PANDAS Recovery

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Today I have with me Ethan Pompeo, and we are talking about transforming health with simple tools for holistic lifestyle.

Welcome to Wellness. In every season, we talk all things wellness, to help you align yourself, align with your goals, find balance in your life, and just recalibrate yourself if you are listening for the first time. Welcome, welcome. I'm so glad you're here, and let's get started in the rest of the podcast.

this is something I'm very much about. It's not about the latest, greatest, most expensive gadgets. So that's what we're talking about is how to have it be.

Real. And he is a survivor of pandas. And if you don't know what that is, we will explain in a little bit. And he is a founder of Green Valley Nutrition, [00:01:00] and there is so much more in here. I, when this came across my desk, I was very excited because. This is a story that I know many of you'll resonate with.

If not for yourself, you will know somebody else who has struggled with health challenges and how do I overcome this, especially when it can be so life changing. So welcome. I am so glad you're here. Tell us a little bit about yourself to start with. Yeah.

Life's changed dramatically since I was a young guy.

I am a big dad. I have four daughters and most recently a little boy as of two months ago. So we've got a big family. We live here in Central Virginia. We have a little homestead property with chickens and pigs and a dog. Life is pretty good. We make the most of it and, we've learned many ways to live the holistic, healthy lifestyle that we enjoy.

That's relatively low stress despite everything [00:02:00] that we have going on. Thank you for having me. I'm in Maryland and I have four kids I don't homestead. We lived in, a small town, but a city and, you know, we decided, hey, we, have more space.

We don't wanna worry about our kids running in the road, and we want to introduce them to where our food comes from. The girls in particular love the animals. It's been a really cool hands-on learning experience for them. We enjoy it. I think my daughter would love that life.

My oldest maybe, and my two youngers. No fun.

So let's start with, tell us about pandas, what it is, and tell us about that journey yeah. So when you say pandas, you immediately think of the bamboo, munching, cuddly bear. But pandas in.

My experience was the complete opposite. It's a neuro immune condition, where your body reacts in an unusual way to a foreign [00:03:00] pathogen, usually strep throat, such that it creates antibodies in great excess. And antibodies are one of the few compounds that can cross the blood brain barrier and cause inflammation in an area of the body where it's not supposed to, the basal ganglia.

And so that's your motor, the motor cortex of your body. When you have inflammation in your motor cortex, the result is, lack of motor function. Ticks. Compulsions anxiety, erratic behavior, OCD, a whole slew of neurological symptoms that come along with that. Me explaining it to you now, this has been multiple decades of unpacking this and blood work and digging to the root of the issue to find out what is this and how does it work in the body?

But when I first started having my symptoms, I was 13 years old. And it was, they, they just came on outta the blue. Like one, one day I was a normal kid. The next day I started having these weird motions, a skip step repetitive motions, [00:04:00] picking up my toothbrush and putting it down over and over again until it felt just right.

At a certain point my parents realized there's something wrong here. It was a long journey to actually get to the Pandas diagnosis. What did it feel like within your brain? What were you going through with your toothbrush in particular? It's a really hard experience to describe.

It's almost like this warmth, this anxiety that stems. In the back of your neck and moves up it is difficult to describe, it's almost an out of body experience in that you're reacting subconsciously in a way that's very abnormal.

It's unusual. You know, what you're doing is unusual. It just feels right to do it. And so there's this crippling anxiety if you don't respond in a certain way, if you don't do these things, it can be really debilitating. Originally my symptoms started out fairly simple, right?

Like the toothbrush thing, but then it [00:05:00] became everything I would put my hands on. It was my fork, it was my cell phone. Anything I picked up I got this anxiety when I picked it up. It had to feel just right in my hands, and if it didn't, I had put it down and pick it up. And pretty soon the frustration of having to do this over and over again.

Caused me to become violent and start slamming the object down on the table and picking it up and just becoming so frustrated and angry. That was when I had to face the very difficult pill to swallow of. Something is wrong with me. I need to get some help.

I'm just, as a parent, thinking about what it would be like to be in their shoes.

It disrupts the entire family.

Have you ever talked to your siblings about that? I have, as of recently, I was very self-conscious for a long time throughout most of my childhood, even into college. I was very [00:06:00] self-conscious, very unwilling to talk about what I was dealing with. I was embarrassed at times, humiliated.

Particularly in class, my peers would see me doing these things. I had a head twitch and I worked at the computer, help desk using the mouse on my computer, I'd have to tap tap, pick it up and people would see me doing these things and out of. Genuine concern and curiosity would say, Hey, are you all right?

And that question, drove me to the brink of insanity, I was so mad. I just wanted to be normal. Like, please stop asking me this. I'm fine. When I wasn't fine. I had to get myself first and foremost to a place where I was okay not being okay.

In my own skin enough to admit like, yeah, I'm dealing with these ticks. I'm fine. I'm not having a seizure. You don't have to worry. But I would just brush it off for many, many years. And move on. And it didn't do anybody any favors. It didn't help me. It didn't put [00:07:00] me in a position to be an advocate for Pandas and to educate people about what I was dealing with.

I was brushing it under the rug, pretending everything was fine, and the people who asked me that question were left still wandering. You know what, what's wrong with that guy who can't sit still? I've been that and had people. Respond in a Just leave me alone type way.

It's hard, to know what to do on either side of the fence. I remember one guy, I was, switching my classes around for college and he had a tick and I was like, huh, that's interesting. But then I had that feeling, don't point it out.

I'm like, okay, I won't. But it was just interesting. And I asked my husband, you saw that too, right? And he is like, yeah. We wonder why, and then we just moved on with our lives I made the mistake of thinking that everyone was so concerned about me.

Everyone's worried about themselves, there's so much going on. You really don't have time to do more than that. Like, oh, what's up with that guy? Oh well, and I thought, they were going home thinking, oh, did you see that [00:08:00] crazy guy? Like, what's up with him? No, nobody cared that much, you know, it was just simply asking me, Hey, are you all right?

Out of concern and frankly, kindness. But me dealing with all these issues, I did not view it that way. I viewed it as almost an attack, and it put me in a very unhealthy place mentally for a long time.

And, you know, we can talk about healing and all the things I did physically to get over this, but one of the big stepping stones I had to get over is mentally getting to a place where it's like, look, this is how I am.

I wanna get better, but this is how I am. Like, accept it, be okay with it. Stop getting so stressed and anxious about this because I'm already dealing with an anxiety disorder.

Do you know what the acronym PANDA stands for? It's Pediatric Autoimmune Neurological Disorders Associated with Strep yeah, there's a lot going on there. Does it always happen when you're younger? Pediatric, typically?

Yeah. [00:09:00] It's categorized as a pediatric diagnosis most of the time? Young kids are getting diagnosed with this. 13 is the older end of the spectrum, so for me to start having symptoms at the age of 13, was unusual. But today, it's not uncommon for me to speak to people whose 20, 25, 30-year-old is dealing with this and perhaps still has not.

Gotten A proper diagnosis. Yeah. Let's talk about that and then let's go into more of your journey, if you're okay with going there. Sure. Because I, when you were talking, I could see people saying, oh, you have a DHD, oh, you have this. This totally ties in with your journey, but how do you help people that.

Maybe it is this, or maybe it's something similar because I'm sure there are similar diagnosis and similar journeys towards healing. Yeah, I was misdiagnosed. I can't even tell you how many times, as a kid, 20 [00:10:00] years ago. There was no literature on pandas.

No one really knew about it or was familiar with it and getting a diagnosis was. Near impossible in the beginning of my journey. So as a result, my first diagnosis was Tourette Syndrome, which was essentially a label that was put on me,

maybe it's Tourettes. Like we don't know what causes Tourettes. We don't know what cures it. We can give you medication, to try to help it, but there's no cure and. It did nothing for me. Like, oh, I have Tourette's. That's horrible. You remember the YouTube video, Tourette's Kid, and it's this guy.

It went viral back in the early days of YouTube this kid just going outta control, cussing, spouting, profanity, and loss of control. It was funny to most people, but you don't understand the aggravation that person's going through. They're not just trying to be funny.

This is an abnormality in their brain that's causing them to do something that causes them to become an outcast. You can't hold a job. There's many [00:11:00] things that impact your life in a tremendous way because of this. The entire family is impacted too.

My parents were my advocates, still are. They did everything they could to try to help me. By the time I was 17, I had been on more than 40 different prescription medicines. We had seen every doctor and specialist from Georgia to. Massachusetts and we're just not getting anywhere. That's a big deal.

Healthcare is really great here on the East Coast. I'm close to Johns Hopkins an hour away. I went to Johns Hopkins. Boston has great medical care too, so that says a lot right there. It was a difficult journey and, before long I had developed physician fatigue where I was just a teenage boy.

I was fed up with doctor's appointments and spending my weekends driving to these hospitals and doctor's offices and getting nowhere. I got to a point where I was just fed up with it. I said, no more, these medicines would make me feel like a zombie. I'm tired all the time.

The side effects [00:12:00] often outweighed any benefits if there were any benefits. It was just a very trying time for me and my parents. And then my siblings too, really were kind of left in the dark in a sense. 'cause I had very limited way to express what was going on internally as well as we didn't know what was happening.

Physically, they knew something was going on, but I was getting this special treatment, going to all the doctor's appointments and it was difficult for everybody. Favorite child, but only you don't feel like the favorite child. Getting picked on and pin cushion

tell us more about your journey especially for parents who are like, I don't know if my child has this, or just open up this world to them. Teachers who are wondering about their students and getting the help that they need, especially because they can't actually say, Hey, you should go and get checked for this.

But they can kind of lead the parent there without saying the exact words because legal [00:13:00] ramifications. Just give us more of your journey and help give more of an understanding for people who might be going through what your parents went through with their children. The tricky part is that the symptoms can be different from person to person.

I had tremendous ticks, where I was twitching and I had limited control of my hands and I did a skip step and I had a head twitch, and at one point I was hitting myself in the head and it was very exasperating. And then compound that with the obsessive compulsive disorder symptoms just the rituals I went through in my mind, it was very difficult to let go of certain thoughts. Some people will have fewer ticks and more of the OCD. Some people have these fears that come out of nowhere. I spoke with a young man who told me that he, at one point was struggling with this thought that if he ate with a fork, his family would die.

It was like this debilitating fear. So he [00:14:00] couldn't use utensils and he is eating with his hands, very abnormal behavior. And with pandas something that's more or less an identifier of pandas is the sudden onset. So it's not like this gradual progression. It's like, your kid is normal and then he wakes up the next day and he is acting funny and he's got all these weird things going on, or behavioral issues or the ticks or the strange fears or he or she may be closing herself off to her parents who a child who was otherwise open beforehand.

So that's what I hear all the time with parents who are going through this my child. Was straight A's and now he can't even get out of the bedroom to go to school. It's this instantaneous change that marks pandas very often. It can be very difficult to diagnose because it's not a clinical diagnosis.

There's no single test you can take that says, you have pandas. It involves blood work symptom analysis. [00:15:00] Looking at infection history and putting all these pieces together to determine. Is this pandas or is this something else? There's still few doctors that are actually equipped to diagnose this.

We've made great strides. Today I work with multiple advocacy organizations who are fundraising for education, for doctors and physicians so that they can be more equipped to do this. I talk to people now who are getting diagnosed much faster than. People in my generation who took 10, 20 years actually figure out what was going on.

Feel free to name drop through this episode for those who are like, I need this help now, or I wonder if this is the path I should be on. There's one book in particular that I always recommend. It's by Dr. Nancy O'Hara. It's called Demystifying Pandas. I think she does a great job of just breaking it all down and giving you the treatment protocols and showing you things that could help in the short term and things to do in the long term.

But most of all, just identifying, [00:16:00] is this what you're dealing with? Quite frankly, i'm not a doctor, but I'm a skeptic. I am of the belief that Tourette's syndrome is essentially obsolete. I'm not even sure that it is a legitimate diagnosis anymore. I think most of the time when you're dealing with these tick disorders, there's something else beneath the surface we can call it Tourette syndrome, but that doesn't actually explain what it is or what's causing it at all.

It's more or less a label, but with pandas we can see the infection. Causing the immune response, triggering the inflammation in the area of the brain that causes these issues. It makes so much more sense on a scientific level, and it opens up the door for a treatment protocol, two-pronged approach. The first one is identifying the source of infection and treating that. You have no chance of recovering or getting better if your body's continuing to fight this infection, strep throat can hide out. In many places in the body, it can be very insidious and hard to get rid of, so you want to get rid of that source of [00:17:00] infection so that your body has a fighting chance.

And then secondly, targeting the inflammation and getting the inflammation at bay so that your body can start to function as it was created to more normally again. So that's more or less the approach and it can be different based on person to person. Pans Pandas two diagnosis that are often grouped together, but PANS is, the same disorder, but it can be caused by a number of other, it could be caused by mold, mildew, parasitic infection, bacteria. Pandas is specific to strep throat and it's the most common. Oh, interesting. I was actually thinking, I've interviewed a functional medicine doctor. He works with chronic pain, that type of thing. Most people that he works with, he brings it all the way back to Lyme disease at some point.

So I was curious because some of the things you were saying, it felt like they correlated and it feels like you just kind of tied that bow for [00:18:00] me interesting. Yeah. Lyme disease I see Lyme disease all the time in our, Facebook forums and stuff like that, and co-infections

Pandas is the body's inability to respond correctly to these pathogens. So strep throat, generally you get strep throat, you have a sore throat, maybe some cough, and a week later you recover and you get better. That's how it's supposed to work, but in my case, my body never fully.

Defeated the strep bacteria and it kept coming back and my body kept producing antibodies. When we looked at my blood work as a 15-year-old, my strep titers, my antibodies were off the charts, like immeasurably high. It was a huge indication that.

You've been fighting the strep throat infection for a long time and something is not right. My body was for whatever reason, unable to fight the strep bacteria off as it should have. So it resulted in some long course antibiotics antibiotic herbs, natural [00:19:00] supplements as well, in order to finally get rid of that strep infection, and get me back on a pathway to healing.

I had been getting blood work annually, from the time my symptoms started and it was at least 10 years before I finally got that pandas diagnosis.

So I went a decade without for the infection part. Oh, oh, right. Yeah. Um, it's funny, we look back now after getting blood work done annually we charted it out and you can see at the point when I recognized what was happening and we started to treat that strep throat, how the antibody slowly ticked down over time and that regression.

Sped up as I did other things to improve my health. Natural things that I should have been doing anyway, like exercising, lifting weights, changing my diet and eating healthy, avoiding inflammatory foods, stop drinking soda. You know, all these things work together to help in a way that [00:20:00] medicine can never do for us.

So it's important to do both.

And how has this journey led you to. Green Valley Nutrition. Yeah. So another part of my journey when I was 16, 17, going through all this treatment I've talked about. It very much normalized the use of substances in my mind as a tool for healing. Right? You know, I went to the doctor, they'd gimme this pill.

If it didn't work, take more. If it didn't work, throw it away, try something else. And so in high school I was introduced to cannabis and I started smoking for the first time in my life, it actually gave me relief and I battled with my parents for years over this. You know, I come from a conservative home.

It's not something any teenager should have been doing, but I knew that when I smoked, it took the anxiety off my shoulders. It [00:21:00] helped me to relax. I remember coming home from school one day and my parents smelled. The plant on me and said, Hey, have you been smoking? And I said, why are you asking me this?

My dad said, well, you're just so calm and relaxed. And I said. This is why I am doing this. There came a time when that use of cannabis backfired and I started to have side effects associated with that breathing issues, paranoia. I got in trouble with the law a number of times and it was just very messy, I knew that while this was helping me, I didn't understand why, and I was also dealing with the ramifications

an illegal product, so I knew something had to change. Fast forward to after college, right? This is 15 years of dealing with this. I moved to Colorado the day after graduation to work on an organic farm. Ironically, we were not growing cannabis on this farm. We were growing watermelons and carrots [00:22:00] and asparagus and everything you see at the grocery store.

And for me it was a chance to start fresh. Decompress and live a new lifestyle and work outside in nature every day and get my hands dirty. It was very refreshing, but it was while I was in Colorado that I was introduced to CBD, which is a cannabis compound, but it's not intoxicating. Today I call it nature's most powerful anti-inflammatory because it did a fantastic job of reducing the inflammation in my brain so that I could take a deep breath and refocus.

Reset without having to smoke or be intoxicated or deal with illegal compounds that came along with the traditional cannabis use. So that transformed my life. And I take CB, D to this day. And I abstain from smoking and all these other things, and I'm a different person now than I was 10 years ago.

And I'm much healthier for it. But moving back to [00:23:00] Virginia, this was 2015, I moved back to Virginia. CBD was obsolete. It didn't exist here. It hadn't made it over the East coast yet. There was still a great stigma around CBD and what it entailed. And so I thought to myself, I really need this stuff, but I can't get it.

So I reached out to some friends I had made in Colorado and they sent me a bunch of CBD products I could be making this myself. That's the kind of person I've always been. I like to do things myself. If I can make it at home, I do so I started making these products in the spare bedroom of my house and snapchatting them to my relatives and my friends, and started to get attention.

And I realized this was not only an opportunity to help myself, but to offer a product to others that could help them. Fast forward to today, I operate a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility in Virginia, where we're making everything from oil drops to gummies, to dog treats and bath products, all with [00:24:00] CBD.

We even have a hemp protein powder now it's a really clean plant-based protein. So I've fallen in love with this plant in a bit of a different way, and I have a different approach. Everything we do is THC free. So we're not after getting people high or intoxicated, but we're using this plant in a way that it was intended to be for our benefit and for our health.

The only part that I use, and we use it in smoothies for our kids too, is there is a high amount of protein and healthy oils with it. So we use the hemp seeds. It's amazing for brain health. I did the research before we ever started, and that's about all I remember.

I remember there were tons of benefits I know so many people who use the oils for different reasons. I had a friend who was, battling cancer. He unfortunately passed away, but. He found that helped him the most with the pain.

Rather [00:25:00] than narcotics from the doctors, and it made a huge difference for him. I love those stories. And the cool thing about it is how versatile it is. It can be used for pain relief, anxiety management. If it's THC free, it can be safe for everyone. I can't tell you how many people I talk to are using it for A DHD and autism and anxiety and sleep support and all these things that we would usually be taking.

Pretty heavy prescription medications to address. I think it's a wonderful natural alternative. And you're right, the hemp seeds are amazing. They're rich in omegas. I just watched a news report yesterday that was kind of reiterating how all these protein powders have contained lead and other nasty stuff from the extraction process.

The hemp hearts that we use the hemp heart is like the hole that surrounds the seed this hemp seed is good too, but the the hole, that heart, I said it wrong. It's basically pure [00:26:00] protein and it's rich in omegas. It's the best plant-based protein you can get.

It's very bioavailable. It's something like. 20 times, 30 times more bioavailable than pea protein and so your body is absorbing. I think it's a great product and we put it in our kids' smoothies too. They love it. We put it in our oatmeal. It's really cool. But then on the other side, the medicinal side, you get the CBD and the anti-inflammatory compounds as well.

It truly is an amazing plant that unfortunately we've just decided we weren't gonna use for the last 50 years. So it's cool to see the resurgence and people opening up to this idea that it can be used responsibly in a way that benefits us. But I'm curious, let's go to the other side for a second

so where's the middle ground with all this? Because I feel like it's. Almost like you should have it in everything and for all these reasons, and it just, it feels like it's a little over marketed. [00:27:00] What are your thoughts towards that? Yeah, certainly. So, you know, I tell people I would never market it as a miracle pill because a miracle pill does not exist.

I talk about CBD in my blog a lot and, always mention look, this has been one tool that has helped me greatly. But it didn't just take me from a place where I was sick to healing me. When you're dealing with disability and sickness, you can often feel like trapped, like stuck, and that's where I was. I saw no way outta this. I was totally reliant on doctors and experts to point me in the right direction, and it wasn't happening. I didn't know where to move, so I just kind of succumbeded to my illness. I said, you know, I'm just going to smoke. And that's the one thing I know was helping me.

And it was not a good lifestyle. It did not put me in the same room with people that I admired. So something had to change. So it was the catalyst for my healing and gave me the [00:28:00] relief to. Step back and say, what things need to change in my life? That ushered in a new era for me where I could make all these changes that I alluded to earlier where I could get in a routine of get out of the sedentary routine and start exercising.

And if you met me when I was a teenager, I was very underweight. I remember being 135 pounds and it wasn't great. 180 now, and that's pure muscle from weightlifting and bodybuilding. My functional medicine doctor has told me that the muscle mass I've gained acts as a sink for those inflammatory compounds.

So not only has gaining this weight diluted the effect of these. Antibodies and inflammatory compounds on my body, but it's given them a place to go other than my brain. Gaining muscle mass and exercising was greatly healing for me. And because of that, my appetite improved.

I was able to eat better higher quality foods, whole Foods, and that can be [00:29:00] different for everybody, but doing things for yourself. Changing things up, like getting out of that funk is so critical to anybody who's dealing with disability or sickness or mental health challenges.

So I always encourage people, you know, if you're not happy where you are now, change something and don't just look for a miracle pill. I think that's hardest thing because we are so unique and we are over there asking the doctors like, fix me and modern medicine groups us all together,

Which we as a society, love to do label and put things in neat little boxes, we do that for health too, and we forget how unique we each are. And you have been talking about that with pandas, that so many people, their symptoms are different. And whatever our thing that we're struggling with, I don't wanna say disability because not everybody has a [00:30:00] disability, but they have something they're struggling with.

Right? Whatever that thing is, you might find people who have some similarities. At the end of the day, we are very unique. Our journey is going to be unique. There will be similarities. We will have people along the road with us. We should not be taking this alone, but it's still unique. So it needs to be unique to us, unique to our needs, unique to our passions.

And for you, you found weightlifting to work for you. For somebody else, it might be something else. Weightlifting still good for you, helps your bone density, lots of other things. The thing is that tuning in with yourself to know what you need.

And we live in such a society where we tune out instead of tuning in. Something in Church of All Places was talking about the scientific article, and I leaned over to my husband, I'm like, find that for me and text it to me so I have it for later. But he talked about this study where people had to sit still for 10 to 15 minutes [00:31:00] and they either had to do that doing nothing, or they get a shock and so many people could not stand the idea that they would shock themselves.

What? Anyway, I'll have to share more of that in another podcast episode because I still need to read the article. I've been in that place in life, haven't you? Where you couldn't stand to sit with yourself for that long? Definitely. Especially in my case with my ticks, I physically could not sit still.

That's not a great place to be. When you can't dive into your passions or relax because you're just trying to survive. You're not anywhere near thriving, and what a difference your journey has made to where you can get to this point, and now you have a platform where you can share it with other people.

The discouraging part is that there is no miracle pill, right? Because that's what everyone wants to hear is like, just gimme the thing that will make me better. But the encouraging part is. That healing is possible, right? It's attainable. And in the [00:32:00] situation where maybe healing is not possible, it's still possible to have an amazing quality of life despite what you're dealing with.

And I've seen that over and over again with people. I admire mentors, friends, and how they manage to overcome incredible obstacles and still have an amazing quality of life, better than people who aren't dealing with that, impeding their progress. So it's very possible, but you have to start somewhere.

And so I always encourage people, don't give up. Your one decision, one new thing away from unlocking that path for yourself, for me, it took. 20 years. For some people it may take a few months, but don't give in because life is so awesome and worth living. Look where I am now.

I used to be so ashamed to talk about this, and now I'm talking about it very openly it's become the thing that I'm very passionate about I still have the impact of pandas in my life. It's nowhere. [00:33:00] Near the magnitude that it used to be, but it still impacts me and my family life.

And so I just wanna be honest with people, I never knew if I would be 100% fully healed, but to this point, I have an amazing family. I love my life. I'm encouraging people. I'm largely healed, and I enjoy what I do. So I consider that a big win. I think you are also teaching your family how to be compassionate.

I've thought about that for myself with my own healing journey from a car accident and some other things, and having that conversation with my kids of sometimes I can be here for you and sometimes I'm here. You guys just need to be patient with me. I'm doing my best wherever I'm at in that moment or that day.

And another part that you didn't say these exact words, but staying curious and trying new things because that's what got you where you are. [00:34:00] Instead of being like, it has to be this way. You try different things. You tried things until they worked or until they didn't.

Even with medicine, that's what doctors are trying to do. But you took some of that same framework and you took it here to then try. Well, maybe using something that's illegal will work. Hoping that someday I return legal. Thankfully, now it is. But it makes me think about, I have family members who are addicts, and I never wanted to go that route.

I never even tried it. I tried alcohol for a while and I saw the trajectory of where I was headed with that and everyone else who was around me, and I realized that's not what I wanted for my life and how much I want to be in control of my body. So it's hard for me when my neck starts freaking out from my car accident.

When I can't be in control of my body, it's frustrating. And you found a way to ride that line until you found something [00:35:00] that was legal and worked even better. There is so much there of making sure that you are. Stepping back and seeing things from different perspectives and seeing that you can be in control of your life of where you deserve to be.

Because we all are born with passions and with. Path that we can take that will bring so much joy into our lives and into the world, and we aren't meant to be stuck. And it can feel so awful when we are, especially if it's pain. Mm-hmm. I definitely understand the pain part of it. On a whole different level than I ever expected to.

I enjoy what I'm learning, but I don't enjoy what I'm going through, if that makes sense. It does, but the [00:36:00] thing is, I've been trying different things to find what works some things kind of work, some things work better, and it's kind of what you were saying, how this worked for now, and then I found something better.

So I hope even if you don't know anyone with pandas, you don't have any experience with that. All of you have experienced time in your lives where you are just surviving and you can't figure out a way to get to the thriving part of life. You are reminding us that we can get to a point where we love life and not to give up.

Absolutely. It's tough when you're living in it, but I came out of this stronger. I'm better equipped to help myself and others with a powerful message to share with the world. We've already been given all the tools we need to have. A happy, healthy life, but we need to tap into that.

You, scripture says everything is permissible, but not everything is beneficial. Meaning that there's everything [00:37:00] out here in the world for us to try, but not all of it will be good for us. So, try things, but be honest with yourself. When I realized that cannabis, this tool was not working for me anymore, I had to move on to something else, I hope this has been an encouragement. It goes with that intuition, right? Of trusting yourself and it sounds like you absolutely did along your journey. Thank you.

Any last thoughts or where we can find you? Sure, yeah, I'm easy to find. My website is Green Valley Nutrition. I have a bio on there with my blog some of the articles I've written about Pandas and my journey with Pandas. I'm on Facebook, Ethan Pompeo, and, Instagram is Ethan. Pandas I post more funny stuff on there recently during the ice storm, my girls were ice skating on the front yard, which I thought was pretty cool.

Thank you for all of this. This has been amazing and I'll be thinking about this for a [00:38:00] while and definitely I'll be sharing this episode. So I hope all of you who are listening and watching do the same and catch us next week on wellness and every season.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I hope that you found the answers that you needed, and you had some amazing aha moments. Please share this episode with others because it helps us align ourselves and then better align the world so that we can seek the healing that we really are looking for as part of the legal language.

I am a certified life coach with a Bachelor's in Applied Health. That is what I am leaning on for this. This is general advice. Take it as such. See you in the next episode.