The race for hope

This letter is a continuation of my personal story. You can reread the first episode here:

Things I've never dared to tell

For years, I had relied solely on treatments prescribed by doctors.

When you are sick, you consult a doctor. The doctor looks for the cause and proposes a treatment.

That was how my parents had taught me to take care of my health. And it seemed perfectly logical to me.

One day, my doctor told me:

"You should come more often."

I looked at it in astonishment.

I was young and I absolutely did not understand what he meant.

Why would I have come to consult him at a time when I wasn't sick?

For me, doctors only intervened once a problem had already developed. The idea of ​​prevention or comprehensive monitoring was unfamiliar to me.

When you are young, you easily think that the body will regain its vitality on its own.

When you become a mother, you postpone things even more. You take care of the children, the house, work, and then you delay until the moment when waiting is no longer possible.

I knew I was often sick.

I could see that bronchitis, sinusitis, allergies, pneumonia and fatigue were not successive problems.

But I didn't yet know how to look at the whole picture.

After a few years, I discovered magazines dedicated to health.

I subscribed.

I began to discover topics I had almost never heard of: micronutrients, inflammation, the microbiota, the functioning of the immune system, the effects of prolonged stress, medicinal plants.

I did not yet have the necessary tools to prioritize everything I was reading.

But, for the first time, I was getting into the mechanisms.

I tested some plants known to support the immune system.

Initially, the results were excellent.

I was getting sick less often. I was recovering better. After all these years, it was a huge improvement.

I had finally found something that seemed to help me.

To avoid taking the same product continuously, I rotated them. I also tried to take breaks.

But when I stopped, I would get sick again after a few days.

Then, gradually, the effects diminished.

The doses had to be increased to achieve the same result. Then, even higher doses worked less well.

The plants could help me.

They had become a crutch that I could no longer really do without.

But a crutch doesn't fix what forces you to lean on it.

Nothing can replace a doctor who is willing to consider a particular case and share their experience with their patient.

I had already consulted several doctors in vain. However, I still hoped to find one who could move my case forward.

I thought I had found this doctor.

He was very well-regarded and well past the usual retirement age. Patients came from all over to consult him.

The main obstacle was not medical.

She was his wife.

She found him to be old and already far too busy. She had therefore asked him to stop accepting new patients.

But this doctor had a good heart.

When someone approached him in the street and told him about their distressed situation, he always granted them an appointment, much to the despair of his secretary.

For my part, I had managed to get a consultation thanks to someone who knew him well.

Even before meeting him, he had my complete trust.

I would follow his treatment, that was certain.

I parked my car in front of a small house with faded plaster, whose surroundings seemed poorly maintained.

A plaque affixed to th