Revisiting Poop Transplants
By: Alison Lyons
Tags: Fmt, Mwc Reentry, Health, Crowdfunding

Then in 2018 I ended a relationship and he took his life. The grief knocked me so sideways I could barely function. My health markers started declining rapidly thanks to the dysregulation of my nervous system and all the chaotic hormones my brain was producing at the time.

I began reacting to all my medications and supplements. Just like the onset of the food issues in 2013, I lost the medications one by one over the course of about a year until I got to the point in 2019 that my stomach wouldn’t tolerate any oral medication at all. I had to switch to finding vitamin lotions, patches, IV’s and suppositories.

Photo by the author.

Then in 2020 I began losing my “safe” foods with no rhyme or reason. Prior to that year I only became reactive to foods if I ate them too frequently or in high volume. So I was in good habits of carefully rotating and measuring foods to make sure they stayed safe. But in 2019 I began reacting to safe foods at a rate of 2–4 per month no matter what I did. I was down to just a few kinds of exotic meat and fish only.

Angus, pheasant, emu, venison, rabbit, yak, silkie chicken, camel, sea bass. Most frequently rotated foods. Photo by the author.

So I was thick into desperately focusing on resting and digesting and resetting my parasympathetic nervous system when a woman in Poland found my old crowdfunding campaign from 2013 and reached out. This was one of the other on-going benefits of that campaign: not only did I get access to the procedure I couldn’t afford with it, but it also got my story out there for others in similar situations to find. Over the years I came to realize it had been silly of me to be afraid to share my story because in sharing it I had been able to help others and they also helped me. The emotional support through this very isolating experience was desperately needed on all sides.

Texting with FMT friends.

The woman in Poland had been keeping up with the progression of FMT and things had apparently changed a bit since I had done it in 2013. It was half the cost and now offered top-down (pills) as well as bottom-up (enema). Suddenly I felt a flicker of something I haven’t felt since 2013: hope.

I joined an FMT group and scoured the testimonials and resources and carefully compiled tons of research. I left no stone unturned and began noticing a pattern among the stories. Anyone who had been struggling for as many years as I had seemed to take on average at least 10 FMT treatments to begin to see lasting changes. That deflated my hopes a bit again. I’d need a minimum $18,000 to heal, likely.

So I tried to shelve the information while I brainstormed ways to make money. I was so spiritually deflated again by that point I believed I shouldn’t do another crowdfunding campaign. It felt greedy to ask for more after all the love, money and support I’d already been given in the 2013 campaign.

But I was losing foods so rapidly at that point that I had no choice but to jump in April of 2021. I had been losing foods at a rate of 2–4 per month for years and was whittling down to so few foods that starvation was starting to become a real threat. So I emptied my bank account, borrowed money from my parents and did my first two top down FMT’s.