Episode 257
Title: Period-related Pain, Blackouts, and Fainting
Host: Dr. Nicole Rivera
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Transcription:
Dr. Nicole Rivera (00:01.036)
What is up, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Integrative You Radio. I am Dr. Nicole, and I am flying solo today because I am talking to you about periods, not necessarily Dr. Nick's favorite topic. But hey, here we are. So I'm talking about this because, one, I have had first-hand experience with this topic. Secondarily, I have actually had
five different women with this quote-unquote mystery condition in my practice. And I was just reminded of it because I had a very dear friend come here to Italy and visit me. And as she was here, she was describing a very similar circumstance. And so let's break this down. So the topic that we're talking about today is
pain-induced blackouts or fainting with periods or with leading up to your period. And the reason why I'm calling a blackout different than fainting is because in some situations these women are losing their vision. Some are even losing their ability to hear, more often losing their vision and not fully fainting or losing consciousness, and some
are losing consciousness. And so this could be very scary for an individual that's experiencing it. And the pain that's associated with this is some of the most ungodly pain that you can ever imagine. And so the pain alone can be very alarming. What is wrong? Do I have a tumor? Do I have cancer? What's happening? Did I have a cyst burst or a fibroid rupture?
And very often it's not any of those things. Of course, you should always go get checked to rule that out, but there is a different association, especially for women that this has been happening consistently. So I'm gonna really start with my personal story so that you can have an understanding of what it looked like for me. And then obviously we're gonna talk more about the different iterations that I've heard from other women.
Dr. Nicole Rivera (02:26.884)
But honestly, it's all pretty similar. So when I was in my, I'm trying to think, I was in high school is when it first started. So I was always an avid runner and I would go for runs and I would definitely have abdominal cramping sometimes that I would have to run to a bathroom if I went for a long run or an intense run. It didn't happen all the time, but it definitely happened.
And this is something that you hear about with runners, cross-country runners, that in some circumstances they can lose their bowels or have sensitive bowels from going long distances or doing very intense runs. So fast forward, I was running in my neighborhood, which was something that I did on a regular basis, and it was barely a mile. It wasn't a very long distance. I was halfway through my run and I started having really, really bad abdominal cramping. So naturally I'm just thinking,
gosh, get home because you clearly need to go to the bathroom. So by the time I reach my lawn, I am doubled over, almost crawling through the lawn to get into the house. At this point, my temperature is rising and I'm burning up. So I'm in so much pain at this point that I'm just find the bathroom and I'm lying on the cold tile.
trying to bring my temperature down because the pain is so intense that I'm in the fetal position. And then I start to actually lose my vision, never lose consciousness, but lose my vision. Fast forward a couple of minutes, I have to have a bowel movement. And this is something that relieves a minor amount of the pain. And really now at this point, it's a waiting game. One of the things that as this happened to me in the future,
that I found was a remedy was sometimes I needed to throw myself into a cold shower in order to buffer the pain, which in reality was just changing the amount of blood flow that was going to my organs. So of course, the first time this happened, it's kind of like, whoa, what's going on? I need to get to a doctor. And I go to the doctor and the results is comical because they barely examined me. They said we don't really know.
Dr. Nicole Rivera (04:50.835)
Maybe you had a twisting of your uterus when you were running. Really? That's what you got for me. No recommendations. Just if it happens again, you know, you will have to do further testing and you might be a candidate for surgery depending on what those results yield. Okay, great. I was never someone inclined to want to...
cut my body open for any reasons. So of course I'm like, I'm gonna take this into my own hands and figure it out. So as time goes on, I start to realize that this is not happening all the time because again, I'm an avid runner, I work out often and it's only happening sometimes. And what I realized is it's happening leading up to my menstrual cycle. I was like, hmm, interesting. What is the connection here?
So years and years and years go by. I'm in school, I'm in undergraduate college. It was happening a little bit. Then it started to happen a lot when I was in chiropractic school. And it actually started to, I was starting to have bleeding, vaginal bleeding, not period associated with the onset of the pain. And it was happening very frequently. So my theory,
And this will make sense as we talk more about what was actually revealed when I finally did more functional integrative testing. But throughout my undergraduate years, I was living in a very toxic environment of mold. So the home or the house that we were living in through college, it was my sophomore year to my senior year.
there was a lot of water damage. At one point, I walked into my bedroom, which was on the ground level because it was a renovated garage. And I say renovated very loosely because it was the worst possible renovation you could ever imagine. They never even put insulation in. So I practically lived in an outhouse. So minor details.
Dr. Nicole Rivera (07:04.095)
But yes, I walked down the steps into my bedroom to squish squish onto my carpet. And later down the line, when I was finally moving my furniture out of that house, there was black mold underneath the couch that was in my room. So there was a very significant exposure to very, very toxic black mold. And for those of you that don't know much about mold, we're gonna talk about it on a high-level today and how it connects to this topic.
But if you want to dive into mold more, I highly recommend listening to some of our other podcasts. No matter if you're on iTunes or Podbean, just type in mold and you will find a variety of different podcasts that are associated to mold and all different conditions. Okay, so getting back to what the hell was going on. So as I mentioned, fast forward, no one knows what's going on. All I know is it's getting worse.
I have these ways to buffer it, as mentioned, don't run leading up to my period, don't do any crazy physical activity. And then also if the pain does onset, throw myself into a cold shower and have a bowel movement and that would relieve the pain. So fast forward, I finally start to break into the functional and integrative medicine field and I start to learn about this idea.
of gut infections, and parasitic infections. And ironically, if you asked me many years ago, do you feel like you have gut issues? I would have easily answered no. And that was primarily because most of the symptoms that I experienced were intermittent. They were not all the time. Nothing was too intense that I couldn't function and live my life. And also most of them just became my normal. Getting bloated after certain foods, just avoid those foods.
normal. Having stomach aches occasionally, normal. You know, having to run to the bathroom after certain drinks or foods, normal. And so I know that this is normal for a lot of people. In reality, it's not normal whatsoever. It's just so many people are suffering with these types of symptoms that it's become normal. And we also, you know, do our own analysis and we say, if I just avoid this food, or if I avoid this drink, or if I avoid this caffeine, then I'll be good.
Dr. Nicole Rivera (09:30.155)
And don't get me wrong, not all food and drink is created equal. Hence one of the reasons why I moved to Italy because I was so sick and tired of spending so much money and getting poisoned. But we shouldn't necessarily be living a life that we have to eliminate things out in order for our gut to feel semi-normal. So going forward, I do this functional analysis and it turns out that I have parasitic infections.
And so I did what I knew then in order to deal with these parasitic infections. And I started to realize that this pain associated with the onset of my menstrual cycle and the blacking out started to get better. Wasn't gone, but it started to get better. The pain was less intense, it would go away quicker. And I was having very, very few episodes of actually like...
having a blackout and losing my vision. So I was like, hmm, this is really interesting. So then fast forward a couple of years and I get introduced to the product by Cellcore called Power One, which is called Mimosa Poudica. And Mimosa Poudica is a very different product that targets parasites. And the way that it does it is when you take Mimosa Poudica and the capsule opens inside of your gut,
The mimosa prudica will start to form a gel. And if any of you have ever used psyllium husks in order to better your bowels or relieve yourself of constipation, when you take psyllium husks and you mix it with water in a cup, you have to drink it very quickly because it does the same thing. It forms this gel-like substance. And if it forms the gel, it's actually pretty hard to drink. So...
When it comes to the mimosa putica, you take it and it does this inside of you. And so what it does is it actually suffocates the parasite. And when the parasite becomes suffocated, loses all of its oxygenation, now you can actually pass the parasite and you can also pass the parasite in its whole form. Because other things that are going in acting of killing agents like wormwood and black walnut,
Dr. Nicole Rivera (11:49.199)
they're going to disrupt the parasitic activity and the parasites can break into pieces and you don't always see it. It just looks like undigested food in your bowels, which obviously you will overlook. Very different circumstance when you go ahead and you take this mimosa pudica seed. So I ended up passing a two-foot parasite. Two feet! And I'm not saying this to scare you guys. This is something that
I see on a regular basis with the people that I work with. But just so you are aware, in order to have a parasite that is two feet big, it has to be in your system for 20 years or longer. So this has been, this was in my system for a very, very, very long time. Not only messing with my gastrointestinal system but also messing with my mood and mental health, because that is one of the side effects of having parasitic issues in your gut.
Secondarily to that is it was creating such inflammation in my gut that that inflammation started to cascade into my uterus. So if you guys go on Google and you look up the anatomy of the intestines, the rectum, the uterus, and the bladder, you're gonna find that your uterus
is sandwiched between your bladder and your descending colon slash rectum, aka where your poop comes out. So when you have things in your gut that shouldn't be there, if you have different infections from bacterial overgrowth, the parasitic infections, if you have fungal infections, you're going to have inflammation in your gut. And maybe they call that
irritable bowel syndrome, maybe they call that Crohn's disease, maybe they call that ulcerative colitis. But this is going to then create, inflammation is going to create an enlargement. So if you start to have an expansion or an enlargement of your descending colon in your rectum, that's going to push on your uterus. And then in addition to this is when you go to get your menstrual cycle,
Dr. Nicole Rivera (14:09.409)
and you start to have inflammation of your endometrium, your uterus, because your endometrium is getting ready to slough off, that is what's coming out of you when you're having a menstrual cycle. So you have, you already have inflammation in your descending colon and your rectum. Now you have inflammation because you're getting ready to have a period in your uterus. And now there is a whole boatload of inflammation in your pelvic bowl. And these organs are pressing up against each other.
And now your vagus nerve, which I'm gonna talk about more in-depth, your vagus nerve, which innervates your gut, is starting to get inflamed. Don't get me wrong, your vagus nerve is already inflamed because of the infection that reside in your gut. So the interesting thing about the vagus nerve is the top of it starts in your brainstem, and then it goes down, it innervates your lungs, your respiratory rate, it innervates your heart for your...
heart rate, and then it innervates your gut. And it plays a very big role in your gut motility, aka how well things are moving along the tract. But what happens is you can have inflammation in your vagus nerve that starts to create inflammation all the way up to your brainstem. And if you start to have inflammation in your vagus nerve that reaches the brainstem and even the inner ear,
You're going to have a lot of issues with lightheadedness, and dizziness. You can have shifts in your blood pressure. And this can induce these blackouts, the fainting. If you've ever heard of what they call a vasovagal response, that's essentially what it's creating. It's creating this vasovagal response, which in severe cases can result in fainting, losing your vision, losing your balance, and losing your equilibrium.
So the moral of the story is that there is a huge, huge connection with the gut and the reproductive organs in addition to the vagus nerve, which can be causing this basal vagal response, which is causing you to get extremely lightheaded or dizzy, lose your vision or faint or all of the above. So for me though, there was an interesting factor here because
Dr. Nicole Rivera (16:32.863)
I was clearly walking around for a large portion of my life with gut infections. And don't get me wrong, I didn't just have parasites. I also had overgrowth of bacteria. I had fungal issues. There was a whole slew of things going on. But obviously parasites are large. They take up space. So that's going to create a significant protrusion or significant expansion of the bowel that's going to put more pressure on the uterus and create more problems. But the other factor here,
is that I had the vagus nerve inflammation due to my gut issues probably since I was a young child. But in two-six, I had a very bad head injury from falling snowboarding. So again, the vagus nerve starts in the brain stem. So now I have the double whammy. I pretty much had my vagus nerve
inflamed from the bottom up, the gut up, because of the gut infections. Then I had a head injury, which gave me 13 staples in my head, a severe concussion, and a sprained neck. And so now I also had damage and inflammation to my vagus nerve from the brainstem level down. So after the inflammation from the top and the bottom all came together, that is really what started to kick in.
the issues, the extreme issues where I was having more frequent episodes and I was also having more intense pain and blacking out. So this is really important for women to realize because you could have just had a bad head injury that created such vagus nerve disruption that now you're having this vasovagal response.
And then when you go to get your menstrual cycle, especially if you maybe have endometriosis or fibroids or cysts, you already have inflammation in your uterus, you are going to be likely to have this type of issue from the pain, discomfort to the blacking out or fainting. Also, if you have gut issues and you have infections in your gut, knowing or unknowing, it can induce it. And if you have both,
Dr. Nicole Rivera (18:56.001)
you can have the extreme that you're having these episodes. So it's really, really important for women to understand the connections because I can't tell you how many women I work with and like my hormones, my hormones, my hormones. Your hormones are something that shouldn't, you'll never be able to manipulate your hormones properly and create a symphony. It's too complex of a system. So if you think that you're going to orchestrate
hormone balance through hormone replacement therapy, nutraceuticals, pharmaceuticals, whatever it is, you're always, you might feel better for a short amount of time, but you're never going to be able to orchestrate the proper balance because there's too many organs involved. You have hormones from the brain, the thyroid, the gonads, the reproductive system, and the adrenals, there's too much involved and there's so many
factors and variables that play a role in your hormones being balanced. So the key is you remove the obstacles, you remove the things that are derailing the hormonal system. And really what that takes is looking at anatomy. I like a lot of times in the beginning of my career, people like, how do you do what you do as a chiropractor?
And I feel so grateful for my background because I had such a focus on anatomy and physiology and the nervous system. So I understand the nerves and how the brain communicates with the organs. And then I also understand the anatomy of the organs and how they're positioned and even how the low back and the spine and the sacrum and the tailbone all play a role in the reproductive organs as well. Because you're
Literally, the two bones on, you people call it your hips, you know, there, you have your ovaries that are anchored through ligaments on your hips. So if you've had a bunch of injuries or you fell off a horse and broke your pelvis or you broke your tailbone, those are things that are also going to contribute to a lot of strain on your uterus, a lot of strain on your gastrointestinal system that's going to
Dr. Nicole Rivera (21:15.183)
potentially even create some of the things that we're talking about today. So I hope this was extremely insightful and I do want you to walk away with some tips and tools. So listen, if you want to go ahead and do a parasite protocol, you know, you do you, but there is a method to it. There is a way to do it properly and there is a way to do it incorrectly.
And so at bare minimum, if you team up with some of the reps at Cellcore, they could potentially help you with their parasite protocol. If you are someone that has a lot of complexities with your health, if you are having the fainting, blacking out, there's probably more to the story. And it's a matter of working with someone who can really get data on your body.
and lead you in the right direction so that you can resolve these symptoms once and for all. So obviously, you know what I do. If you're here, you can look at our website, and check it out. We pride ourselves on being investigators and data junkies. We always figure it out. We always have solutions, and we always get results. So I will leave you with that, my friends. Until next time.
