From Surviving to Thriving: Marcy Langlois' Path

Transcript

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And welcome back to another episode of Life Changing Challengers, as she has been through a lot and overcome more than the average and is here to tell us about it and has a great view on life, and I'm just so proud to have her on.

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So, marci, welcome to Life Changing Challenges.

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Thank you so much for being here.

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Yeah, Brad, thank you so much for having me.

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I'm so excited to be here and have a conversation with you and hopefully provide some valuable insights to your audience.

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Oh, I am sure you will.

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But as I ask every single one of my guests, Marcy, can you tell us a little about your childhood, a compliment to your family, where you grew up and what it was like to be Marcy as a kid?

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Yeah, absolutely.

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I was born and raised in a little town in northwestern Vermont.

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I grew up in a town of about 250 people on the Canadian New York border, and so that was just interesting all within itself, where I grew up.

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And I'm 48 years old.

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And I just say that because when I was born with a cleft lip and palate and at that time there was no technology that indicated that to my parents so I came into the world in a very rural area, needing a lot of medical attention right out of the gate, and so that started my life.

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And just for people who don't know what a cleft lip and palate is, basically your lip does not form all the way across and you have a gap in your lip or a hole in your lip, usually underneath the nose, and then you have no palate in your mouth, so you have no roof to your mouth and oftentimes this facial deformity is an indication that there's more going on in the body that's wrong.

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It can be your heart, your digestive system, your major organs.

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So the first seven days of my life I was sent to the university hospital from the rural hospital I was born in and that became a battery of tests to just figure out, like what else could be going wrong with me at that time, and I found out or my parents found out that there was nothing more.

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Everything for me was in my face, my ears, my face, my nose, my mouth, my palate, and so that began that sort of paved the way, though, for the rest of my childhood and my life, where I am today, honestly.

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And so from there, what happened is, my parents were young.

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My mom was only 19 when I was born, and I had an older brother at the time and he was 19 months older than me, so my mom's hands were full.

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My father was an alcoholic and actively drinking at the time, and we didn't have much.

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We didn't have really very little means.

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At times in my childhood, we had no running water, no electricity, and so things were always interesting in my house between my medical needs, my father's active addiction and really very little resources.

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Things were tenuous, to say the least.

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I had my first surgery when I was three months old and my last surgery when I was 18 years old, and over the course of that time I had nine major surgeries, which consisted of 23 surgical procedures, and because it's in your face, it's as you grow right as your body changes, then the surgeries occur to keep up with the changes, and so, in addition to all of that, I needed huge dental work done.

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I had braces from the time I was in kindergarten until my senior year in high school and I required speech lessons and doctor's appointments and orthodontist, dentist, the ear, nose, throat specialist, you name it.

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I was there, and then I was also sick all of the time.

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I just I was never well.

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So I had a lot going on, without even considering all the dynamics of my family, and so my mom was my number one advocate and supporter for, being 19 years old, she was amazing.

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She made sure that I got every bit of medical care and resource and support that I needed, and she just made it happen, really against all the odds.

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My mom made it happen, and I'm so grateful for everything that I received in terms of care, surgeries, the doctors that I got to work with, all of it, and so, moving along, I always knew something was different about me.

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Of course, I wasn't like the other kids, but I was really insulated.

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As I said, I grew up in a small town and everybody was wonderful and supportive and kind and I had a huge family and my mom comes from a family of eight, my dad comes from a family of seven, so I have 26 first cousins and they were all my best friends growing up and so I was really cocooned and insulated and felt really protected.

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And then when I went to school, I knew that I was different because the kids let me know and that they didn't know who I was right.

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And I went to a Catholic school in New York state which was just across the lake, and when I showed up at school, kids really made it apparent that I was very different and they called me names and they taunted and teased me and bullied me.

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And my mom got on top of that immediately and came in and we did a whole thing about what is a cleft lip and palate and tried to educate the kids so that they wouldn't be making fun of me, and that was helpful to a certain extent with the kids in my class and I was able to make really good friends in my class.

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It was the kids that were above and below me that didn't get that education, that didn't know what was going on with me, and so that was difficult and created a tremendous amount of shame.

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But I learned really early on that if I could just overachieve and I could be anything that anybody else wanted me to be and you would like me then it took the heat off from the way that I looked.

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And so I loved school, I loved learning and I loved sports, and so that was like the breeding ground for me to just overachieve and excel.

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Excel at everything that I did, and I had a really great sense of humor.

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So when I started to feel like the pressure was mounting, I could just crack a joke and take the pressure off from the way that I looked.

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So I found all these coping mechanisms to deal with what I had going on.

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Right, I just did the best that I could.

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But that followed me into my adulthood and the rest of my life, and you'll hear more about that in a minute.

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But you know so, through grade school, as I was sitting in this Catholic school, I also uncovered that I definitely was not attracted to girls.

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I was attracted to boys, or not attracted to boys.

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I was attracted to girls.

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And I mean, sitting at Catholic school, that wasn't really a great place to have this discovery.

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So I just thought like, hey, maybe if I ignore all of this.

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Don't give it any attention.

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I say my prayers every night.

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Do what I've been taught at school, like this will go away, like this won't be a thing.

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So that's what I did and I acted like I liked boys, and I was so full of shame about the way that I look, the way that I spoke, and now I was attracted to like something is wrong with me.

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What is wrong with me?

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Right, always feeling like something is wrong with me and always feeling like I needed to over compensate for that.

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And so we went through that.

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And then in middle school I went into the public school system because the Catholic school opportunity ended and that was a jolt to my entire way of being.

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I went from this really structured, disciplined way of learning to like chaos and a free for all type from what I you know from where I had come from, what I knew and so, and I had to make new friends and the whole nine yards.

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But I ended up getting a great peer group.

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Also, I'm so grateful.

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I hear kids that just are taunted, teased and bullied forever and it never ends, and that's true for me too.

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But I had enough friends that offset that I feel so grateful for that in so many ways, and so, in middle school, though, again I wanted to fit in, but also I was battling this shame, this unrelenting shame, and what felt good was drinking alcohol, and that had been modeled for me right in my home.

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Wait a second.

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All right, hold on, we're going middle school.

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Middle school, you've been drinking.

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Oh yeah.

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That's crazy.

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Just a couple of quick questions listening to you is one is you said that you had, basically the resources were very low because your mom was full taking care of you and your brother and your dad was an alcoholic and you but you had all these surgeries and orthodontists and dentists and all that stuff.

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Who, how were you able, how was your family able, to take care of the bills?

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Yeah, so that's a really fantastic question I had a feeling you're going to ask me.

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So in Vermont there is this program that's called Handicapped Children and it's funded by the state and you have to meet certain criteria or whatever, and I met the criteria, so 100% of my medical bills were covered by the state of Vermont.

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So I yeah, I wish more states had something like that.

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Yeah, I literally had like world-renowned surgeons.

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Dr Peter Linton was my plastic surgeon.

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He did my first surgery and he did my last.

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I had the top of the line care.

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When I say my mom went all out to make sure that I was so well taken care of, really it was amazing.

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So basically you're saying that sort of the cleft palate and I'm just curious about this.

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I've got a little bit of a healthcare background so it makes me curious so not having a roof of your mouth.

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So I got a pretty good idea of how they can take care of the lip and the front right and the plastics there.

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That I understand.

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But how do they replace?

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Because isn't that like almost actually part of the skull is?

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Yeah, so they use tissue that's within the mouth.

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Oh, and they just replace it.

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Yes, create it.

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That's crazy.

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And when were they actually able to create that, that roof of the mouse?

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Was that earlier in your, at 18?

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So you didn't have it?

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Oh, 18 months, okay, yeah, and did they keep having to?

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Did it grow or did you have it?

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Was that part of it that you had to keep getting surgery on in order to add to it?

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yeah, yeah, no, so that was fine.

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So what happens is, when I was growing, it's as your face is changing and all your features are developing.

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So my nose was really flat to my face and so the way that you see my nose today, this is actually cartilage at the end of my nose or, excuse me, bone.

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So my nose doesn't push in.

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Like most people have flexibility in their nose, mine doesn't move.

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And then, like I had my jaws broke twice and wired shut twice because I had such a severe underbite it was 11 millimeters.

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That resonates for you.

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Yeah.

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That's so significant and so it affects your breathing, your teeth alignment.

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I had a severe crossbite so they had to break it twice because the movement was so significant that naturally my jaws moved back.

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After they did the first surgery so they did it again and then I had plates and screws put in and taken out.

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I had bone taken from my hip and put in my jaw to make one full top jaw, because the bone doesn't connect in the upper jaw.

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That okay.

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So on one half it's interesting, right, it's just interesting that they're able to do this, that the medical side.

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But on the other hand, the pain that you must have suffered going through all this, especially as a young adult well, not even a young adult as a child, and then a young adult, and you had to keep going through high school until you're finally.

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You said your final one was at 19,.

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Right, 18,.

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Yeah, keep going through high school until you're finally you're.

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You said your final one was at 19, right, 18?

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Yeah, at 18.

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So what?

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How do you still go to school after, after a couple of days after surgery?

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Are you still?

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Are basically, where do you get?

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You have to be homeschooled as part of it.

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How did that whole work with all these different surgeries?

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yeah, I just went back to school as soon as I could.

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Luckily, my grandparents lived in the same little town, and so it was a combination of all my grandparents that would take care of me when my mom and dad had to go to work, and so they would just keep me home from school for as long as necessary, and then, once I was recovered and able to go back to school, I was dying to go back to school, of course.

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So, yeah, I just would go back to school as soon as I could.

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Yeah, it was really painful.

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It was yes.

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I can't even imagine.

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So, yeah, so I just wanted to step back and I wanted to grab some of that, because I think it's important to know that this wasn't a one and done.

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This wasn't a teeth pull, this wasn't a pull of the twos or something like that, where you all right, you get it done and then you go on.

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This is major surgery and there's pain allowed to it, yet you still were just dying to get back to school and learn and achieve.

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Now we can come back into the point where you've gotten this example of your father, that is, an alcoholic, and middle school you started drinking, and I'm imagining that you started just getting it out of the house, right?

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Yeah, wherever I could find it, but usually it wasn't too hard to find because everybody around us drank.

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In a really small rural community that's not uncommon, so a lot of my friends' parents were drinkers, so alcohol was easy to find for us and so I would drink with my other friends and we didn't really cause trouble per se, but we did drink.

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But I learned quickly.

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I understood why my father drank, like I got it right and it made me feel like I was escaping all of the things that were so painful for me to look at and it just made me carefree in a way that I had never been able to experience before, because I was always worried about not belonging, not fitting in, not being enough, not being good enough, right, all of those things.

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And when I would drink I didn't have those experiences.

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And so I did that and I would drink as often as I could.

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And then when I got to high school, because I was an athlete God, I loved sports.

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I just loved sports, and I still love sports today.

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And so I competed.

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I was really committed because I'm an overachiever.

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I was super committed and trained all summer long for my freshman year and I made the varsity basketball team and then I didn't like the coach and we got into it and whatever, and I picked drugs and alcohol over basketball, yeah, and I kept playing softball.

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And I was and I love softball, that was my passion and I kept playing softball.

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But then my sophomore year I couldn't play anymore because I had to have my jaws broke and couldn't be around the softball and what was going?

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on More damage.

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Yeah, Reducing that risk right.

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Yeah, it just became too dangerous.

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And so then I really started being able to drink and party and do all the things, because I didn't have an allegiance to a team.

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And so, as this was all winding down and I could see the light at the end of the tunnel, the last thing that I got done was my nose reconstructed and the plates and screws taken out of my jaws.

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And so I thought, okay, I'm like on the, I'm on the up and up right, like I've made it, and we're going to turn the page here.

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And so my senior year I had an afterschool job and I was on my way to my afterschool job and I got in a horrific car accident that day and there was a man that pulled out in front of me.

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He never saw me coming and I hit his car and he had three passengers in his car and all three of those people passed away.

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And yeah, and that's still tender for me to talk about that- I, yeah, I can't imagine.

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And what about you, though?

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Or did you end up being okay, you were just getting over surgeries and the whole bit.

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Yeah, I was okay.

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All of my problems were soft tissue, so my neck, my back, my shoulders, my hips, my knees, literally from head to toe, from the impact, the seatbelt and whatever.

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But really the most impacted was my mental state, my emotional and mental state, and so I, my whole life, changed in that moment and my life was never, ever the same again, and I never looked at life the same way again.

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Everything about me changed and I really assigned blame to myself.

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I felt like I was responsible for the accident, even though the other person had pulled out in front of me.

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It was the story that I adopted, it was the story that I told myself.

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Survivor's guilt is very real and I thought that I should have died in the accident with these people and I definitely did not think that I deserved to be alive.

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And so every day I woke up and I told myself I really you deserve nothing.

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Every day I woke up and I told myself I really you deserve nothing and you've killed three people and this is your life, and I used that.

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I weaponized that against myself and the only way I could combat that or deal with that was to drink and drug, and so I just poured the alcohol and the drugs on me and trying to just survive, and things got ugly and I was supposed to go to college and I went for eight weeks and I never went to one class and I called my mom and I said you have to come and get me and if you don't, I'm going to take my life Like I can't.

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I can't be here.

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That was only eight months after the car accident.

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Seven months after the car accident, I felt like I had a billboard above my head that said I've killed three people, and so I felt like people knew that this had been my experience and the amount of shame and guilt that I had on a daily basis is I cannot quantify it.

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It was debilitating, beyond debilitating.

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And so my mom came and got me, but she said I'm only coming to get you.

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If you promise to leave, you'll have to leave this area, like you're going to drink yourself to death or drug yourself to death.

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Like you have to go create a new life for yourself somewhere else or you're going to die.

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And I said I'll do anything as long as you come and get me.

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And she came and got me and I got three jobs and six months later I left.

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I picked a spot by blindfolding myself and pointing on the map and I picked Central Florida and I left.

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I left with a friend that I graduated with and we moved to Florida and, unfortunately, because of the car accident and the because of the car accident and the nature of the car accident, with all these lives lost, there was tons of insurance companies and attorneys, and so there was an ongoing saga for four years and that just fueled the need to drink and drug.

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I couldn't shake it.

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I couldn't get away from it.

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I had severe PTSD.

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The movie was playing in my mind constantly in the events of that day and they would not go away.

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It never stopped.

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Whether I was awake, sleeping, talking to you, it was constantly playing, which is a hallmark symptom of PTSD.

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And so, anyway, I moved on and after the accident, I, or after the litigation was ended, I decided to relocate and I was on my way to Alaska and I stopped in Colorado and I never left and I've been in Colorado since 1998.

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And I met a woman here and we got together in 2001.

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Daughter named Brianna and she was eight years old at the time and I raised her because her father was pretty absent in her life.

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So I became the other parent and one day I had been drinking at the bar and Brianna needed a ride home from school, so I went to go pick her up, and when I was on my way back to the bar with her which is what my dad did with me it became really clear to me that I was doing exactly the same thing to Brianna that was done to me, and I in that moment vowed that I was not going to do this to her or anyone else, that I was going to stop the cycle and I was going to change.

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And sometime within the next 10 days I don't know exactly when that was, but on March 25th 2003, I walked into my first 12-step meeting and I've never taken a drug or a drink since that day.

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Wow, Since 2003?

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.

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Yeah, so it's been 21 years.

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I've been clean and sober.

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That's fantastic, that's absolutely incredible, especially since you're not even talking about someone who picks it up, for obviously you picked it up as a pure escapism as well.

00:22:35.538 --> 00:22:39.817
But you talk about middle school, not to mention you were around it all the time.

00:22:39.817 --> 00:22:43.070
Everybody around you was big drinkers, so it just was the example.

00:22:43.070 --> 00:22:54.113
So middle school, high school, college, then for a little bit of college, and then and it just kept following you because you had this other, this constant reminder what was going on.

00:22:54.113 --> 00:23:01.232
So you can under, obviously it's, it's an addiction and it's it's something, but you can.

00:23:01.294 --> 00:23:06.209
When you talk about your life and everything that you've gone through, you understand it.

00:23:06.209 --> 00:23:07.571
You know what I mean.

00:23:07.571 --> 00:23:11.586
I'm not saying it's the right thing, and what I'm saying is that you understand it.

00:23:11.586 --> 00:23:20.413
But the idea that you're able to look at it and go and the light bulb goes off and says, whoa, this is the way this happened to me.

00:23:20.413 --> 00:23:23.461
I can't do this to this child.

00:23:23.461 --> 00:23:26.708
I know what it felt like for me and I just can't do it.

00:23:26.708 --> 00:23:32.919
And you just cut sober and decide, going into your 12 step and you're done.

00:23:32.919 --> 00:23:37.693
And that was the when you walked in that first meeting.

00:23:37.693 --> 00:23:41.666
From that point on, nothing, zilch, you didn't fall off the wagon once.

00:23:41.666 --> 00:23:44.392
Nothing that's outstanding.

00:23:45.894 --> 00:23:47.917
Yeah, thank you.

00:23:47.917 --> 00:23:49.140
Thank you.

00:23:49.140 --> 00:23:54.747
It was, I thought, because I drank all day, every day, and I drugged all day every day.

00:23:54.747 --> 00:23:56.250
That was I had to.

00:23:56.250 --> 00:24:01.348
I was in so much pain emotionally I couldn't face the world sober.

00:24:01.348 --> 00:24:10.237
And so I thought when I got like well, when I got 24 hours and I had not drank or drugged, I was like, oh my gosh.

00:24:10.237 --> 00:24:19.128
And by day five I thought for sure I should be giving like a state of the union address or something like like I really felt like I had arrived.

00:24:19.128 --> 00:24:28.256
And that's how it works A lot of times with people, when they get clean and sober, is that they think like, oh, I've got a few days and so now I've arrived.

00:24:28.636 --> 00:24:30.746
Well, that's not how recovery works.

00:24:30.746 --> 00:24:43.275
Right, the reason that people are drinking and using is because they're suffering, just like I was Right, it stops being fun long before you actually stop, if you're lucky enough to stop.

00:24:43.275 --> 00:24:45.537
I wanted to quit for years.

00:24:45.537 --> 00:24:50.420
Every day I'd wake up and I'd say, ok, today I'm not going to drink, no matter what happens, I'm not going to drink.

00:24:50.420 --> 00:24:55.229
And if I can make it to like five days without drinking, then I'm going to give myself this sort of reward.

00:24:55.229 --> 00:24:59.455
Right, and inevitably within hours I would be drinking again.

00:24:59.455 --> 00:25:01.512
That's literally how my life looked.

00:25:01.512 --> 00:25:06.936
So I wanted to stop drinking long before I actually was brave enough to stop.

00:25:06.936 --> 00:25:14.730
And some people just don't ever get there and for that I have tremendous amount of compassion for them and zero judgment.

00:25:14.730 --> 00:25:24.105
And the thing is that I thought again right, like I had arrived and that, like my life was going to be amazing now that I had quit drinking.

00:25:24.105 --> 00:25:32.635
And there were a lot of things about my life that did get a lot easier, of course, right, but all the things it reversed on me.

00:25:32.635 --> 00:25:38.267
And what ended up happening is that when I quit drinking, all the other stuff that I had not dealt with showed up.

00:25:38.267 --> 00:25:41.173
Right, I kept saying, oh, the past is the past.

00:25:41.173 --> 00:25:42.276
Time heals all wounds.

00:25:42.276 --> 00:26:00.809
My parents did the best they could, all the things, all the platitudes that people say, and what I know and Bessel van der Kolk wrote a book about it is that the body keeps score, and that means that the body never forgets, and I can tell you that I am a living, walking, breathing testament of that.

00:26:01.451 --> 00:26:15.086
And so what happened is I got sober, or, as I stayed sober, my body started disclosing all of this stuff to me that had been tamped down and I started.

00:26:15.086 --> 00:26:15.709
First it was skin problems.

00:26:15.709 --> 00:26:18.007
I started getting psoriasis all over my body, then it was.

00:26:18.007 --> 00:26:23.809
I started having really bad heart palpitations and then I had chronic sinusitis, like I was just infected.

00:26:23.809 --> 00:26:47.321
I woke up every day and I felt like I had the flu, and then it was insomnia, and then it was anxiety, and then it was like I don't know, 10 or 15 anxiety panic attacks a day and then, right, it just kept going and my body was slowly deteriorating and the Western medicine community could not do anything for me at all.

00:26:47.321 --> 00:26:50.268
Literally, they didn't know what was going on with me.

00:26:50.268 --> 00:26:52.412
They didn't understand what was going on with me.

00:26:53.253 --> 00:27:02.788
So my friend said to me like three years into being sober, you need to go to a naturopath and just see, like, get a whole different perspective and just see if someone can help you.

00:27:02.788 --> 00:27:14.916
I was so desperate and so willing so I went to the naturopath and they do a whole different series of intake information than the Western medicine, right?

00:27:14.916 --> 00:27:22.932
They want to know what is your story, they want to know what trauma have you experienced, they want to know all of it, right?

00:27:22.932 --> 00:27:26.295
So it was like whatever, a five-page document or whatever it was.

00:27:26.295 --> 00:27:34.250
I just said to the woman like there's no way I can fill this out and see you today, like I don't, we wouldn't have enough time.

00:27:34.250 --> 00:27:37.577
And I said my story is so big and deep.

00:27:37.577 --> 00:27:39.890
She's like just come in let's talk.

00:27:39.890 --> 00:27:45.230
So I tell her my story, just like I just told you my story, and I'll never forget it.

00:27:45.230 --> 00:27:57.170
She set the pen down, she stared me right in the eye and she said oh, my goodness, I cannot believe that you're clean and sober.

00:27:57.170 --> 00:27:57.792
That is amazing and a miracle.

00:27:57.813 --> 00:28:04.050
And the other thing that I know is that everything that's going on in your body is the trauma that's stored in your body, and the only thing I can do is support your body while you heal the trauma.

00:28:04.050 --> 00:28:06.877
But I cannot heal you and neither can anyone else.

00:28:06.877 --> 00:28:10.834
And I was like so what does that mean exactly?

00:28:10.834 --> 00:28:13.027
She's like so you need to go to therapy.

00:28:13.027 --> 00:28:15.633
And I'm like are you kidding me?

00:28:15.633 --> 00:28:16.955
I don't need to go to therapy.

00:28:16.955 --> 00:28:22.214
I've been sober for like three years and I've done the 12 steps and a lot, right, all this stuff.

00:28:22.214 --> 00:28:24.909
She's like no, you really need to go to therapy.

00:28:24.909 --> 00:28:28.076
That's going to be your only chance to recover your body.

00:28:28.076 --> 00:28:33.288
And I was like well, I'm going to show you, lady right.

00:28:33.288 --> 00:28:36.803
And I went to therapy to spite her, because I really didn't believe that I needed therapy.

00:28:36.803 --> 00:28:40.570
I really believed that I had made peace with my past.

00:28:40.570 --> 00:28:50.777
And that's so funny still today, right, like 20 years later, I'm still in therapy and I do a lot of different modalities at this point, but I still have support.

00:28:51.598 --> 00:28:57.897
And so I went to therapy and I started to do all the work and my body continued to get worse.

00:28:57.897 --> 00:28:59.288
And that's how it goes.

00:28:59.288 --> 00:29:01.011
That's literally how it goes.

00:29:01.011 --> 00:29:15.798
And what I realized is that or where I should back up to is that at the same time I got sober a little before I got sober, back up to is that at the same time I got sober, a little before I got sober, I had started a career in mortgage banking.

00:29:15.798 --> 00:29:17.221
And that's a sales career, right, basically?

00:29:17.221 --> 00:29:28.492
And that's a really bad place for somebody like me, somebody who doesn't have a sense of self, somebody who needs outside affirmation and validation to feel okay about who they are.

00:29:28.492 --> 00:29:31.118
A sales career can provide that right.

00:29:31.325 --> 00:29:33.795
And so I basically switched addictions.

00:29:33.795 --> 00:29:36.733
I started working instead of drinking and doing drugs.

00:29:36.733 --> 00:29:39.032
I was working the same exact way.

00:29:39.032 --> 00:29:46.285
I'd work from the moment my eyes opened until the moment my eyes shut literally, and it paid off, right.

00:29:46.285 --> 00:29:54.826
I had all of these great accolades in my career and I've been in the top 1% for years and years in my industry, and all this stuff.

00:29:54.826 --> 00:29:56.327
Oh, that's wonderful.

00:29:56.327 --> 00:30:12.031
However, my body was dying and it and they would tell me that.

00:30:12.031 --> 00:30:19.134
They all told me the same thing Until you deal with the trauma which I was dealing with, the trauma by going to therapy.

00:30:19.755 --> 00:30:26.176
I went to the Meadows, which is a world-renowned trauma facility and treatment center.

00:30:26.176 --> 00:30:27.537
I went there twice.

00:30:27.537 --> 00:30:35.479
I did every modality that I could find EMDR, holographic, reprocessing, all everything I could find.

00:30:35.479 --> 00:30:36.239
I tried it.

00:30:36.239 --> 00:31:03.674
But the thing is that when you have a tremendous trauma history like I had, and I was continuing to be a nut seven days a week and I'm in this constant state of stress that, even though I'm over here trying to heal all this trauma, the body never came out of the chronic state of stress, and so you cannot heal the body if you stay in a chronic state of stress.

00:31:03.674 --> 00:31:07.059
It's impossible, it will not happen, believe me.

00:31:07.141 --> 00:31:14.292
I tried, I took every kind of supplement there was to take, I did every modality and I was continuously getting worse.

00:31:14.292 --> 00:31:20.833
So I met a doctor and she was amazing, and she's still amazing and she's still my doctor today.

00:31:20.833 --> 00:31:28.438
And she told me the truth If you don't stop working, then you can only expect that your conditions are going to get worse.

00:31:28.438 --> 00:31:31.645
And I was like but you don't understand.

00:31:31.645 --> 00:31:35.153
You don't understand, right?

00:31:35.153 --> 00:31:41.854
And it's the same as when I was drinking, right, if you don't stop drinking, marcy, this is going to get worse.

00:31:41.854 --> 00:31:44.702
But you don't understand.

00:31:44.702 --> 00:31:47.368
And then I kept the same behavior going Right.

00:31:47.368 --> 00:31:50.575
And you see the parallel there, right?

00:31:50.954 --> 00:31:51.856
Yeah, yeah.

00:31:51.856 --> 00:31:55.029
I'm just wondering how I mean you have all these symptoms.

00:31:55.029 --> 00:31:55.771
Everything's happening.

00:31:55.771 --> 00:31:57.155
You got sinusitis, you got these.

00:31:57.155 --> 00:32:01.836
Aren't like small little symptoms, these are things that can really trip you up.

00:32:01.836 --> 00:32:03.425
Yet You're still working.

00:32:03.425 --> 00:32:05.448
That blows my mind.

00:32:05.448 --> 00:32:18.821
But I guess your addiction the addiction which now we're saying is work is still overriding the fact that you've got these symptoms that are popping up that you can't seem to get away from.

00:32:18.821 --> 00:32:27.338
So everything in the world is telling you to slow down, let yourself heal before you keep putting stress on the body.

00:32:27.338 --> 00:32:30.651
There's a parallel to this.

00:32:30.651 --> 00:32:33.666
Keep putting stress on the body.

00:32:33.666 --> 00:32:34.087
That that goes.

00:32:34.087 --> 00:32:34.648
There's a parallel to this.

00:32:34.669 --> 00:32:37.736
So and just to just segue just out of this, just for a second is is endurance sports.

00:32:37.736 --> 00:32:38.817
So that's what I do, right?

00:32:38.817 --> 00:32:39.766
I'm an endurance coach.

00:32:39.766 --> 00:32:54.133
I, I coach people to do triathlons and marathons and stuff, and I tell my clients I give them their workouts and that's putting stress on the body, right, I have to give them a week.

00:32:54.133 --> 00:33:05.186
Every three weeks they get one more week and that's what we call a recovery week, where I bring them down, I slow them down, I I keep their durations down to minimal, I do the whole thing, but it's the same thing.

00:33:05.186 --> 00:33:06.587
You can't, I can't.

00:33:06.587 --> 00:33:08.410
Run them week after week.

00:33:08.410 --> 00:33:14.915
They'll go over-trained, the body will break down, they won't sleep, the appetite will go down to nothing.

00:33:15.356 --> 00:33:17.538
It's almost a parallel, just like what you were saying.

00:33:17.538 --> 00:33:19.861
You just kept working without any kind of recovery.

00:33:19.861 --> 00:33:26.068
It's obviously it's apples and apples, but it's also apple and oranges.

00:33:26.068 --> 00:33:35.199
Obviously you're talking about more of an internal stressor, internal and external, mental, the whole bit and somebody that's spending five days a week working out at least two, three hours a day.

00:33:35.199 --> 00:33:38.170
You're talking about 12-hour days, 15-hour days.

00:33:38.170 --> 00:33:49.148
So it's the same, but it does delve a little bit of a parallel that maybe some people that don't quite understand how somebody can work that much might understand it a different way.

00:33:49.148 --> 00:33:59.989
So that's why I just wanted to draw that little bit of a parallel um, absolutely the same yeah, so I so it's so that's so interesting to me because I've over trained.

00:34:00.348 --> 00:34:05.865
I have been there and so I might have felt a tenth of what you had to feel.

00:34:05.865 --> 00:34:11.574
But the aspect of but there was times when I'm just like I just wake up and I don't want to train, I'm done.

00:34:11.574 --> 00:34:12.155
You know what I mean.

00:34:12.155 --> 00:34:19.556
I need the day off and you're like, no, keep going, and of course that's going to start breaking down the body and especially the mental state.

00:34:19.556 --> 00:34:21.307
So what did you end up doing?

00:34:23.811 --> 00:34:29.028
So what I ended up doing is I had no part in it, so my body said no more.

00:34:29.028 --> 00:34:30.215
Right, my body said no more.

00:34:30.215 --> 00:34:31.664
Finally, I had met part in it, so my body said no more.

00:34:31.664 --> 00:34:33.090
Right, my body said no more.

00:34:33.090 --> 00:34:41.458
Finally, I had met my match, and so it was like November-ish 2020.

00:34:41.458 --> 00:34:45.623
And it was the busiest year I'd ever had in the mortgage business.

00:34:45.623 --> 00:34:49.215
Right, it's COVID and interest rates are 2.75%.

00:34:49.215 --> 00:34:50.186
Right, it is.

00:34:50.186 --> 00:34:52.050
You just can't even.

00:34:52.050 --> 00:34:53.353
It's crazy.

00:34:53.353 --> 00:34:57.351
And both of my grandparents my mom's parents both passed away.

00:34:57.351 --> 00:35:14.047
My grandfather passed away in January and my and then my grandma passed away in October and I was so close to them, they were such an important part of my life and who I am today and how I am today is from them, and so they both passed away.

00:35:14.047 --> 00:35:16.152
And so it was November.

00:35:16.773 --> 00:35:24.177
After I returned from my grandmother's funeral, I started having these weird symptoms and they didn't seem interconnected at all.

00:35:24.177 --> 00:35:25.606
It was like random.

00:35:25.606 --> 00:35:32.288
I started feeling like I thought I was having tremors, but I've never had tremors in my life, so I didn't know.

00:35:32.288 --> 00:35:34.532
Right, like I'm like I'm not sure.

00:35:34.532 --> 00:35:35.335
Was that a tremor?

00:35:35.335 --> 00:35:35.976
Was it right?

00:35:35.976 --> 00:35:36.947
Like I couldn't tell.

00:35:36.947 --> 00:35:41.016
And then it would just happen for a second and then nothing else would happen.

00:35:41.016 --> 00:35:44.090
So I was like I'm not sure, right.

00:35:44.090 --> 00:35:46.818
And so I was scared to tell my doctor.

00:35:46.818 --> 00:35:49.572
But that should have been my first time, right?

00:35:49.572 --> 00:35:58.266
But then I started noticing like I was having trouble with shortness of breath and I was having trouble with my heart getting erratic.

00:35:58.266 --> 00:36:02.577
All these different symptoms were happening and they kept getting worse.

00:36:02.724 --> 00:36:13.394
And by the week before Christmas I was definitely having tremors and I was having all these other symptoms and they were becoming more intense and they were becoming more frequent.

00:36:13.394 --> 00:36:22.833
And my doctor, marcy, for real, if you don't stop, this is going to get very bad, very quickly.

00:36:22.833 --> 00:36:27.153
And so I said okay, I'll take the week off between Christmas and New Year's.

00:36:27.153 --> 00:36:28.340
Okay, I'll do that.

00:36:28.340 --> 00:36:29.623
So I did that.

00:36:29.623 --> 00:36:30.686
I took the week off.

00:36:30.686 --> 00:36:36.483
And then I was like, okay, and I'll shorten my workday by an hour every day, I'll get done work at four o'clock instead of five o'clock.

00:36:36.483 --> 00:36:40.610
Really, she's like that's probably not going to do it, but okay, that's better than nothing.

00:36:40.750 --> 00:36:47.644
So I did those things and I just kept getting worse and worse through the month of January, like really bad.

00:36:47.644 --> 00:36:50.490
And I didn't tell anybody because I was scared.

00:36:50.490 --> 00:36:57.106
I was really scared and then, on February 6th of 2021, I was sitting at my computer.

00:36:57.106 --> 00:36:59.347
I'll never forget it and I hope I never do.

00:36:59.347 --> 00:37:16.141
I was sitting at my desk working on my computer, and the tremors were so bad throughout my body and in my brain that I could not tell if the desk was moving, if I was moving or if the computer was moving Like I.

00:37:16.141 --> 00:37:18.293
Literally I couldn't tell.

00:37:18.293 --> 00:37:25.291
I was on the floor, touching the floor, because our washer, our laundry room's below my office.

00:37:25.291 --> 00:37:29.190
So I was like must be, it's the washer's going off, right?

00:37:29.190 --> 00:37:32.068
Yeah, no, the washer wasn't going off.

00:37:32.068 --> 00:37:33.907
It was all internally in my body.

00:37:33.907 --> 00:37:39.650
So I called my branch manager and I said hey, look, I'm really in trouble here with my health.

00:37:39.650 --> 00:37:44.146
And she's like take a long weekend, it's probably stress and whatever.

00:37:44.146 --> 00:37:46.452
I'll watch your business, come back on Monday.

00:37:46.760 --> 00:37:52.612
So as soon as that happened, my body was like oh good, now we can really show you what's going on.

00:37:52.612 --> 00:37:55.666
And for 40 days I was bedridden.

00:37:55.666 --> 00:37:59.193
I couldn't even talk on the phone.

00:37:59.193 --> 00:38:05.166
If my wife brought the phone in the bedroom, then the tremors would increase tenfold.

00:38:05.166 --> 00:38:07.250
So what I learned?

00:38:07.250 --> 00:38:11.543
And I had a three-day stretch where I thought I was going to die literally.

00:38:11.543 --> 00:38:17.065
The symptoms were so over the top, I couldn't was unbelievable.

00:38:17.184 --> 00:38:22.262
So what I ended up having was mass cell activation syndrome and histamine intolerance.

00:38:22.262 --> 00:38:32.875
And that is basically when your nervous system and your immune system go haywire and your nervous system starts believing that everything is an invader.

00:38:32.875 --> 00:38:36.182
So that's what causes anaphylaxis, right?

00:38:36.182 --> 00:38:39.429
So I never had anaphylaxis, thank God.

00:38:39.429 --> 00:38:42.353
But I had hundreds of reactions to food.

00:38:42.353 --> 00:38:47.112
But here's the kicker I had hundreds of reactions to my thoughts.

00:38:47.112 --> 00:38:59.086
So if I was thinking the wrong thing, so if I started thinking about my career and if I was ever going to be able to get back to it, the tremors would literally increase in my body tenfold.

00:39:00.168 --> 00:39:18.733
But if I could walk myself back off the ledge and I could just be calm and be in the moment and just watch some silly Netflix show and just stay there, then I could keep the tremors not manageable because they were awful but reasonable, right.

00:39:18.733 --> 00:39:24.288
But if I started getting in the future and full of fear, then I was done, literally.

00:39:24.288 --> 00:39:26.512
It was terrifying what would happen in my body.

00:39:26.512 --> 00:39:29.771
My heart would become erratic, I couldn't see anything.

00:39:29.771 --> 00:39:36.829
I couldn't breathe, because histamine stops the air, right, it shuts the air down.

00:39:36.829 --> 00:39:38.614
So I literally couldn't breathe.

00:39:38.614 --> 00:39:41.266
So this is when I got it.

00:39:41.266 --> 00:39:44.043
This is when I got it was those 40 days.

00:39:44.304 --> 00:39:48.052
It was absolutely the best thing that has ever happened to me in my life.

00:39:48.052 --> 00:40:01.030
150% was the best thing that's ever happened to me in my life, because I realized in that three day stretch, when I thought I was going to die, that I had to surrender.

00:40:01.030 --> 00:40:03.942
I had to surrender in a way I'd never surrendered.

00:40:03.942 --> 00:40:17.027
I had surrendered when the car accident happened and I got to the place where I could say, okay, I don't like that, this happened and I would do anything to take it back, but I accept that this is how it is and I cannot change it.

00:40:17.027 --> 00:40:20.402
And so there's something really powerful in surrender.

00:40:20.402 --> 00:40:24.367
Most people think that it's a giving up, and it is, but it's not really.

00:40:24.367 --> 00:40:29.925
It's a letting go of the resistance, of what is and accepting it just as it is Right.

00:40:30.387 --> 00:40:35.561
And so in that moment, when I thought I was dying, I surrendered.

00:40:35.561 --> 00:40:43.094
I realized that all the accolades, all the money I had made, all the whatever, it didn't matter.

00:40:43.094 --> 00:40:44.481
None of it mattered.

00:40:44.481 --> 00:40:57.322
And that if I was going to survive and if I was going to get to live my life, whether I got better or I stayed in the same condition that I was in, that I was not going to die the way.

00:40:57.322 --> 00:41:03.134
I wasn't going to die like this, because I had not lived the way that I had wanted to live.

00:41:03.134 --> 00:41:13.009

From Surviving to Thriving: Marcy Langlois' Path

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