Lyrae Willis

Author at Blue Heron Health News

Hi, I'm Lyrae Willis.

I was twenty years old, studying Environmental Sciences at the University of British Columbia, when my body stopped working. My ribs were pushing through my skin. My face was sunken. I looked like I was starving to death — and in a way, I was.

Half a dozen gastroenterologists couldn't agree on what to call it. Severe ulcerative colitis. Crohn's-colitis. Crohn's disease. They only agreed on one word: non-responsive.

I sat through years of failed drug trials. Then experimental drugs. None of them worked. Most made me worse.

At twenty-two, my doctors told me my only option left was a colostomy.

I refused.

Being a stubborn scientist, I walked away from the specialists' offices and dove in head-first — reading every study I could find, testing things on my own body, learning what my doctors had never bothered to teach me. I pushed for the allergy testing they kept dismissing. I rebuilt my diet from scratch. I learned how stress was wrecking my gut. I found the supplements, the herbs, and the small daily rituals that finally let my body do what it had been trying to do all along: heal.

That was almost thirty years ago.

I've been mostly well — drug-free and surgery-free — ever since. I still get the occasional relapse. I'm honest about that in my book. But every time the disease flares, I use the same protocol that pulled me back the first time, and it pulls me back again. I am, as I sometimes put it, literally living proof that "non-responsive" doesn't have to be a life sentence.

In 2024 I finally wrote it all down. Overcoming IBD is the book I wish someone had handed me in that hospital bed at twenty. It's the elimination diet, the allergy testing, the stress work, the microbiome support, the herbs, the cheat sheets, the recipes — and the eight-week plan for anyone wondering where to start.

These days you'll find me in Alamogordo, New Mexico, where I'm building a small native-plant nursery on a patch of high-desert ground. I'm learning the local medicinal herbs one plant at a time, hiking when my body lets me, and chasing the kind of quiet, outdoor life I once thought my disease would steal from me.

I'm not a doctor. I never claimed to be. I'm a scientist who got sick, refused to give up, and figured out her own way through.

If you've been told there's nothing more they can do for you — please don't believe them. Your body has an innate desire to be healthy. Mine did. So does yours.

— Lyrae Willis, BSc.

Articles by Lyrae Willis
IBD and Hemorrhoids connection

IBD and Hemorrhoids connection

by | Oct 12, 2024

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and Hemorrhoids are connected. No surprise. Two questions remain: 1) Does one cause the other? 2) How can you cure them both? A new study in Scientific Reports reveals some answers. The main goal of this study was to determine whether...