Kelly was 24 years old when she started feeling tired all the time, regardless of how much she slept.
Two years prior, she had landed a job as a consultant in a major city, often requiring that she work more than 12 hours a day to keep pace with the seemingly ever-increasing demands of her role, so she first assumed that a lack of adequate downtime was the culprit.
It certainly made sense, at the outset, that her unusually stressful job could cause her fatigue, but when she started struggling to wake up in the morning despite multiple blaring alarms, or stay awake during the day without a constant supply of caffeine, it became clear to her that there was something else going on.
This wasn’t just stress.
Nor overwork.
She had experienced both during college, as a self-described “overachiever,” often camping out at the library overnight until she had perfected her essay, project, or presentation, in the same way that an artist might obsess endlessly over their masterpiece, until it’s absolutely perfect.
This wasn’t that kind of fatigue.
This was an unrelenting exhaustion that followed her around all the time, including the weekends, and wasn’t just isolated to moments of exertion.
Normal test results
Desperate for answers, Kelly scheduled an appointment with her primary care doctor, who agreed that her fatigue was unusual and warranted investigation.
When her doctor called her a few weeks later to report her test results—that everything was normal—Kelly wanted to ask if there were any other tests that could be ordered to further investigate what was going on, but the five-minute call was over before she had a chance to ask about ordering more tests.
It felt like her doctor had wanted to help, but when her test results came back normal, that was as far as she could go.
She didn’t offer to order more tests, so the implication was that her doctor didn’t know what else to order beyond a basic evaluation.
Or that maybe the system she was in prevented her from conducting a comprehensive evaluation of the health of her patients.
Whatever the case, Kelly recognized that it probably wasn’t worth trying to get her doctor to order more tests, and that, instead, she needed a resource that allowed her to access whatever tests she wanted, whenever she wanted, so she could get the data she needed to recover her health.
Enter Quantify
As if the social media platform knew exactly what she was looking for, Kelly soon started seeing Instagram ads for Quantify.
Checking out the website, she saw that Quantify made it easy to test for parasites, bacteria, fungi, viruses, metals, chemicals, food sensitivities, and other causes of chronic symptoms that her doctor hadn’t tested for.
Excited to finally figure out what was causing her fatigue, Kelly soon signed up.
After getting matched with a certified health coach, completing a health questionnaire, and meeting with her health coach over video chat, a Lyme disease test and Epstein-Barr virus test were ordered for Kelly, to test for Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacterium that causes Lyme disease, and Epstein-Barr virus, the virus that causes mononucleosis.
Reactivated Epstein-Barr virus
A few weeks later, she received her test results, and her health coach explained that while her Lyme disease test was negative, indicating she likely didn’t have Lyme disease, her Epstein-Barr virus test showed significantly elevated IgM and IgG antibodies, indicating reactivated Epstein-Barr virus, which can cause extreme fatigue and innumerable other chronic symptoms.
Her health coach added that Kelly had likely contracted Epstein-Barr virus when she was young, as most people do, and that her immune system had kept the virus under control until the stress of her job had compromised her immune function to such an extent that caused it to reactivate.
To address reactivated Epstein-Barr virus, her health coach continued, Kelly would need to optimize her immune function, by eliminating grains, processed foods, and dairy from her diet, exercising regularly, and getting to bed on a consistent schedule, while addressing the virus directly, by taking certain supplements, such as NAC, lysine, and reishi.
Recovery
While Kelly was surprised to learn that a virus she had contracted when she was a kid was now causing her fatigue, she was also excited to have figured out why she was so tired all the time, and, more importantly, what she needed to do to address the virus and get her life back.
She had contracted mono when she was nine, recalling that she had been effectively bed-bound for weeks with the worst fatigue, fever, and sore throat that she had ever experienced at that point, so it made sense that the same virus could reactivate if her immune function faltered.
Following her health plan closely—her recovery strategy now more advanced than the chicken soup approach from her childhood—Kelly started feeling better 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.
A year later, her fatigue had completely resolved, and she reported feeling like she had gotten her life back, now equipped with the right diet, supplements, and lifestyle to ensure the virus wouldn’t reactivate again.