Meghan Telpner is the picture of health.
As a professional nutritionist, she spends her days teaching cooking workshops, helping clients develop healthier eating habits and riding a bicycle around her Parkdale neighbourhood. At age 31, she's often mistaken for a teenager. But her life hasn't always been this way.
"There were a lot of days when I was too sick to go to work, or had to leave work to go to various doctor’s appointments, because I was dealing with this beast inside of me," she said.
That beast was Crohn's disease— an inflammatory disease of the intestines that causes abdominal pain, digestive problems, weight loss and has been linked to colon cancer. While Telpner had suffered symptoms since high school, the disease came to a head at age 26 while she was working in advertising.
"I was going to the gym before work, so I was getting up around five every morning and working out really hard on cardio machines, then coming home, getting dressed, eating really quick breakfasts and going to work for the day until about eight o’clock at night,” she said. “I would come home at night and sort of crash.”
Telpner tried to keep up her hectic schedule, but as her illness took hold, she eventually just couldn’t do it anymore.
"A lot of the time my energy was low and, being the sort of type-A that I was, I just kept pushing through it until it got to the point where I physically couldn’t leave my apartment to go to work," she said.
After three years of doctors’ visits, she was referred to a gastroenterologist who told her what was wrong. Despite her relief at finally having a diagnosis, she wasn't happy with the course of action the doctor proposed—a wait-and-see approach that involved medications and possibly surgery.
"I was 26 and it just didn’t feel right to have to be on medicine for the rest of my life,” she said.
When Telpner mentioned her interest in trying alternative therapies, the doctor quickly shot her down.
"I said I was going to try acupuncture and he dismissed it, saying there was no study that proved that it worked,” she said.
Naturopathic doctor Shelly Reitkop says it’s not uncommon for conventional doctors to turn up their noses at alternative treatments.
“There are some conventional doctors that are really opposed to naturopathic medicine, mostly because they don’t know very much about it,” she said.
Telpner left the doctor’s office in tears, but she knew she had another option.
"At that point I realized that I could go with what he was saying, or try something else," she said. "You can always try something else."
According to Mississauga-based life coach Claire Coltsmann, one of the most important things she teaches her clients is how to change the story of their lives—how to transform negative beliefs into positive action.
”You can become aware of the story you’re telling yourself and think, does it support where I want to go in life?” she said. “And if it doesn’t, then how can I change the story?”
For Telpner, changing the story meant quitting her job, packing up her life and moving to California for four months to work with a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine. Quickly, her routine became much different than it had been in Toronto. She spent her days meditating, doing yoga and receiving acupuncture treatments. Soon, her symptoms were under control.
But despite feeling better, Telpner still feared that her doctor would ultimately be right.
"It’s easier if someone else makes a decision for you no matter what it is. It was scary to go against what a quote-unquote professional was telling me to do," she said.
While it can be nerve-wracking for patients to take control of their healthcare, Reitkop says it can also be empowering.
“Once they take that responsibility, they start to appreciate themselves, their body, what their body can do,” she said. “They believe in themselves.”
After her summer in California, Telpner returned to Toronto to attend nutrition school. Today, she's symptom-free and working to help other people face the same fear she did.
"I feel fortunate to be in a position to be able to take that fear away from people. To give them confidence that they can get better, that they can heal, that nothing is a life sentence," she said. "It’s a real honour."
Photo by karimian, available under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.
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