Hi, my name is Mette.
I'm the founder of Mymee.
It's a digital therapeutics company
where we identify triggers in order to reverse disease symptoms for autoimmune patients.
The company started out with me as the N of 1.
I was the one who had the problematic journey
that ended me up in this place of patient.
I was 14 when I got my first autoimmune condition,
psoriasis.
I noticed like three dots on my neck
and then the next day, I just had it all over.
The shock in and of itself was pretty disturbing to a young girl.
We immediately got [a] famous acupuncturist in Denmark
to give me whatever supplementation and they brought me to
a different climate and it pretty much got reversed relatively fast.
But for me, my teenage years was more around
not being able to do what others were able to do but without knowing why.
In Denmark, teenagers drink
and I was unable to do so.
I literally had my parents begging me
not to because if I had a drink on Saturday night,
I would be out of school at least Tuesday, but most likely Tuesday/Wednesday.
Now I know it's a mutation of my liver but at the time, I had no idea.
I remember when I was a teenager actually,
probably 18, 19,
and I started gaining weight rapidly.
The [modeling] agency I was working for,
when you have a set card,
there's no weight gain in the parameters of what's OK
and they assigned me a boxing trainer and a nutritionist.
The nutritionist had me on an 1,800-calorie diet
That then became 1,500, 1,200.
I remember when she fired me for cheating
because nobody, in her opinion, could be gaining weight at 1,200-calorie diet.
My question wasn't whether she was right.
My only thing wasÑ there's something wrong with me.
Around the age of 20,
I started feeling very different.
I started going to the doctors.
I started basically trying to figure out why was I not feeling right.
Blood work was always fine.
Then at 23,
after having exhausted the Danish healthcare system,
I moved to L.A.
Moving to L.A. was quite detrimental to my health in some ways,
and in other ways, kind of perfect.
Temperature-wise and weather-wise, [it]
made me not have to worry about psoriasis or any of those things,
but on the flip side, I started losing my eyesight.
I'd be going into the kitchen to fetch something
and I could see the kitchen clearly,
but as I would get close to the kitchen table, it all would grey out.
I couldn't see what was there.
The first time it happened, I remember thinking,
"I'm having a brain seizure or something. This is not right."
They took one look at me and my eyes were out, my throat was big and they were like,
"We know exactly what this is." They medicated me and I was relieved.
Then the next morning they came back with 7 residents and like,
"Your blood work came back perfect and this is an interesting case."
But once it's happened a few times, it's not so interesting anymore,
for them or for me.
I would get these hot cramps
and I would faint.
It got to the point where you're going upstairs and you faint and you fall and you hurt yourself
and you manage. You find ways around it and I think that's one of the things
that I think about with chronically ill people, is that
we kind of come across as OK because we find ways around it.
I remember after I moved back to Denmark in 2003
and got a job in a fashion company
and we had this huge staircase going up to the 1st floor.
I couldn't walk to the 1st floor without panting like a 75-year-old man.
You figure out a wayÑ about a third up,
you introduce them to the shoe department and then another third up,
you introduce them to something else
so that you actually can make it up the staircase with the clients.
Those years I would have literally killed for sugar or carbs around 4 o'clock.
My blood sugar was so unstable. It was like all sorts of things were kind of off.
I ended up seeing a psychiatrist because I was hoping I was a hypochondriac
You're just looking for any kind of explanation.
And then when I became a "cardiac patient,"
I started taking blood thinners, cholesterol lowers, but not all at once.
It started out blood thinners and then the next thing,
and it was like when you woke up in the morning,
you didn't know what you would be waking up to.
That was the worst part. It was the not having any control.
I'm a little bit OCD on some levels.
I actually flew to see this guy who was a specialist in
stomach-related issues I guess. I don't even know if I knew any closer than that.
I got there and I had to sign a release form that he was a veterinarian.
I remember calling my mom and I'm like, "He's a vet."
Mom was like, "Get out of there."
Much to my own surprise, he was actually the first one to
at least figure out why I wasn't feeling great,
but more so than anything, he looked at all the paperwork.
You fill out 10 pages of like, "How do you feel?"
and he took one look at it. He sat me down and he said,
"You're really not feeling well."
To my memory, that was the first time anyone acknowledged
that I didn't feel well and I just started crying.
He made me drink sugar water, so like fasting blood sugar,
sugar water and had me lie down on a bed for, I don't know how long.
And then he asked me to sit up slowly and then get up standing slowly.
My resting pulse was 64
and my pulse once I had gotten from lying to standing
was 141.
He was basically like, "If I ran a marathon,
my pulse would go to where your pulse is from just getting up from lying to standing."
He was like, "If you were anywhere close to where you lived,
I would literally have gotten you to the hospital."
It ended up being that it was insulin resistance.
I could now actually go and get an endocrinologist and get all the different specialists.
I remember I went to this specialist
on Park Avenue.
It was fascinating because it was like he knew me better than I knew me.
He was like, "You don't eat fruit." I was like, "No."
He's like, "It doesn't do anything for you."
But it was in such detail
because of course he'd seen thousands of me.
I only had me to go by and none of what I had been taught
applied to my own scenarios.
My latter half of my 20s pretty much was collecting disease labels and drugs like candy.
I got psoriatic arthritis. With that came Humira.
I actually had a period where I didn't go to the doctors
because I felt like if I go, I'll get another drug,
I'll get another diagnosis.
It just kind of felt never-ending.
I was now going into my 30s a chronic patient with 6 autoimmune conditions,
Sjšgren's, metabolic X, basically like the slew of things that people get.
I think the one thing that we don't think about is when the...
if you think of the body as different processes,
once those processes are off,
they're going to have implications and everything.
For me, what that ended up being was some sort of control,
I kept all of my doctors.
I always asked the questions, "Is there anything I can do?
Should I change my diet? Should I beÉ?"
I always got the answer, "No." I remember my endocrinologist telling me that
I was genetically in a position where even if I did all the things
that I would read about in the magazines,
it would come back like a boomerang.
He told me these stories about women who
had thought that they could eat their way out of insulin resistance
but then a year later, he would see them and now they would be full-blown diabetics.
For me, that was like, OK, when he told me, "This is your friend for life,"
I was like, "This is my friend."
I didn't actually question much and in hindsight,
I'm kind of puzzled that I didn't question it more.
But I think I was just happy that there was answers.
About 10 years after being diagnosed,
mid-30s now and I get a call that my doctor's team have great news.
It's super charged and go in and then upon arriving at the hospital,
[I] get told that...
it's still silly, that I wasn't going to die in the immediate future.
There was several "Aha!" moments in that.
First, it had never actually dawned on me
how dire my situation was until that moment.
Secondly, I was naively optimistic so I actually at first asked,
"OK, that's great. What's the good news?"
At which point it got exceedingly awkward because this was the great news.
At the time actually the one thing that came to my head was,
"I'm a CEO for a company,
if I went to my board of advisers
and told them we're not going to go bankrupt in the immediate future,
I don't have a job."
I post the question, "What are we going to do about my process?"
to which the answer was, "We're happy with your numbers."
He could've said 20 things that would have me come back
but numbers...
I'm an economist by training. I am artistic with numbers.
It's kind of where I feel safe.
By him saying, "Oh, we're happy with this."
I kind of saw 8 years of EKG data in my head and was like,
"This is notÑ he doesn't know what he's doing,"
but more so, "He can't help me."
I should be so thankful for this doctor because at that moment,
yes I was disempowered as a patient,
but I was empowered as a human being in a sense that
if I wasn't going to do something, I was going to die.
From that moment on it was very much like
writing down things in a journal and transcribing them into an Excel spreadsheet
because that's where us economists feel like we're at home,
but the good thing about tracking things is that you start paying attention.
I started seeing patterns of things that shouldn't beÑ
I would go out to see my uncle in Phoenix
and he's a roper and they basically wake up and have 3 eggs and a steak.
I would be on his diet for 3 days while we were in the back country
and I would come home and my numbers looked good.
If I looked up what the American Heart Association said I should be eating,
that was not the diet that I should be eating.
I basically started A/B testing
my system and I think from that, I got enough insight that 5 months in,
all of a sudden I could drop my blood thinners, my cholesterol lowers and
I was like, "Wow." Every time I got a new autoimmune condition,
at least the label,
I would be told that it was because of my cardiac issues
or it was because of something else
and as I was unravelling this, I was like,
"I should probably be able to get rid of all of it."
It took me 16 months to normalize my blood work, get off my drugs.
I'm 7 years drug and symptom-free today. [knocks on wood]
All of a sudden,
my doctor's team was like, "Oh, maybe you didn't have those diseases in the first place.
Sometimes the body can be interesting." And I was like,
"Fine, take me off my EMR or whatever you call it."
They were like, "Well, it's not that easy.
It's either/or," especially because at the time, there was a lot of talk about insurance
and how much they were going to have access to
and I was literally afraid that I was never going to be able to be insured here.
Then they started pulling out my blood work and my stats and they're like,
"No, that's not possible."
I was like, "So either I have these diseases and I reversed them
or I didn't have them."
But essentially, one of the things that baffled me when I came out "on the other side," so to speak,
was that I had friends, not distant friends,
relatively close friends that would say to me,
"Oh, I didn't even know you were sick.
Were you really sick?"
It was just a big "Aha!" moment for me to realize that people
had not even really understood my situation.
I think it's a very common thing. You don't want to be defined by it
and you almost don't even want to acknowledge that it's a part of you
so you just find ways of dealing with it
so that nobody really understands or sees at least the situation that you're in.
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