned that if I didn't do this, I could probably get pregnant very easily, and so I did. We harvested 27 eggs. The fertility harvest put me into a relapse. I actually lost complete feeling on my entire body,

MARTIN: Because it's a hormone stimulation to do it?

JESSICA: Yeah, with all the hormones and everything. So I lost complete feeling, my whole body went numb. They ended up putting me on very, very high dose prednisone to try and correct that, and it didn't fully go away. And then after we did the stem cell heart, like the fertility harvest, we started the stem cell process. So the first process was, I did one round of chemotherapy, and that kind of just shocked the body into going, “Oh, something's happening here.” So I did one round of chemotherapy, and then I started doing these daily injections, and they were called GCSF shots, I believe, and they're in my belly, and they were designed to pull the stem cells from my bone marrow into my blood. So I had to do those for, I believe, I did four or five days. I think it was four days, and then on the fifth day, you go back into the hospital, and they take a blood sample, and they take it off, and they count how many stem cells are there, and they decide, do you have enough that we can harvest today, or do you need another shot and we'll check tomorrow? And I was very lucky, I had enough that I could harvest on that first day, and I went up to basically what I think is like a dialysis machine. So I was hooked up with a port to my chest. 

MARTIN: To take them outside of you. Concentrate. Multiply.

JESSICA: And so they extracted all the stem cells and gave me my blood back. And I shared this room with a very heavily tattooed, tough-looking guy, and I was 27 and I'm a runner, and I'm 5’7, and he goes, “oh my God, you poor little girl.” He compared the pain in his bones. He's like, how did you survive the weekend? Because for him, the pain in his bones, he compared it to being shot. And I said, “Well, I've never been shot, so I don't know what to compare it to, but I ran 7k this morning, so I was fine.” I had a little bit of bone pain and I felt so guilty, I was like, “I have no pain, sir.” 

But they harvested, I think, a couple billion stem cells from me, right? They took them away. My parents had flown out for this part, then they went back to Ontario, and I'm very lucky, because my dad's a teacher, so they ended up driving out as soon as school was done, and that's when we started the stem cell transplant, and so then I did 11 rounds of chemotherapy in eight days, and it wipes you out completely, lifting you down. Yeah, at one point they walked in and they said, “We want to give you a blood transfusion, but we've run out of your blood type.” Because I'm A negative, and they're like, so we want to give you a positive with the medication, so there's not a reaction. And I was like, that doesn't sound great. “How low are my platelet levels?” And for context, anything below fifty, I was not allowed to floss my teeth. My platelet levels were at four.

MARTIN: Right. Because any tiniest nick and you're bleeding to death.

JESSICA: So they're like, yeah, you need them. So I ended up having this infusion, we did the 11 rounds of chemotherapy in eight days, which is not a fun experience. I highly don't recommend, if people don’t have to do it.

MARTIN: So you had your journey. So somewhere along the way, before even this, you have become a fully trained nutritionist, Health Scientist. Mind you, the mainstream way, they don't teach you really what's going on. They only teach you their certified mainstream pharmaceutical nutrition, which is not the same thing as going natural, right?

JESSICA: So I have a degree in Health Science, Med SCI. My original goal was to be a pediatric neurologist and help kids like myself, but my health would never have allowed me to go through with all of the med school and all the stuff that you needed to do is quite bad. But while I was doing my first degree, I took my first nutrition class, and I fell in love with nutrition. And so then I decided I'm going to go get a degree in nutrition and dietetic sciences, and at the time, so this would have been 2014 to 2016 is when I was doing that. I was following the Terry Wahls protocol.

MARTIN: Let’s just make sure that this is not glossed over. Terry Wahls. 

JESSICA: Yeah.

MARTIN: Terry Wahls.  W, A, H, L, S, she's a very famous woman. She was full MS and fixed herself. You mentioned something really important, which was that my blood type is A negative. I will bet my first born that Terry Wahl is a blood type O, not A negative.

JESSICA: Yeah. I don't think she has the same blood type as I do, no.

MARTIN: And so here goes, yeah.

JESSICA: So I was following Terry, and if anybody has ever heard of the Terry Wahls protocol it's a, Terry had MS, secondary progressive MS. She was wheelchair bound. She changed her diet. It was very, and she published this book, and I can say it's very well known. All of my friends, I have like 40 friends with MS because I went to MS summer camp. So we've all read it. We've heard about it. And when I was in university, I was like, I'm going to do this. This is supposed to be functional. It's supposed to, and if there's different levels to the Terry Wahls protocol. And I said, “Screw it. If I'm going to do something, I'm going all in. So I was like, level three, let's do it. And level three involves organ meats.

MARTIN: Okay, so let me explain something here, just so, this audience knows me as a Metabolic Typing Advisor, where we interact with how genetics intersect with food inputs. And depending on your genetics, depending your ancestry, whatever your ancestors ate, that is your sweet spot. So if your grandparents were Eskimo, then you're going to be just fine eating raw seal meat and whale blubber. But not everybody's like that. And so when you, in mainstream medicine, or in general mainstream people don't think of these things. They think that every human is identical to the other, and that is totally not right or not true. So here goes how you did on level three, Terry Wahls organ meat.

JESSICA: So I was in university, and I remember at one point I drove around to about seven different butcher shops looking for a cow's heart, because in the book, she says the cow's heart is closest to, if you've never had organ meat.

MARTIN: Yeah, well, just to be clear, this is the high purine stuff. So it starts with raw bison meat, and then going in from there would be tongue, heart, liver, brain, kidney, lungs, all of that stuff that is super high in purine.

JESSICA: Yeah. And so I cooked a cow heart. I made a cow hearts stew, okay, and then I couldn't eat it. I couldn't do it.

MARTIN : Yeah, I would expect that you with your A negative blood, you would want to throw up.

JESSICA: I fed it to my roommate. He loved it. But I was trying to follow it. So I was following essentially, there are other terms. People call it a paleo diet. I was eating meat. I was eating vegetables. I wasn't eating anything with wheat or gluten. I wasn't having any dairy. And at this time, I was going through my nutrition degree at the University of Western Ontario. 

MARTIN: Well, let's highlight this little bit, so you just gloss over it, but let's highlight it. So paleo is essentially pretending that agriculture was not invented.

JESSICA: Yeah.

MARTIN: So we're going in with whatever grows in nature, natural. So salads work. Some tubers are okay, but mostly not, and grains are out.

JESSICA: Yeah, grains are out, and meat is in, because we're hunters. Well, A negative blood type is no hunter. A negative blood type is a farmer, yeah?

JESSICA: Yeah. And so we had it. I was trying to follow this paleo Terry Wahl style of diet, where I wasn't having dairy, I wasn't having grains, really, I was eating a lot of meat and a lot of vegetables while doing my degree. And everything that was in my degree was based on the Canadian Food Guide.

MARTIN: Right, which is where I was just saying the mainstream of nutrition is nothing like natural science nutrition. That's stuff has been designed by industrial agriculture marketing boards, not by science. 

JESSICA: Yeah. And so every assignment that I had to do, I had to compare my diet and what I was eating in my food diaries to the Canadian Food Guide. And I don't know, It's been years, It's been almost a decade since I graduated, so I'm sure it's changed. And the Canadian Food Guide has actually changed since.

MARTIN: It's not much.

JESSICA: I think they got rid of dairy. They're not saying that everyone has to have dairy now, but it is like,

MARTIN: Yeah, it's sort of in your face that blood type O's do not do well with grains and dairy. That's a known fact. If you open Peter D'Adamo’s, “Eat Right for Your Blood Type”, which everybody should read. It's right there. It tells you.

JESSICA: And it was one of those things, I got really tired of just defending my diet that I was trying to do for a disease,

MARTIN: Because the mainstreamers are telling you, you must be mainstream.

JESSICA: And I said you don't have my disease. I will say that while I was on the diet, my MS did not stop progressing, obviously.

MARTIN: No, because you were on the wrong diet.

JESSICA: And so my MS was still active. It wasn't working for me. I am also, my friends tell me they're like, “You're a bleeding heart.” And I said, I do. I met animals. And I was like, it doesn't compute to me. And so when I graduated from that, I looked in, and we have the Canadian School of Natural Nutrition. So I got certified through them, and I started going the opposite way. And so I'm kind of this weird mix of science and holistic, because I take, I did take medications. I believe there's some great things that the medical environment does. There's also some things that I don't think that they,

MARTIN: You know, here's the tragic thing: you are an N of one. You cannot know whether you would have done better knowing the natural stuff, going all natural, and never having done the chemical stuff. We don't know. 

JESSICA: Yeah.

MARTIN: You might have done just fine, right? Like if you met me back when at the beginning at 15, and if you believed in somebody like me who would be telling you things. Well, let's detox you, and let's correct your nutrition, and let's push really hard in the direction that your ancestry would have you. You might have done fine, right?