Amanda's Testimony

Mike and Amanda Combs’ Story

My name is Amanda and I am a client at Internal Balance in Brentwood, TN. I teach Biology and have a nursing background, and my husband Mike has a PhD in Analytical Chemistry. Here is our story, and why we know that Internal Balance is real, and is saving lives.

I found the clinic through the Isaacs, one of the sweetest families I have ever met. My wonderful mom had invited us to one of their concerts in 2012. It is actually a miracle I was even there, because I was so sick, I almost did not go that night. When Becky gave her testimony about being ill for so many years, and then sang, “Waiting in the Water”, I could not move. How did she know that song was the song of my life?

That song and testimony led to a telephone call to Tamara at the clinic. I remember the call to this day. For once in my eleven to fifteen year long illness, I had someone on the phone who said she thought she could help, and was offering me hope again. I had tears streaming down my face. I was still a little skeptical, and afraid to hope, because I had been to doctor after doctor trying to find some relief from my unknown illness.

What we did know about my illness was I started feeling ill and struggling with my health when I was in nursing school. After having two children, I had developed severe allergies when I was 27 years old. Outdoor allergies and food allergies. Allergies to all nuts, which is normal, but the other food allergies were really odd. I was allergic to carrots, peas, spinach, avocados, bananas, apples, peaches, nectarines, potatoes, cinnamon and other spices, corn, kale, coconut, the list goes on. The multiple allergists I saw, even at a reputable teaching medical school, all agreed this was extremely unusual that the allergy tests were positive as an adult, and that I would just have to suffer with these allergies the rest of my life. I could not even take highly diluted allergy shots because I was so reactive.

Right before my food allergies developed, I had a major crash or set back that basically took me from doing aerobics an hour and a half a day, cooking and eating low fat healthy meals, keeping a spotless house, keeping up with the yard, taking care of two wonderful little toddlers, to being completely flat in the bed. I mean I could not move. My heart would start racing to 100-150 beats or more per minute, my chest felt like it was crushing in on me and I was having asthma attacks, I was so unbelievably tired, all I wanted to do was sleep. The left side of my face went completely numb from my chin up to my ear. Then I developed severe vertigo, it got so bad that I had to have a bottle of medication right at my head so I could take two pills every morning before I could even pick my head up off the pillow. My memory was being affected, and my nerves were shot, all of this happened to me at the same time, and the doctors were baffled. I had some symptoms of fibromyalgia, some symptoms of multiple sclerosis, tachycardia (fast heart beat), symptoms of arthritis, and my allergies were so severe that even highly diluted allergy shots were breaking me out and had to be discontinued. I was all over the board, and each specialist I saw referred me on to another, and I finally ended up at a prestigious medical university hospital. That was a dead end too, they agreed that the symptoms I had were odd and severe, but they said they had no answers.

After this gauntlet of doctors, I was fed up and highly discouraged. I did not feel like any of the medication these doctors gave me was really helping me get well, they were only masking my symptoms, and some were making me worse.

As the years passed, I learned to juggle my busy life with two toddlers and a husband who was climbing the corporate ladder to success. From the outside, we looked like we had it all together and everything was perfect, while on the inside of my body, I was slowly dying an excruciating physical death. I kept developing more allergies, the biggest allergy was to latex. We figured I had developed that when I worked as a nurse about ten years before the symptoms became severe.

The next illness and symptom I developed when I was about thirty-two was severe abdominal pain, pain so bad that it would drop me to the floor. I had an ovary taken out and that did not help. It took the doctors about two years to diagnose the condition, again at a major medical university, and they thought I had cystitis. It is a condition where the lining of the bladder is eroding and inflamed all of the time, like you have ulcers in your bladder. The doctors told me this pain was comparable to someone who had cancer. It was unbearable, and the medication that helped alleviate the pain was extremely expensive, and had to be taken on a strict schedule every day.

My life was being so dominated by the foods I ate, the clothes I wore, and the medication for my bladder that I felt like a captive, just a robot living a life that I did not want to live.

I gave up on going to the doctor, it just got to the point that it was too frustrating, and any shred of hope I had at ever feeling better was gone. I tried to live life like a normal person, keeping up with the house, kids, my appearance, and I even went back to college, but it was a monumental feat for me to do all of these things. But I was not going to let this sickness get the best of me.

Four years ago, I was teaching by this time, my illness went from being bad to extremely severe. I got so sick that it felt like someone was rolling my lungs in on me like a scroll. I was experiencing severe memory loss. For example, I was playing the piano one night at church (I have played for eighteen years) and that night, my eyes were bothering me, and then all of the sudden, the sheet music I was reading did not make sense. My speech was slurred and it was all I could do to drive the kids and I home, because I was having trouble remembering where we lived. I started to have severe numbness and headaches where it felt like someone was crushing my head in a claw machine. My memory was terrible, my heart was racing, and I was even passing out, which was a huge struggle for me to go to work, but I did. These attacks led to an ER visit, which led to an echocardiogram of my heart. It showed that the blood pressure in my lungs, which is different from the whole body blood pressure, was elevated. I had to have a heart cath to rule out pulmonary hypertension, which is in most cases, fatal. Thankfully the heart cath ruled pulmonary hypertension out.

A few months later we went to the Isaacs concert, and my life finally changed. I called Internal Balance and we scheduled a trip to Nashville. We met with Tamara, and then we went home to think and pray about our visit. It took us a year to decide that this was the right path to take, and I am so grateful and thankful we had the courage and commitment to take that path. My husband, children, and mom all truly believed this was the right step to take.

I will admit that when I got to the clinic for my first day of treatments, I was scared to death! I had never left my children for longer than a day or two, and I really struggled with this. I cannot tell you how many times I almost had Mike turn the car around on the trip, and I almost did not get out of the car to walk into the clinic. I had tears rolling down my face because I was afraid that Tamara would not get it, and that the treatments would put me into a severe allergic reaction and make me worse. I was not afraid to die, I was just afraid my kids would lose their mom, I even left notes for them if I did not make it. Most of all I was afraid of living with the possibility of never getting better, and I could not take that news one more time.

Well, I am still here, and extremely thankful and happy! The treatments I have received at the clinic are just for me, tailored specifically for my body. I doubt I have ever done a treatment that is the same as anyone else that is a client at Internal Balance. Before Tamara has given me any type of treatment, she has tested it to make sure that I will not react to it, and that it is safe and beneficial for my body. The treatments have caused the toxins and chemicals to move, which is a good thing, but sometimes I have reacted to them moving, and Tamara has always been able to pull me up out of a reaction and get me to a speedy recovery. All this time, I have still been able to work, which is a miracle!

One of the biggest gifts I have received at the clinic is that I know what made me so ill. Organophosphate pesticides (I grew up on a farm, had an exterminator for our homes, and was eating a lot of fruits and vegetables that had pesticides on them) and mercury are my two biggest culprits, along with a virus that has attacked my heart, and bacteria. Right before I crashed when I was 27 years old, I had a lot of mercury dental fillings removed within a four week time period with no precautionary equipment used to mitigate the mercury vapors. With the pesticides already trapped in my body, the amount of mercury I was exposed to sent me spiraling down. With my busy life, my body could never catch up and heal itself, much less repair itself on a daily basis. I just kept getting exposed to chemicals we all use every day, and it kept adding up in my system and my liver and heart could not keep up.

I was having allergic responses and reacting to chemicals such as pesticides, cleaners, paints, the list goes on, and these chemicals were causing my mysterious attacks. I did have a positive allergy test to mercury before I went to the clinic, but we did not understand the extent of the allergy.

Chemicals are placed in classes according to their chemical structure, and each class of chemicals can cause different symptoms in the human body. That is why my symptoms were all over the place. At the clinic I learned I was sensitive or allergic to an overwhelming amount of substances and that basic minerals and vitamins were missing from my body. The toxins I had been exposed to had attached themselves in my body, like the pesticides in my brain and spine, causing complete chaos. The toxins were causing my immune system to be on hyper alert, attacking everything I came in contact with, even food. Due to these sensitivities, it was making everyday life almost impossible. We needed to buy a new car, I reacted to it. We had to quit attending our church because I was reacting to it. The classroom I was teaching in was making my symptoms worse, and I had to move to another classroom and adapt it with a specialized air purifier so I could stay in there the whole day. My husband is a Chemist, I was reacting to him. We even bought a house, but we could never move into because I reacted to it. Tamara was able to test me for specific chemicals, so I then learned which substances were my worst enemies and how to avoid them.

Since then I have received a medical diagnosis of Multiple Chemical Sensitivities. The hard thing about Multiple Chemical Sensitivities is there is really no cure for it, and this condition is also highly ridiculed as a mental condition because there has not been much research done on it, so the prognosis from a medical standpoint was not good.

Because my immune system is in the hyperactive mode, and due to the excess mercury I have in my cells, my body has the ability to pick up on wireless radiation and high electric fields due to the vibration they emit. This causes my head to hurt, like someone is banging it against the wall. When I was severely ill in 2012, it felt like someone was picking my head up with a claw. It would also cause rapid mood changes in me, one minute I would be fine, then I would be super angry and agitated. It was so bad that I even started tapping my fingers together and spinning in circles, like an autistic child.

My family and I soon learned when I started displaying those types of behaviors that we were either in a place with high wireless radiation, or in a place that was utilizing a lot of electricity. Ordinary things like microwaves, hair dryers, computers, the SMARTboard in my old classroom, and cars, anything that was high in electromagnetic radiation used to send me into crashes. Sometimes they were so bad that I could not even communicate with my family. Other times, I could feel my feet vibrating and it felt like they were on fire. (I often wonder to this day if this is what an autistic child experiences on a daily basis.) Another symptom of this disorder is insomnia. There would be times I would go three to four nights without sleeping, which was only making my physical wellbeing worse.

So as you can see, I had multiple environmental issues attacking my body. It usually only took very slight triggers, either chemical, food, molds, or electromagnetic radiation, to basically take me down for the day or even weeks at a time.

I have been going to Internal Balance now for two years, and I am a completely different person. I am the real me that I was almost twenty years ago; the me I had forgotten. The disorders of Multiple Chemical Sensitives, Electromagnetic Hypersensitivities, food allergies, viruses, and bacteria had not only made my body unable to communicate and function on a cellular level, it had defined my life. They forced me to live a life I did not want to live, and held me captive for over a decade. Not only did it hold me captive, but it was affecting my family, almost to the extent we could not do anything together anymore.

God has allowed Tamara to have the healing knowledge to pull someone like me, someone that should not get better according to the medical community, up out of the miry clay. I have my mental intelligence back, and my memory is improving each day. My body has suffered a lot of damage, and it will take time for it to catch back up, but it is getting stronger each day. I still have bad days, and my body still reacts to some things. As a result of toxins leaving my body, I have gotten about half of my foods back that I had lost to food allergies. I can now drive in a car without getting extremely ill. I can clean my house and not have a “crash”. I can take my daughter and her friends to the mall, and have a great time while we are there. My electromagnetic sensitivities are going down. I now have more freedoms to go where I want to go and do most of the things I want to do.

I must be honest, when I was in the worst part of this stormy life I have lived, I felt like there was no hope. I know what it is like to not have energy to go one more step or be in so much physical pain you do not want to move. I also know what it is like to beg for God’s mercy and plead to touch the hem of Jesus all day long. I knew I was not making these symptoms up, I loved life too much and had so many things I wanted to do! I just want to encourage each person reading this testimony that there is hope, and there is healing!

If you decide to come to Internal Balance, you will be treated like the most special person ever created. If you are going through treatments and you hit a bad spot and do not feel well, all you have to do is call. They will answer your phone call and get a message to Tamara right away. Within hours you will get a call back with help and things you can do at home to make you more comfortable, and you will be amazed at how quickly you will feel better. Internal Balance is one of the most personal clinics you will ever go to and you never feel like you are alone.

Through this journey, I have gotten better and healthier, and so has my family. It is healing our bodies and our hearts. We have learned such valuable information on how to keep our own family healthy and safe, and it is priceless. Our children are happier, and Mike and I are much happier and content. We are now sharing our story and knowledge with other families that want to keep their families healthy and well from everyday toxins we are exposed to. I had other plans for my life, but God knew this is where he wanted me, and I am so thankful He has brought me this far! It is amazing what a healthy body and lifestyle can give you. Internal Balance is simply amazing!