From Being Carried to the Bathroom to Running on a Treadmill

Nicole's Story: Living With ME/CFS

I'm from Colorado and I was 29 when this started. I'm a very type A personality, very go go go, and when it comes to stress or traumatic events I just try to get past them. There's a stress bucket and everybody hits their threshold. I definitely hit mine, I just didn't realize it.

There was something going on within my family, specifically with my brother, at the same time I was working my job and starting an Airbnb business. It was a lot at once. A lot of good stress, and then an intense amount of stress I couldn't control. Learning to let go of what isn't in my control is one of the biggest things that helped me later.

The first symptoms were intense heart palpitations. Then random moments where my body would just start shutting down and I couldn't physically stand up. I had no idea what was going on, so the fear started, and it was a bad loop from there.

The day I was supposed to get a heart monitor, I got out of the shower and had another episode. I sat on my bed and had a palpitation so bad I called 911. That was the first hospital visit. Everything came back totally normal.

That week everything spiralled. Fast heart rate every time I went from lying down to standing. Burning sensations. Muscle spasms and twitching all over my body. Sound sensitivity, light sensitivity. And the worst were the dizziness and the fatigue. I couldn't even lift my head to take a bite of food. By the end of that week I was completely horizontal and fainting every time I tried to get up.

I spent two nights in the hospital with blood work every five hours, an MRI with contrast, an echo, an ultrasound. A functional health test had told me I had Lyme. Everything came back normal except my postural vitals, and they discharged me with no answers.

Then two months where I couldn't walk at all. My brother carried me from the couch to the bathroom. My dad was about to buy me a wheelchair. I had to quit my job and stop my business. That's a kind of depression I'd never experienced. You lose control of your body, then your routine, then your friends. I checked out of my entire life for about six months. I was a shell of myself.

Honestly, the mental was harder than the physical, which is insane to say when I was fainting and blacking out. Nothing was ever structurally wrong with me and I knew it, because I'd had every test there is. But the symptoms are real. The palpitations are real. The sensitivities are real.

I was doom-scrolling TikTok, which is horrible, and then one positive video came across my feed. A girl said, you're going to recover, go watch these recovery videos, go to this channel. That was the single biggest turning point of my recovery, because when people tell you that you can't recover, you stop trying. That led me to Raelan Agle and then to Miguel. I'm very analytical. I won't believe something works until I understand exactly how and why it works, and the content was structured that way.

I joined Platinum and my coach was also named Nicole. We got into a Discord chat and put a plan together immediately, and she was good at not overwhelming me.

The physical turning point was forced on me. My best friend, whose house was my home base, took a job in San Francisco in September. I knew I wouldn't have a home base, so I made myself go on the road trip to move her, with my brother along. It was the first time I'd stepped out of the house in four months.

Before that I was doing five knee-ups a day and trying to make it to the kitchen for a cup of tea. Sometimes I couldn't, and my brother had to come and pick me up. But it was a lot of intense brain rewiring. I had to take over my negative thoughts constantly while I was reintroducing physical activity.

My golden nuggets are these. Stop feeding yourself negative content. I was Googling, I was asking AI, and we all know where that leads. And learn how to be okay with discomfort. If you can't get rid of the physical symptoms, you can always change the way you look at them. Somebody gave me the analogy of thinking of your thoughts as clouds rolling through the sky. You see them and you let them go.

The Science Behind ME/CFS Recovery

In ME/CFS, the nervous system gets stuck in a chronic stress response. Research suggests the issue may be functional rather than structural. Your nervous system may be stuck in protection mode, and even normal activities can feel overwhelming. This is what keeps symptoms like fatigue, brain fog, and insomnia cycling.

Nervous system retraining uses neuroplasticity, your brain's ability to rewire itself, to help shift out of that stuck state. Instead of managing symptoms, it may address the underlying pattern. That's when real, lasting recovery starts.

Before vs. After: Nicole's Recovery

Area	Before Recovery	After Recovery
Movement	Carried from the couch to the bathroom by her brother	Running on a treadmill
Heart rate	Panicked if it went above 100	Trains at around 180 with no problem
Travel	Thought she'd never board a plane again	Traveling constantly, with Bali planned
Work	Quit her job and put her business on hold	Four rental units and scaling
Independence	Needed help to shower	Took her first shower alone and told everyone

Where Is Nicole Now?

Nicole lives in Arizona, travels constantly, is back in the gym and running on a treadmill with her heart rate up around 180 with no trouble, and is scaling her rental business from four units. She's planning to be in Bali in September and to spend the next stretch traveling. Nicole made this progress through CFS Recovery's recovery system, built on nervous system retraining. This story is one of over 100+ hours of filmed recovery case studies from real people sharing their real experiences. Not scripted. Not staged. Real people, on camera, in their own words.

We've helped people as young as 9 and as old as 86. People who've been dealing with this for 3 months to 50 years. People from bedridden to semi-functional and everywhere in between. Over 3,000 documented client wins across our community.