I met Kevin on November 10th, 2017. It was a snow day for the public schools, so volleyball was canceled and we had a game’s night at the church instead, my first youth event in Nova Scotia. We played occupation and I said I was a circus clown and he said he was a tour guide. I had no idea that night what a journey our friendship would bring and where we would end up, including being married some years later.
On January 13th, 2018 Kevin asked the youth group if anybody would be interested in going to the ocean to swim. I was smart enough? Or dumb enough? To agree to this. It is not something that I would want to do again but I will never regret doing this with him. We did this once a month for the whole year of 2018, each time with a different group of people and in a different location. This was something very powerful that we were doing together. Both of us were on a journey. They were separate journeys of course, that caused a lot of growth during the year of 2018. We both needed to find ourselves and become better people, and it was so cool to be able to go on our separate journeys, yet do them together, to become the people God wanted us to be. During this time we became closer and closer, just hanging out together and texting more. We became better friends through the years of 2018.
As we grew closer I started to learn about the health issues that Kevin experienced in his life, both past and present. Kevin went into a deep depression that year, and he ended up completely stopping eating towards the end of the year. He felt like he was feeling better if he didn’t eat, but he was also giving up on life. He didn’t know how to survive anymore. He couldn’t find direction and ended up crying out to God. He told God that if He would heal him then he would allow God to use him as He wanted. This started the path in him searching for better health.
He started to see a Naturopath in Nova Scotia and she suggested some dietary restrictions. He began searching and found the AIP (Autoimmune Protocol) paleo diet. He ended up teaching himself how to cook because it was a whole new experience (minimal ingredients allowed to be used) and he did not want to put that on his mom. He also wanted to learn all he could to make his health better and that included food, he followed this diet for almost a year. He was unable to work because of his health, so he put all his energy into cooking and just gaining control over his life. I enjoyed helping him with that process.
In May of 2019, Kevin went to Belize with the sole purpose of finding answers to his health, and to find a new perspective. When he went down there he didn’t know where he would stay, and he didn’t have a job. He moved in with his sister for the first little while, then moved in with his aunt and uncle. While he was there his cousin reached out to him in regards to helping out with marketing and cooking at Shining Star Health Center. He did really well with this job and was also able to find a lot of help and answers in regards to his health journey. They were very understanding of his health conditions. During this time his health did get better and he began to feel much stronger, even training to climb a volcano in Guatemala with his friend.
On March 3rd, 2020 he called me and asked me if I want to start a dating relationship with him. I of course said yes and had in fact been hoping that our relationship would move in that direction for a while. The whole time he was in Belize we were having frequent phone calls, constantly texting and remained very close even though we were far apart. I had moved back to Ontario at this point from Nova Scotia. During the month of March, COVID really ramped up and Kevin ended up leaving Belize on a repatriation flight back home to Nova Scotia. He did his 2 weeks of quarantine there with his friend, afterwards reconnecting with friends and family even though COVID made this challenging.
In the end of May Kevin moved to Ontario and he started searching for a job here. He was lucky to find a job within the first month of moving here. It ended up being exactly a month from the day he moved here to the day he started working and we have been so grateful that his workplace gave him a chance. He had never been a parts or sales person before, but they still gave him a chance to learn the field and become part of the team. In July we got engaged, and had four months to plan a wedding with COVID restrictions that seemed to change constantly. It was a stressful time. It was hard on Kevin’s health, but he pushed through and we had an amazing wedding. It wasn’t until looking back that we realized how much he had pushed himself and made do during that time. We were married for 2 months when Kevin’s health crash happened.
In the end of December we went to a Naturopath to see what she had to say about Kevin’s health, he is always trying to find ways to completely heal his body. On January 7th his body started crashing hard, and he got so weak to the point that I needed to help dress him and get him into bed. His coordination was off and he was very lethargic among other things. Instead of going to work the next day I ended up taking him to the hospital where they tested him for COVID, and as we suspected his results came back negative. We were in communication with the Naturopath via email and phone calls every day. She helped us get him on different supplements. We saw slight improvement in his symptoms within the first week. Then it plateaued, he would go into work for maybe 3 hours a couple days a week, but every time he’d go into work the entire day surrounded that, like when we would go to sleep the night before, when he’d eat, what he’d eat, when he’d wake up, when he took his pills, everything got put around this 3 hour window. Eventually one of his co-workers asked if he had ever been tested for Lymes. Kevin remembered that a Doctor in Nova Scotia had mentioned Lymes before, but he was never tested for it. We started doing research, and the amount of symptoms from Lymes that matched Kevin’s health issues was incredible. We kept doing research and talked to our Naturopath about it. She then passed us on to another Naturopath that is educated in Lymes. We are now waiting for that appointment on February 9th, 2020.
On February 10th, he has an appointment with my Family Doctor to hopefully make it so that he can have a Doctor here in Ontario, because his current family Doctor is in Nova Scotia. What I didn’t know before this journey is that in the ER, they won’t do many tests unless a Doctor has sent in a Referral. So we are hoping after our appointment with my family Doctor we will be able to have some referrals sent in and get some more testing done. We feel blessed that my Family Doctor has agreed to see Kevin, it can take years to find a family Doctor here.
If the diagnosis is chronic Lymes, we are on for a long journey to healing and it will be a hard journey to walk through. Kevin might not be able go back to full-time work for a while (currently he is completely off work). In some ways if Kevin is diagnosed with chronic Lymes it will be good because we will at least know what we are dealing with, and we can actually face the problem head on and work with it. An analogy that Kevin came up with for how his body feels is that he feels his body is a room. A room that is filled with glass bowls and things that are sitting on the shelves and there is this bowling ball spinning all the time. It keeps knocking things off the shelves and they break. We catch on that this thing is broken, and we pick it up and glue it back together, putting it on the shelf and its good for a while, until the bowling ball comes around again, and it knocks that object off the shelf again. Kevin feels like all we have ever been doing is just temporarily fixing a problem, but never actually figuring out what the bowling ball is or its source. Until we can figure out what that bowling ball is and can actually stop it from spinning around this room, we are always going to be just picking up broken objects and temporarily fixing them. And once we finally get rid of that bowling ball there will be a lot of damage we are going to need to clean up (heal), but hopefully we can do that for the last time and not have it as a continual process of 1 step forward 2 steps back.
The past month has not been easy for either one of us. It is hard for him to not be able to provide as he should in a marriage relationship. It is hard for him to have me help him with everything, going to work, shopping, cooking, and taking care of him. And it is hard for me to have to do all those things and to be strong emotionally. It’s been a hard journey for sure, but we ask that you will join us in praying for us. We know we are not alone and pray God will be honoured through this process.
If you want updates on how Kevin is doing please let me know. I have set up a WhatsApp and Signal group that you can join and I will be putting updates on there. I may also have more blog posts in the future.
Thank you to everyone that has helped us thus far, all the blessings given to us mean the world!
