After 15 years of symptoms related to Babesia, mold illness, and mast cell activation syndrome (MCAS), Zoe finally found lasting relief by calming her nervous system. Within six months of starting nervous system and brain-retraining work, her symptoms resolved and her Babesia marker became undetectable. She’s now an integrative health coach and psychology graduate student who helps others use nervous system regulation to heal from chronic illness.

A 15-Year Search for Answers

After years of health struggles, from debilitating headaches to brain fog to irregular cycles, Zoe felt like she had tried it all:

Doctors
Diets
Medications
Supplements
Therapies
Complex protocols

Only when she stopped most of it did she start to turn her health around.

The missing link: helping her nervous system feel safe again.

“If you respond to a body like it’s something you need to fix constantly, it’s going to in turn think that there’s something wrong and there’s a threat,” she says. “I stopped all of my treatments I was doing. I stopped most of the supplements I was doing… and I went back to living my normal life.”

From Migraines to Hormonal Headaches: Zoe’s Early Health Struggles

Looking back, Zoe recalls health issues popping up around age 10, when debilitating headaches forced her to quit soccer. She began seeing specialists, who tried allergy shots and medication trials without relief. Around age 13, the headaches began cycling with her period.

The family’s search for relief led to holistic practices. She found peppermint oil helped her headaches. And within a few sessions of seeing an osteopathic physician, she regulated her hormones and resolved the headaches.

Zoe’s health was relatively stable for years — until her sophomore year of college. Again, her cycles became irregular, along with fatigue, brain fog, hair loss, bloating, and heart palpitations.

“My hair started falling out,” she says. “I looked almost nine months pregnant.”

Turning to Functional Medicine for Answers

After seeing gastroenterologists, cardiologists, and endocrinologists, Zoe collected a string of diagnoses. The endocrinologist diagnosed polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) and recommended birth control. The gastroenterologist attributed her symptoms to candida or bacterial overgrowth and put her on a treatment protocol. Each specialist treated her symptoms in isolation.

She eventually found her way to functional medicine through an internship with Dr. Frank Littman, a physician in New York. With a root-cause focus, functional medicine led Zoe to see her symptoms as connected.

“All these things are connected. Why am I treating them separately?” she recalls thinking.

Diagnosed with Lyme Disease, Mold Illness, and MCAS

More extensive testing turned up culprits behind her many symptoms: Babesia, possible Lyme disease, and mold illness. Under the care of a Lyme-literate specialist, she tried ozone therapy, stem-cell therapy, and neurotherapy.

She was trying everything doctors recommended, but only felt worse.

“A lot of things were just making me a lot sicker and sicker,” she says. “In the Lyme community they call this like a Herx reaction — if you get sick, it’s like a die-off reaction. So I was told the sicker you get, it’s a good thing because it means you’re killing these bugs.”

The two years of treatment took a toll beyond her physical symptoms. Zoe became increasingly restrictive with food and hyperaware of every sensation in her body.

“They [friends] would go out at night and I would just do dinner with them and eat the five foods I could eat,” she says.

Her body was becoming hyperreactive to her environment, leading to a new diagnosis of mast-cell activation syndrome. MCAS is a condition where the immune system’s mast cells overreact, flooding the body with histamine in response to triggers that shouldn’t cause a major reaction.

MCAS was likely behind the allergies, bloating, and other symptoms.

Healing Chronic Illness by Calming the Nervous System

For Zoe, the turning point came after finding a therapist specializing in brain retraining and nervous system work. But first, she looked into the science behind it.

“You can’t heal a lot of these things until you stabilize your system and work on the nervous system piece,” she learned.

Through sessions, she learned how to change her orientation to symptoms. She reframed them as messages rather than threats and focused on breathwork and body awareness.

“My normal response was to Google the symptom… panic…” she recalls. “So I really had to learn how to rewire my response to symptoms.”

Zoe describes moving between two extremes: a sympathetic state of “wired and mobilized energy,” similar to the body’s response to a threat, and a dorsal shutdown state, “almost like animals who play dead.” The work was learning to return to a third state where the body can finally rest, digest, and heal.

This marked the first time Zoe had tried therapy. She had always pushed through and persevered, a pattern she says is common among people dealing with chronic symptoms.

At the same time, she stopped the heavy protocols she had started to address Babesia and mold.

“Within six months of this work, I felt back to optimal health,” she says. “My bloating was completely gone, my digestion was normal. We retested my Lyme, and specifically the Babesia marker, and it was undetectable — no Babesia.”

From Patient to Practitioner

Zoe’s experience led her to become a licensed integrative health coach. Now, she’s mostly through a master’s program in clinical psychology to become an MFT. Given her experience, she focuses on nervous system work and pulls in tools to help clients reset their systems.

“I really wanted to go down this psychology route because of my own journey, but also working with clients and seeing how big of a component the nervous system was — not just environmental triggers and toxins and things like that to their physical health, but the emotional part of their health, the spiritual part of their health,” she says. “I really wanted to marry those two worlds and be the practitioner that I really needed when I was in the thick of it.”

Zoe points to the two-way relationship between the nervous system and the immune system as a key reason this work matters for anyone managing chronic symptoms.

“Mast cells respond to your nervous system state and vice versa,” she says. “They’re communicating.”

These days, Zoe keeps her nervous system in balance through regular body check-ins throughout the day.

“It’s about hearing what your body needs and then giving it to your body,” she says. “The more and more you do it, the more automatic it becomes.”

“Everything is protective at the end of the day… it’s my body speaking to me,” she adds.

Find and follow Zoe Shirken at her Substack (@ZoeShirken) and on Instagram (@balancedwithzoe).

You may also like: How Jaime Calmed Mast Cell Activation Syndrome Symptoms.