CBD + yoga: A relaxing Fusion
advocacy
A fluffy, 30-something mother with sudden onset osteopenia due to a new diagnosis of multiple myeloma and its rare partner, amyloidosis, simply needed her body not to hurt. Better yet, not feel like an aging granny well into her golden years. Kim DeLaney-Surratt, a Tennessee native turned North Carolinian transplant, needed answers and better options.
Late Summer of 2013, an emergency room visit left a handful of surgeons perplexed and offering no answers. Horrible muscle spasms in the mid and lower back coupled with wrenching gut pain soon showed itself as a rare blood disease. I was later diagnosed as having bone marrow cancer and a few blood illnesses- Factor X, a blood clotting disorder, and amyloidosis, an abnormal protein produced within the bone marrow depositing in major organs and causing potentially deadly issues. It is believed the amyloid attacked her gallbladder first as it was 0% functioning upon removal, and the continued gut pain showed evidence of the protein deposits in the intestines.
After a successful Autologous Stem Cell Transplant procedure conducted at UNC Chapel Hill in 2014, she felt uneasy about her “new normal” and all the questions that high-dose chemo brought with it. Up until this point, if you did not know Mrs. DeLaney-Surratt was ill, one couldn’t merely tell by a glance. She hide it quite well. Except for the planned, calculated trips to the grocery store, to minimize her bone pain; or the extreme fatigue that emerged during normal family trips across the mountain from Charlotte to East Tennessee that demanded a nap at a rest stop with her pre-teen, their usual simple 3-hour trek.
trek. Hair was still intact and she was still making her 90-minute commute to work 4 days a week. She just looked thinner. Within those 15 days of mandatory hospital recovery, her stem cells were collected and high-dose chemo administered then her cells redeposited into her “clean body”. The nausea worsened, the body was frail due to her low bone density, bald as a tick and now she looked as sick as she felt.
Photo Courtesy of Burst 2018
By Kim DeLaney-Surratt