Kelly was 24 years old when she signed up for Quantify, after struggling for years with chronic fatigue, and not getting anywhere with conventional medicine.
Her primary care doctor had ordered a complete blood count (CBC), comprehensive metabolic panel (CMP), and thyroid-stimulating hormone (TSH) to investigate what was going on, but when her test results came back normal, he didn’t have any ideas, other than the possibility that Kelly was “just stressed.”
A product manager at an early-stage startup, Kelly recognized that her job wasn’t exactly a walk in the park—she would often get home after a 12-hour day at the office, exhausted but frazzled from the nearly constant state of chaos at the company—but she was understandably reluctant to accept her doctor’s suggestion that stress alone was causing her fatigue, without any test results to back this up.
What’s more, when Kelly asked her doctor if there were any other tests that he could order, he dismissed the question, implying he didn’t know what else to order beyond a basic evaluation.
Frustrated by her doctor’s lack of outside-of-the-box thinking, Kelly decided to pursue a more data-driven approach.
In her first appointment at Quantify, Kelly’s health coach recommended a Lyme disease test and Epstein-Barr virus test, to test for Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterium that causes Lyme disease, and Epstein-Barr virus, the virus that causes mononucleosis.
Test results
Her first time testing for chronic infections, Kelly’s Lyme disease test was negative, indicating she didn’t have Lyme disease, the notoriously underdiagnosed tick-borne infection that often masquerades as other chronic conditions, including chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, and multiple sclerosis.
Kelly’s Epstein-Barr virus test, however, showed significantly elevated IgM and IgG antibodies, indicating reactivated Epstein-Barr virus, which can cause fatigue, brain fog, depression, anxiety, and other chronic symptoms.
A surprisingly common infection—around 90% of the global population are infected with the virus—Kelly had likely contracted Epstein-Barr virus in her teens, as most people do, and her immune system had effectively kept the virus under control until something, some stressful event, caused it to reactivate.
Recovery
Kelly was shocked to learn that a virus was causing her fatigue, but she wasn’t surprised.
Thinking back to her childhood, Kelly recalled that she had gotten mono when she was 15, and had been bed-bound for weeks with extreme fatigue, fever, and sore throat.
While she had seemingly fully recovered, it made sense to her now that the same virus could reactivate if her immune function faltered.
When her fatigue had started years later, in college (where she had pushed herself to keep pace with the ever-increasing demands of her coursework with frequent all-nighters in the library and an overreliance on caffeine), the extreme physical and mental stress Kelly had been under had likely compromised her immune function to such an extent that allowed the otherwise dormant virus to reactivate, proliferate, and cause her to feel tired all the time.
Thrilled to finally get answers, Kelly started following her health plan closely, checking in with her health coach regularly to help her stay on track.
She eliminated processed foods, sugar, and grains from her diet, increased consumption of fruits and vegetables, took certain supplements, such as astragalus, lysine, and NAC, and started getting to bed on a consistent schedule.
Within a few months, she started feeling more rested in the morning, less reliant on coffee, and better able to keep up with the demands of her job.
Within a year, her fatigue had completely resolved, she reported feeling like she had gotten her life back, and a follow-up Epstein-Barr virus test showed normal antibodies, further validating the work she had done to address the virus that had unknowingly compromised her health.