Rachel Khoury Facebook ad: “The nurse said something was moving”

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During my smear test the nurse stopped, the speculum still inside me, and said, 'Rachel, I can see something moving. I need to call a doctor.' I'm Rachel, I'm 38, and I live in Leeds with my two boys, Joel and Lucas, and our daft Labrador, Barney. I am writing this for the woman who has been told her bloods are normal, her bowel is irritable, her hormones are just par for the course, while her actual body is quietly falling apart underneath her. I was that woman for nearly two years, and the reason nobody could find what was wrong with me is that no one ever really looked. The thing the nurse could see moving that afternoon was a worm. A long, thread-thin, off-white worm, wriggling just inside my cervix, caught in the light of her head torch, still alive. She was professional about it. She withdrew the speculum slowly. She told me not to move. She pressed a buzzer on the wall and then she just stood there, one hand on my knee, the other on the edge of the trolley, waiting for the doctor to come. I lay there with my legs still in the stirrups, staring at a poster about chlamydia, trying to remember how to breathe, because I could feel something tiny still moving inside me where it had no right to be. When the doctor arrived, a young locum with a face I did not know, he looked, and then he looked again, and then he said, very gently, 'Has anyone at home got pets?' I told him we have a dog. He nodded like that explained it, handed me a sheet of paper, and said, 'Probably pinworms. Nothing to worry about. I'll write you up for a single dose of mebendazole from the pharmacy downstairs.' Single dose. One tablet. As if a single tablet could answer two years of my body screaming to be heard. But I did not know that yet. I was just relieved that someone, finally, had found something that proved I was not making it up. I took the mebendazole that evening. Two days later I went back to my own GP, told her what had happened, and asked if that could explain the rest of it: the exhaustion, the bloating, the brain fog, the way my stomach swelled up every afternoon like I was about five months gone. She looked at my notes, said the bloods were all fine, and said, 'Pinworms don't cause symptoms like that. The mebendazole will sort the infection. For the rest of it, have you thought about managing your stress levels a bit better?' I was 38, I had two children and a dog and a full time job, and she had just told me to manage my stress. Let me go back to the beginning, because the smear test was not where it started. It started about eighteen months before that, so quietly that I explained every single thing away until there was no explanation left except the one I was too frightened to say out loud. I noticed the tiredness first. Not normal mother-of-two tired, where you go to bed at half ten and wake up still wishing you had another hour. This was different. I could sleep nine hours and wake up feeling like I had been emptied out in the night, like something had siphoned all the petrol off while I was lying there. I started setting my alarm for twenty to six, not because I had anywhere to be, but because I needed the extra twenty minutes to sit on the edge of the bed and become a person before I could go downstairs and make the packed lunches. Then the bloating. Flat as a board when I got up. By four in the afternoon my stomach was hard and distended and I looked pregnant. By eight o clock I was on the sofa with my jeans unbuttoned, a cushion over my lap, pretending I was cold. I stopped tucking in my tops. I bought two pairs of elasticated trousers from Matalan and lived in them for a year. Joel asked me once, in the car on the way to football, if there was a baby in there, and I said no love, I just get a bit swollen after my tea. Then my head went. I would lose the thread of my own sentences. I would walk into a room and forget why. I put the milk in the cupboard with the plates. I rang the school office and could not remember which of my two boys I was ringing about, and I stood there in the kitchen with the phone against my ear, completely blank, until a woman on the other end said, 'Is everything alright, Mrs Atkinson?' At work I read the same email four times and took in none of it. I started writing myself notes for things I had been doing for eleven years. Then the three in the morning waking. Every single night, almost on the hour, my eyes would open and my heart would be pounding like I had run up the stairs. Nothing had woken me. Nothing was wrong in the house. I would lie there in the dark listening to my husband Rob breathing, and I would think, there is something badly wrong with me and nobody is going to find it. Then my hair. Real clumps of it in the plughole every time I washed it. I started picking it out and wrapping it in toilet paper and pushing it right down into the bin so Rob would not see it. He never said anything. He definitely saw the hairbrush. Then half a stone fell off me in about six weeks without me doing anything to make it happen. People at work kept telling me I looked great. I stood in the corridor by the printer and tried to make my face look like I was pleased about it. And I got horrible. That is the bit I still cannot forgive. Lucas knocked a whole glass of orange squash across the kitchen table one Sunday morning and I screamed at him, properly screamed, at an eight year old, over a drink. He just stood there with his chin trembling and I got the cloth and said sorry and then I went in the downstairs loo and cried with my hand over my mouth so neither of them would hear. I was not that woman. I had been swapped for someone with a shorter fuse and no petrol in her. So I did the right thing. Over and over again. Visit one: 'You're a working mum, Rachel. You're run down. Try getting to bed earlier.' Visit two, a different GP because that is the luck of the draw: 'Your bloods have come back perfectly normal. That's good news, isn't it?' Visit three: 'It's probably IBS. Try more fibre, keep a food diary, cut out the onions.' I ate more fibre for nine weeks. By the end of it I could not bend down to load the dishwasher after my dinner because the bloating was so painful I had to stand with my hands on the worktop, breathing through it. Visit four, and this is the one where I stopped trusting them entirely: 'Have you thought about antidepressants? A lot of women your age find the physical symptoms ease off once the mood is a bit more level.' I said I was not depressed, I was ill. She looked at me the way you look at someone who is being difficult. Visit five was a private gastroenterologist, three hundred and twenty pounds, ten minutes in the room. He pressed on my stomach twice, said it was functional gut disorder, and told me to keep a food diary. I had already kept a food diary for seven months. In between all that I spent money we did not actually have on probiotics and peppermint capsules and digestive enzymes and a gut health powder off Instagram that cost thirty nine pounds and tasted like pond water. I tried gluten free for eight weeks. I tried dairy free for eight weeks. I tried a low FODMAP diet that left me eating rice and chicken for two months. Nothing made any difference at all. I added it up one night at the kitchen table while Rob was watching the football, and I had spent nearly eleven hundred pounds on things that did not work. And the whole time, I was getting worse. The smear test was meant to be nothing. Just a routine appointment, something to tick off a list. When the nurse called the doctor in and he said pinworms and handed me that paper for the pharmacy, a tiny part of me felt something I had not felt in months: hope. Maybe this was the answer. Maybe the worms had been causing everything: the exhaustion, the swelling, the fog, the temper, the hair, the half a stone. Maybe one tablet would fix it. The mebendazole did kill those pinworms. For about a week, I thought I might be turning a corner. Then the bloating came back, and the fatigue, and the 3am waking, and I knew. There was something else in me. Something deeper. Something that a single dose of a pharmacy tablet was never going to touch. I went back to my GP. I told her the smear test had found a worm. I told her my symptoms were all still there, every single one of them. I asked her if there was a test for intestinal parasites. She looked at my notes, looked back up at me, and said, 'We can do a stool test, but honestly, Rachel, in a woman like you, in this country, it is almost certainly not that. Your symptoms sound more like stress to me.' She ordered a stool test anyway. The sample came back clear. Of course it did. I know now that standard stool tests miss up to ninety percent of parasitic infections. The parasites hide behind a biofilm, a sort of slime shield they build around themselves, and behind that shield they do not shed eggs consistently. So the sample I handed in that morning was never going to show anything. But at the time, that clear result was the worst thing that could have happened. Because now I had a doctor's word that there was nothing in me. The worm the nurse saw must have been a one off, a bit of pinworm that had wandered, nothing systemic. My husband Rob believed the doctor. 'They've looked, love. They've tested you. There's nothing there,' he said. I loved him for wanting to reassure me, but his reassurance felt like him siding with them. From that point on, I started to properly believe that I was dying. I did not tell Rob that. I did not tell anyone. I just quietly started getting things in order. I wrote a note on my phone about which bills go out on which days, and where the passports are, and that Lucas will only wear the socks without the seam across the toes. I moved the life insurance papers into the top drawer of my bedside table, so they would be easy to find. I started answering the question 'what shall we do for the summer holidays?' with 'let's wait and see', not because I was busy, but because I was not sure I would still be here. One Thursday night I sat at this very kitchen table and started writing letters to my boys, to give to them when they were old enough, in case nobody could tell them what had happened to their mum. I was 38. I was writing letters to children who were still in primary school, because every doctor on my case file had decided I was just a bit stressed and a bit middle aged. What stopped me was not a doctor. It was my sister in law, Jo. Jo came round on a Saturday afternoon in the autumn, unannounced, with a bag of apples from her tree, and she found me on the sofa at two o clock in the afternoon in my dressing gown with the curtains half shut. She put the apples on the kitchen table, made a pot of tea, and sat down in the armchair opposite me and said, 'Right. From the beginning. Every single thing.' I told her. The fatigue. The bloating. The brain fog. The 3am waking. The hair. The weight. The worm the nurse found. The clear stool test. The letter I had been writing at midnight. Jo did the one thing nobody had done in eighteen months. She did not ask me about one symptom at a time. She took a piece of paper out of her handbag, wrote them all down, and then typed the whole list into Google together. About half an hour later she turned her laptop around to face me. 'Rachel, read this.' It was a long article by a functional medicine doctor about a woman in her late thirties with my exact list. Not most of it. Every single thing. Two years of clear tests and being told she was just stressed. What they eventually found in her, when the right person finally looked, was an intestinal parasitic infection. Not pinworms. Not something a single mebendazole could wipe out. Proper gut parasites, hiding behind biofilm, stealing her nutrients, poisoning her brain, destroying her digestion, and slowly shutting her body down. I sat at that kitchen table and cried, because for the first time in two years something described exactly what I was living. The article explained how you get them: from undercooked meat, unwashed salad, the dog, public loos, swimming pools. The World Health Organisation estimates that one in three adults in the developed world is carrying an intestinal parasite. One in three. And standard tests cannot see them because of that biofilm shield. The parasites attach to the wall of your gut and take the iron and the B12 out of your food before your body can absorb anything. That is the exhaustion. You are eating, but you are not the one being fed. They release toxins that get into the blood and reach the brain. That is the fog, the mood swings, the waking at 3am with your heart hammering. They inflame the gut lining and fill it with gas. That is the bloating that makes you look five months pregnant by teatime. And the two things that came up again and again as the proven way to eliminate them were not drugs. Carvacrol, from wild oregano oil, which ruptures them and dissolves the biofilm. And thymoquinone, from black seed oil, which stops them reproducing and helps the body flush them out. Both used for thousands of years. So I went to the health food shop on the high street the next day and bought a bottle of oregano oil for twenty two pounds. I took it every morning for two weeks. Nothing happened. Nothing at all, except tasting oregano until lunchtime. Jo asked me to read her the label. Fifteen percent carvacrol. You need at least eighty percent to break through the biofilm. Below that, the parasites sit behind their shield completely safe and you have bought some very expensive olive oil. That is exactly what I had done. I wasted twenty two pounds and nearly gave up entirely. Jo did not let me. She spent another week researching online and then she sent me a link at half seven in the morning. 'This is the one. Eighty percent carvacrol. Cold pressed black seed oil in the same softgel. Third party lab tested. Air sealed. This is what the studies actually use.' Herbies Oregano Plus. I ordered it that morning. It arrived on a Thursday. Brown glass bottle, softgels inside, no drama. I took two with my morning tea. Nobody warned me about the first two days. Day one and day two I barely left the bathroom. It was as if my body had been waiting for permission to let go of everything it had been holding onto. I will not describe it in detail here, but I will say that on day two I sat on the bathroom floor with the door locked and cried, not from disgust, but from pure relief. Because what came out of me was unmistakeably a parasite. Not a bit of thread. Not something I imagined. A living thing that had been feeding off me while a GP asked me whether I had tried managing my stress. By day four the violent clearing settled down and I felt lighter. Genuinely lighter. As if a weight had been taken off my whole system. Week one: the bloating started to go. I ate a full evening meal and my stomach was still flat at ten o'clock at night. I stood in the bathroom side on, lifting my top up, checking it again and again like I did not trust it. Rob walked past and said, 'What are you doing?' and I said, 'It's flat. Look, it's still flat.' Week two: I slept the whole night through for the first time in eighteen months. I woke up at twenty past six and lay there working out what was different, and it was that I had not been awake at ten past three. I cried again. I did a lot of crying that month. Week three: the brain fog lifted. I helped Joel with his maths homework, fractions, and I followed all of it, quickly, keeping up with a ten year old. He said, 'You're good at this, Mum,' and I had to go and put the kettle on so he would not see my face. Week four was the energy, and that was the best part. Not coffee energy, which just makes you jittery and still empty. I felt light, happy, full of power. I hoovered the whole house on a Tuesday night and then took Barney for a walk up the hill without stopping once. Week six my skin cleared up, less oily, less grey. People at work started telling me I looked well again, but this time it was true. And the snapping stopped. That is the one that truly matters. Lucas spilled an entire bowl of cereal across the kitchen floor, milk right under the table, and I got the cloth and he stood there waiting for me to shout and I did not. He said, 'You're not cross?' I said, 'No love, it was just an accident.' I had to turn and face the sink for a minute after that. It has been four months now. I take two softgels every morning, and I will do it again for a fortnight every autumn and spring, because now I know what can build up in a body while you go about your normal life telling yourself you are just tired. You only need to do it once or twice a year, it is all natural. The only real problem is I have had to buy new jeans, because the elasticated trousers I lived in for a year hang off me and my old size twelves are miles too big. I know how that sounds. I have earned the right to say it. And it is not only for people who got as far down as I did, who were sitting at their kitchen table at midnight writing letters they hoped their children would never read. Most of the reviews I read before I ordered were from ordinary people. The bloating that no diet shifts. The tiredness coffee cannot fix. The brain fog. The stomach that swells by four in the afternoon for no reason. They took it, and within a few weeks the misery they had quietly learned to live with simply started lifting. Now I understand why the reviews are full of people ordering it again and again. You feel so much better you do not want the old you coming back. You do not have to be found with a worm in a smear test before it is worth looking. Nobody is paying me to write this. I do not work for Herbies and I get nothing if you buy it. I am a 38 year old mum from Leeds whose two boys nearly lost her without ever knowing why, because bad tests and lazy medicine almost took me down. Herbies Oregano Plus is eighty percent carvacrol from wild Mediterranean oregano, with cold pressed black seed oil standardised for thymoquinone, in the same softgel. Nitrogen sealed, third party lab tested, no fillers, no oily burps. Two softgels every morning. Before you buy any oregano oil, do not make my mistake. Most of it is fifteen to fifty percent carvacrol and it will not break through the biofilm. Check the number on the label or you are just buying expensive olive oil. There is a thirty day money back guarantee. If you do not feel different, more energy, a flatter stomach, a clearer head, you email them and you get your money back. No questions, no arguing. They are a small company and they sell out regularly. I am sorry if it has gone when you click, it honestly happens. But if it is showing as in stock now, I would get it. Rachel P.S. I went back to the same surgery for my follow up smear six months later, and I asked the nurse if she remembered me. She did. I told her what had finally come out of me, and she put her hand on my arm and said, 'I knew that was not a normal pinworm. I have thought about you more than once.' If someone in a paper gown in a cubicle knows more about your body than three doctors, trust them. Trust yourself. Write down every symptom you have, all of them at once, and search them together. That is the only reason I am still here.

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herbies.co

The nurse said something was moving

Feeling bloated, heavy, or drained after meals? Oregano+ combines the natural power of oregano oil and black seed oil in one easy-to-swallow softgel capsule. Together, they support your gut balance from the inside out, no side effects, no oregano burps. 2 capsules a day. 30 doses per satchet. Simple...