KIRBY’s STORY
“Things took a turn for the worst five years ago when I had a copper IUD put in. For me while I was copper toxic my entire life when I had a copper IUD put in it pushed my body farther than it could handle and started to take over almost every function in my body. Within months of having the IUD placed I went from having normal periods to heavy, painful, and overly emotional episodes starting 10 days before I would bleed. Then the anger and fight or flight started.
This is where I started to detach. Physically and emotionally from the world around me. Everything started to change as I become more and more numb. Take fighting, when I started my last relationship or even with my old career when I would have a fight with someone I would do what most women would do, find a place to cry to myself quietly and distance myself from the conflict until I could think about it and return to talk about it. Gradually, that healthy and calm response faded. When faced with conflict I would panic, yell, freak out, and just act crazy. I would just “go” so quickly and expect the opposing party to keep up with me or just get more angry with them threatening all of the worse things my mind could come up with to get my way.
This was not me. Even months earlier I had never acted like this. What was happening was my body was slowly going into fight or flight reactions when I was stressed. My adrenals in response to the IUD started working in overdrive to get the copper out and tell me something wasn’t right. I had adrenaline and cortisol running through my body every minute of every day. I could no longer relax no matter how hard I tried.
As I got worse and worse, I started to not even need an argument to be put into this frame of mind. I was in a constant state of anxiety and didn’t even know it as it came on so gradual as the copper levels rose. A world event would make me obsess, someone within ear shot doing something I didn’t like, hell not getting to set up my environment and belongings around me how I felt they best suited would receive these over the top responses.
I became paranoid, anxious, and emotionally completely detached. I remember one time even crying to my husband how I couldn’t feel anymore and how life had lost it’s colour and how I felt I had no connection to the world or the people in it.
Eventually, I started to blame everything around me. I blamed my family, I blamed the country I was in, I blamed my past, I blamed my work – any story I could come up with why I felt so stressed and detached I would latch onto because when you feel this way nothing is enough, no one is enough or can do enough for me because I could never get relief and relax.
I would break out in crazy hives anytime I would go running, my periods and PMS were getting worse and worse with each cycle, I lost all sexual sensations/feelings and interest and I was more and more going through the actions of life rather than feeling them… Eventually my husband shut down on me. I mean can you blame him? He met this lovely, adventurous, loving, connected woman who fought fair and was reasonably stable, and slowly I evolved into someone we both didn’t know, or honestly didn’t want to know.
So after a particular large fight again falling 10 days before I bled I said enough was enough and went to the walk in clinic… (the doctor) said she had seen over the last couple years a lot of women coming in with the same sorts of problems and a copper IUD. She couldn’t tell me why this was happening and knows that all the literature says the copper IUD is safe but could only tell me what she was seeing with her own patients and asked if she could take mine out. UH, yes! So I had the evil little thing removed that day.
The detox and the recovery were one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life. It was painful, lonely, and heartbreaking for nearly 6 months, I lost so much weight as the copper poured out I was less than 100lbs, but slowly things improved. My moods balanced, the weight returned, and a new vitality showed in my eyes and face I hadn’t had for years.
I’m writing my story here because there’s so little information online right now about what it is like to live with copper toxicity and how it can literally rob you of your life. I’m hoping if I share my story I can help others not lose years of being connected with the world around them like I did. If me sharing this helps even one woman it’s worth it.” ~Kirby Amour
(Kirby now shares her healing journey as part of a 90 day support program for other women going through similar, available HERE
