James's Story
My husband and I decided to wait for 3 years after we were married to start our family, because we wanted everything to be perfect. We wanted to establish the ideal foundation on which to raise our children. We worked and saved and planned and shaped our lives around that goal. And, in hindsight, I am so glad we did, because if we hadn’t I’m not sure we would have survived those early years that were fraught with so much unexpected difficulty.
Even the pregnancy itself was a little difficult. I had a period of intense stress and a few infections during my first trimester. I developed high blood pressure in the middle of my third trimester, which was kept under a doctor’s watchful eye on a regular basis. I can’t say that it was one of those nightmarish pregnancies you sometimes hear about, but it was already shaping up to challenge the ideal vision we had when we started.
James decided it was time to enter this world about 6 weeks early. He was quite premature and I had a really hard, forced, fast birth because the doctors were concerned that the stress of delivery would be too much for a baby so small.
Ironically, he turned out not to be particularly small. James was 6½ pounds at birth. According to his growth chart, he would have likely gained a pound a week in that final period, which means if he had come to term he could have been more than 12 pounds. Now, I am a smallish, small-hipped woman. I think he just ran out of room in there.
Despite the fact that there are a million things I would have done differently with my birthing experience, James seemed pretty healthy on the surface. He was breathing on his own. The doctors were a bit surprised about that. He was fully functional and was able to nurse shortly after birth. These were good signs.
But there were little things that didn’t seem right. He was slightly jaundiced and had some significant hearing problems because the cartilage in his ears wasn’t fully formed yet. He also resisted sleep so much that the nurses in the hospital force-fed James dairy-based formula, a decision I would never have condoned and can see now was a major mistake.
Nonetheless, we were sent home. Overall, I suppose the doctors felt James was healthy. They were mistaken.
“Immediately upon arriving home, we could tell James was a cranky, unhappy little person in a lot of pain.”
I know babies cry, but James’s cries were different. There was no consoling him. He would just cry until he passed out from exhaustion.
Even then, he would sleep for no more than 40 minutes at a time, day or night. Somebody always had to sleep with him, and we were up 6 or 7 times a night every night. That went on for the first 2 years of his life.
The only time we ever got sleep was when my father would come over and walk James. For some reason, that soothed him, so Dad would walk around the house with him literally for hours at a time.
When he did sleep or rest, he had severe sleep apnea. He also had serious problems with fluid building up behind his ears—to the degree that he was clinically deaf in one ear. On the surface, those problems don’t seem related, but they can be.
Two flaps of tissue behind the ears (called the adenoids) can become inflamed in childhood, leading to fluid retention and breathing problems, especially at night. Our pediatrician wanted to remove his adenoids surgically, but we held off on that because we weren’t interested in surgical procedures.
It was impossible to put James in a crib, because the first (and only) time we tried, he banged his head against the side until it was a bruised. He slept on a mattress we kept on the floor, and I made these super-soft head- and sideboards to surround and protect him so he couldn’t hurt himself.
Listen to Grace explain how difficult it was to have a violent child who couldn’t be consoled.
I think all of these things contributed to his sleep problems. They were compounded by the fact that he didn’t like to be held—which made it much more difficult to console him. He pushed against me and didn’t want to be snuggled at all. He didn’t want to cuddle with me. This is very hard for me to share and I get emotional even now when I talk about it, because it was so hard. As a mother, you just want to hold your baby, especially when he’s in pain, and I couldn’t. At least I couldn’t in any normal way.
You see, we eventually learned that though James didn’t want to be held, he loved being squeezed very tightly. That was almost more difficult to manage than just putting him down and letting him cry, because he would kick and struggle until you were practically strangling him. Only then would he calm down.
Another terrifying aspect of James’s condition was his projectile vomiting. It was truly disturbing, like something out of a horror film. You have this beautiful little baby lying there and all of a sudden a column of yogurty goo would shoot out of his mouth 4 feet into the air.
“As James got older, he became increasingly more aggressive and violent in his behavior.”
He actually made concerted, forcible efforts to hurt us. We’d pick him up and he would look at us and bash us in the nose or forehead with his fist. They weren’t playful punches. They hurt. It was shocking that a 2-year-old would know how to hurt an adult, but he did.
What was perhaps strangest of all about the entire situation was that by looking at James you would never know he had a problem—at least in the early years. He was a chubby, rosy-cheeked little baby who ate constantly. I nursed him for 18 months and he grew at a regular pace.
He also reached most of his milestones. After accounting for his prematurity, he was almost exactly where he needed to be. Perhaps that’s why we never got very far when speaking with our pediatrician about these problems. Obviously, the doctor recognized and diagnosed the sleep apnea and the issues with his ears, but the rest went relatively unattended by the physician.
So, we just sort of limped along. We weren’t able to function all that well, because we weren’t getting any sleep. We were both working at home at the time, and while that allowed us to be with him, it also made it extremely difficult to keep up with everything.
“That was a very dark time for my husband and me.”
It wasn’t like we had marital problems or that it impacted our relationship in a negative way. We were very close and felt equally committed to helping our son. We also had a similar way of handling the situation in terms of searching for answers. So our relationship was fine—we even grew closer in some ways. But we were exhausted and desperate for help.
We tended to blame ourselves for James’s problems. We didn’t have another child with whom to compare his progress, so we really didn’t know what normal development looked like or exactly how James was different. It was only clear that he was different and that we should do something about it. But what? It felt like we were failing as parents.
When we tried to get James together with other kids to play, it only became more evident how serious his problems were. We couldn’t really have normal play dates, because James sometimes became violent or threw things and hit the other children. That got to be pretty embarrassing and isolating.
The other parents didn’t understand it, and I can’t say I blamed them. But it was sad and a bit dismaying that even my closest friends who had kids looked at me strangely when I tried to discuss my experiences with them. It was so outside their own worldviews that they simply didn’t know what to make of it.
As a result, I basically lost all of my friends. They clearly didn’t understand what was going on, and, since we were so tired, there was no time to socialize anyway. My husband, James, and I became our own little world. That was how our life was until little James was about 3 years old.
At that point, luckily, we found a woman who ran a play group for kids like James. Her name was Lisa and meeting her was a godsend. She connected us to a group called Children’s Health Program, which is an early intervention program for children with similar problems to what James was experiencing.
That group was extremely helpful. When we went to meet them, they analyzed James and said he had a recognizable cluster of symptoms that was referred to as sensory integration disorder. We got him into a play group there, signed him up for one-on-one therapy, learned about his condition, and found out all sorts of ways to soothe him, from joint compression to skin brushing and other techniques.
All of that was helpful, but in the end, truthfully, it didn’t help that much. Nonetheless, I was extremely thankful to get into that program and felt a deep sense of relief. The main thing was that it made my husband and me realize we had a situation on our hands that didn’t correspond to the normal flow of things. I can’t tell you what a relief it was to know that we weren’t just really bad parents with a child who hated us for no reason.
It also gave us a way to search for real answers to James’s condition. Of course, no one at the Children’s Health Program said anything about food allergies, but my husband and I started doing some research online and began trying anything we could to help James heal.
When we first learned about food allergies and the impact they could have, we began watching James and monitoring what he ate. We noticed that when he ate a lot of carbohydrates, including pasta, or dairy, his behavior was much worse. So we removed those things from his diet even before we encountered Dr. Hyman’s work. Taking him off those foods helped a great deal, but it didn’t resolve James’s problems.
The straw that finally broke the camel’s back and sent us in search of answers far outside the halls of conventional medicine—which would eventually lead us to Dr. Hyman’s doorstep—was when James came down with a stomach flu from which he simply couldn’t recover.
There was a virus going around and James caught it, like most of the people in our circle at the time. However, each of them healed in a day or 2. For James, the virus hung on for weeks, and it eventually got so bad that he threw up every 2 or 3 hours and after every meal.
We took him to see his pediatrician, and she just passed it off as the normal course of the illness. I didn’t buy this and neither did my husband, but we didn’t know what else to do, so we went home.
“Eventually the illness got so bad that we had to take James to the emergency room.”
He hadn’t digested a single scrap of food in more than 5 days and had lost such a huge percentage of his body weight that he was little more than a bag of bones. Within a week, he went from being a chubby child to a gaunt figure whose ribcage and shoulder blades stuck out. It was terrifying to witness.
“The doctors thought we were abusing our son because we weren’t feeding him wheat or dairy .”
After some testing at the hospital, it quickly became clear that he was so dehydrated and undernourished that his internal organs were basically eating themselves. He was digesting himself from the inside out.
We were obviously upset at our pediatrician for ignoring the situation. But what was truly appalling was the behavior of the doctors at the hospital. They were awful. They suggested that we were abusing James because we refused to give him wheat and dairy.
They treated us as nothing more than criminals for making a dietary decision that had obviously helped our son. It was as though they were blaming us for James’s condition. Meanwhile, they were stuffing him with Jell-O and sugar, fried this and hydrogenated that, day after day. It was abominable feeding him there.
We were there for 7 or 8 days and they stabilized James, got him on fluids, and he was okay. But it was during that time that I realized our situation truly wasn’t functional and we had to do something about it.
That’s when I heard about Dr. Hyman and his work on The UltraMind Solution. I listened to one of his lectures on the radio and thought, “Now, this man has something interesting to say.” It also turned out that my father was seeing Dr. Hyman at the time for an unusual skin condition that was related to food allergies.
This food allergy connection made me realize that I wanted to see Dr. Hyman right away. We had already figured out food allergies might have been an issue for James, so hearing that he treated them made the idea of going to him extremely compelling.
We were able to get in to see him quite quickly (which I now understand to be a stroke of luck in itself), and I must say that just going to see Dr. Hyman was such a relief, because he is a very kind human being. He immediately told us, “I see a lot of children who have this cluster of symptoms you are talking about. It’s not just a random bunch of symptoms. We are going to get to the bottom of it.”
“That’s when we were able to make
great strides on James’s road to health.”
Dr. Hyman conducted an enormous number of tests, which is kind of shocking at first, because it’s such a different approach from what conventional pediatricians take—which is essentially to do nothing.
After testing for food allergies, it turned out that James was allergic to 28 different foods. He was allergic to pretty much everything he had been eating. Most of those foods were relatively healthy, and I’m proud to say that one of the few things that I hold as a success from the early days of raising James was Dr. Hyman’s compliments on our dietary decisions. He said, “Wow! Normally when I see children with these problems, they look really unhealthy. But because you’ve been feeding him properly, he still looks pretty good. That’s an achievement.”
Even so, he was allergic to wheat, dairy, soy, eggs, almonds, tomatoes—the whole nightshade family, actually—citrus, avocados, safflower oil, cherries, asparagus—you name it he was allergic to it.
So, the first step we took was to get these items out of our diet. That was, admittedly, a HUGE, HUGE lifestyle change. But, as you can imagine, we didn’t have any reservations about it because we were so exhausted and ready to try anything to help our son.
“We had to eliminate everything and start all over, but when we did it made a major difference.”
Gradually, the tension left James’s body. He didn’t have his shoulders hunched and his fists clenched constantly anymore. He had better range of motion in his neck. He was able to move his body a little more freely. And he wasn’t as angry anymore.
We were actually able to start having regular play dates with other children and not have to worry about what would happen. Basically, he just started to relax a lot.
Dr. Hyman told us that James was having a series of adrenal reactions to the foods he was sensitive to. He would eat these foods, then a couple of hours later his adrenal system would turn on and send him into a severe fight-or-flight response. It was almost as if he was looking for something to justify the panicky feelings his adrenal glands were creating, so he would have a fit or start attacking someone.
Gradually, all that slowed down. He didn’t have the same kind of violence in him and he was clearly not in as much pain. Because of that, I think he was able to look at the world through different eyes—eyes that were much calmer and more peaceful.
He grew an astonishing amount in that period—an inch a month for a while. His color got better. The dark circles under his eyes faded. James was healing.
With that groundwork in place, the next step was to start working on James’s heavy-metal poisoning. He had very high levels of lead, mercury, and salium (an industrial product) in his body. We still aren’t sure how he got exposed to all of this. It could have come through me while breastfeeding, but who knows? The issue was that he was toxic and we needed to treat that.
So we started chelation, a process in which pharmaceutical agents are given that bind to the metals in the body and pull them out through the urine and stool.
I think it’s important for people to know that chelation and some of these other treatments are not always trajectories straight to health. James had so many problems—so many layers of issues—that the path to health was often long and winding.
Chelation, for example, is a very intense process. Dr. Hyman told us that when James started taking the medication, we would see the metals come out. That was absolutely true and often scary. James would literally lie on the floor, roll around, and drool during that process. He couldn’t eat. There was so much poison coming out of his body he could barely function.
During that time, I often questioned Dr. Hyman. I’d ask, “How can this be good? Look at him.” But Dr. Hyman assured us that this was part of the process, that he had been using these medications for a long time and that they were safe.
“Despite our fears, after every intervention we would see this ray of sunshine come out.”
Once the poisons were purged from his body, this brightness came out of James that we didn’t even know was possible. Every little step was difficult, but after each treatment there was a little bit more sunshine. Then another step and more sunshine.
One of those steps was when we started giving James B12 shots. His level was extremely depleted. Within 4 or 5 hours of taking the shots and getting his level back up to where it needed to be, James went from grumpy and aggressive to being a little Buddha—calm, peaceful, and extremely polite.
It turns out that deep down James really is all of those things—calm, peaceful, and loving. But so many things had gotten in the way of his normal physiological function that he couldn’t operate as he normally would; so many of his systems were out of balance that he simply spiraled out of control.
Imagine how hard that must be for a child of 2 or 3. Language acquisition, socialization, and behavior development are all hard enough as it is. Imagine how much harder it would be if your body simply didn’t function properly. Imagine trying to learn how to toilet train when you had chronic diarrhea you couldn’t control, or learning to sit quietly with other children when your body was reacting to the foods you ate as though it was a life-or-death emergency.
It’s no wonder that James became a kind of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In his case, it was his personality that was the first indication something was out of balance. As a mom, it’s really hard to witness that.
Obviously, I love him to pieces—to watch him struggling with these things was horrific.
“We’re still in the process of healing, but I feel that with Dr. Hyman’s help we were able to narrowly escape what could have been a catastrophe.”
Today, James is basically a normal 5-year-old boy. We still have some steps to take, but the difference is so enormous that there’s no way to describe it in words. We had basically come to a point where we didn’t think James would ever be a functional human being. There is nothing more devastating than that for a parent. That James is basically normal now is a gift beyond compare.
I shudder to think what might have happened if we didn’t meet Dr. Hyman so early in James’s development. As kids grow up, the behaviors they learn in their youth become their personalities as adults. What kind of person would James have become had we not treated him early? Would he be a Jekyll and Hyde his whole life? Thankfully, we’ll never have to know.
Listen to Grace discuss how happy she was that she caught this issue early.
You have to have a certain amount of faith going into this process. There are these thresholds of difficulty you face, but you push through them and you move on. I know a lot of people say it’s impossible to make these kinds of lifestyle changes, but it isn’t as hard as you might think.
Sure, at first it’s socially ostracizing to bring your child to a birthday party where he isn’t allowed to eat anything. But as time has gone on and we’ve gotten older, our friends have gotten used to it, and everyone is extremely supportive.
I think staring into the abyss of change is harder than making it. You just do it. You eliminate whatever it is. You change what’s in the fridge and change what’s in your cabinets. You go through the chelation and take your supplements. You just do it.
And you should do it as soon as you can, because the difference is unbelievable. If you have even the most minor food allergies or the other problems described in The UltraMind Solution, I would encourage you to jump on them right away.
Because waiting only makes it worse—not better.
Grace Bloom
Western Massachusetts
