Caitlin’s Journey to Health

Getting a fresh start in life comes in many ways. for me, my fresh start begins with my health. My name is Caitlin Banks, I’m 20 years old and I suffer from chronic pain every day. However, my life didn’t used to be this way. To get a better understanding of how my fresh start will look I want to take you on a journey of how it all started.

In my younger years I remember being the girl of picture-perfect health. I would rarely get sick and when I did, I would just get sick and then ask for a buffet of food. Nothing ever lasted long, just the occasional flu and cold. As far as my mental health goes, I probably had it a little tougher than most girls at a young age, but I can’t say for sure. I always had depression that stemmed from being bullied almost everyday since grade three, not to mention some things at home were tough. My dad and sister suffer from chronic illnesses and I am the youngest of 4 children in a blended family since I was 6 months old, so as you can imagine the drama that comes with all of that. The medical system has always played a role in our household, but nothing ever to do with me. Until grade 6, when a school field trip to Space Camp would change everything. Here I am on this amazing trip getting an experience of a lifetime and then my whole life falls apart. I wake up one day at the beginning of the trip and start violently getting sick. I couldn’t keep any food or water down and to top it all off, I couldn’t go home. The rest of the trip would be filled with hot/cold flashes, exhaustion, dizziness, and getting sick repeatedly. When I got home, we went to doctor after doctor to get some answers with everyone just saying it was the flu. Weeks of this went by until doctors started telling my parents it was anxiety, or others saying I was faking it to get out of school. For the following months I would be dragged to school as my parents didn’t know what else to do. After seven months of this I ended up in the emergency room, they ran tests, and the doctor asked “did you know you had mono?”. That’s right. I was misdiagnosed for 7 months with doctors telling me I was faking it! I knew there was something wrong (key word: WAS wrong). Now here I am with an anxiety disorder created by the medical system. The following months would be the most difficult to get back to my happy spirited self. Junior high had a rocky start but was seemingly getting better aside from the intense bullying everyday. Then in grade 9 I would suffer from a headache that hasn’t stopped since. I went to the hospital for ten days and had every test known to man. Once again absolutely no answers. The following years would be filled with several different medications, treatments, homeopathic remedies, etc., everything in an effort to find something to make all the pain stop. On top of that, those years were also filled with more doctors telling me I was faking it to get out to get out of school, or it was all in my head and my anxiety was creating it. From 2012-2019 I have been diagnosed with anxiety, depression, mono, mixed headache condition, fibromyalgia, and functional dyspepsia. These titles were given to me as descriptions of the pain I suffer from everyday, although I believe none are perfectly accurate. Now here we are in 2021 and I’m trying to get out of the bad thoughts that this pain will be my forever. Until one day I started learning about Lyme disease. A few people I know reached out to me and asked if I had ever been tested, which I had not. I started doing a bunch of research to find out exactly what Lyme disease is and what it can do to your body when undiagnosed for years. To my surprise I checked off every box. When Lyme disease is misdiagnosed here’s what happens: First you often receive a misdiagnosis of mono. Next, swollen lymph nodes/tonsils and after 2 to 3 years neurological problems develop (headaches can become constant). Once it gets to this point there normally isn’t hope of even considering Lyme as you are misdiagnosed with chronic pain. Following this there is constant body pain and after 6 years of Lyme disease going undiagnosed it progresses to several food sensitivities. I also found out that getting tested for Lyme disease is complex and 50% of tests are false positives or false negatives. In my research process I found out that Canada does not have adequate testing for Lyme disease and every year 400,000 cases are missed! In fact Lyme disease and mono diagnoses are often confused as each other as the standard tests run in Canada are not very accurate for these diseases. In some cases you may even have both. I have led my fresh start by finding a clinic in Calgary called Neurovana who have already done a brain map and confirmed that in fact they are 99% sure I have Lyme disease along with some other suspicions. I received several tests and am awaiting results that should be back by the beginning of April. I am so excited to get back to feeling healthy and being myself again. There’s just one problem... all of these tests are private, as Canada does not run them, so they have to be sent to the United States and Germany. Not to mention treatment will not be fully covered. As I have not been able to hold a job, due to all my medical issues, I am sitting with just over $10,000 of debt to have the tests, receive a diagnosis and treatment that I should have received years ago. I know paying for all of this is not going to be easy, but I’m not going to give up as I am so close to the hope I’ve been waiting for almost half of my life! I started a GoFundMe which brought in a few hundred dollars from friends and family, but nowhere close enough to what I needed. I got to thinking, what if I started a silent auction and reached out to local businesses on Facebook marketplace, and see if anyone would donate items. It was a long shot, but if this could work not only would I be raising money for my health, I would also be helping promote local businesses during these hard times. This is how the Journey to Health silent auction was created.

I need your help to get back to the healthy girl I once was. You can help by donating a piece to my silent auction, bidding on silent auction items, following/ sharing my group, or by simply making a donation to my GoFundMe/Facebook Fundraiser. Please help me get my auction seen as not only is it helping me but also helping local businesses. Look at the next few pages to see just a few highlighted items in my silent auction. Thank you for the help in getting my fresh start at a happy and healthy life!