Wellness In Every Season
Wellness in Every Season is a twice-weekly wellness podcast exploring burnout prevention, nervous system regulation, sustainable wellness, leadership wellbeing, and intentional living through honest conversations and practical tools for growth-minded adults.
Wellness In Every Season
Transforming Health with Simple Tools
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What happens when your body suddenly stops feeling like your own — and no one can explain why?
In this episode of Wellness in Every Season, Autumn Carter sits down with Ethan Pompeo, PANDAS survivor and founder of Green Valley Nutrition, to talk about transforming health through simple, holistic lifestyle changes that support true healing.
Ethan shares his deeply personal journey from being a healthy 13-year-old athlete to developing debilitating neurological symptoms connected to PANDAS (Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal Infections). After years of misdiagnosis, medications, anxiety, tics, OCD behaviors, and frustration, Ethan began searching for answers beyond conventional treatment.
Together, Autumn and Ethan explore inflammation, nervous system health, the mind-body connection, holistic healing, CBD, lifestyle shifts, exercise, nutrition, stress reduction, and the importance of staying curious instead of giving up. This conversation is a powerful reminder that healing is rarely about one “magic fix.” Often, it’s about building supportive habits, finding the right tools, and creating a life that allows your body and mind to begin recovering.
Ethan also shares how his struggles eventually led him to create Green Valley Nutrition, where he now helps others explore practical wellness tools and alternative approaches to health.
You can connect with Ethan Pompeo on Instagram at @ethan_pandas, Facebook, and YouTube, or learn more through Green Valley Nutrition.
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This is episode 211. Today I have with me Ethan Pompero, and we are talking about transforming health with simple tools for holistic lifestyle. Welcome to Wellness in Every Season. We talk all things wellness to help you align yourself, align with your goals, find balance in your life, and just recalibrate yourself. If you are listening for the first time, welcome, welcome. I'm so glad you're here. And let's get started in the rest of the podcast. So that's what we're talking about is how to have it be real. And he is a survivor of pandas. And if you don't know what that is, we will explain in a little bit. And he is a founder of Green Valley Nutrition. And there is so much more in here. I when this came across my desk, I was very excited because this is a story that I know many of you will resonate with. If not for yourself, you will know somebody else who has struggled with health challenges. And how do I overcome this, especially when it can be so life-changing? So welcome. I am so glad you're here. Tell us a little bit about yourself to start with.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, life's changed dramatically since I was a young guy. I am a big dad. I have four daughters, and most recently a little boy as of two months ago. So we've got a big family. We live here in central Virginia. We have a little homestead property with chickens and pigs and a dog. Life is pretty good. We make the most of it. And we've learned many ways to live the holistic, healthy lifestyle that we enjoy that's relatively low stress despite everything that we have going on. Thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_02I'm in Maryland and I have four kids. I don't homestead.
SPEAKER_00We lived in a small town, but a city, and we decided, hey, we have more space. We don't want to worry about our kids running in the road, and we want to introduce them to where our food comes from. The girls in particular love the animals. So it's been a really cool hands-on learning experience for them. We enjoy it.
SPEAKER_02I think my daughter would love that life. My oldest, maybe, and my two youngers, no. But so let's start with tell us about pandas, what it is, and tell us about that journey.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so when you say pandas, you immediately think of the bamboo munching, cuddly bear. But pandas, in my experience, was the complete opposite. It's a neuroimmune condition where your body reacts in an unusual way to a foreign pathogen, usually strep throat, such that it creates antibodies in great excess. And antibodies are one of the few compounds that can cross the blood-brain barrier and cause inflammation in an area of the body where it's not supposed to, the basal ganglia. And so that's your motor, the motor cortex of your body. When you have inflammation in your motor cortex, the result is lack of motor function, ticks, compulsions, anxiety, erratic behavior, OCD, a whole slew of neurological symptoms that come along with that. Me explaining it to you now, this has been multiple decades of unpacking this and blood work and digging to the root of the issue to find out what is this and how does it work in the body. But when I first started having my symptoms, I was 13 years old, and it was, dude, they they just came on out of the blue. Like one one day I was a normal kid. The next day I started having these weird motions, a skip step, repetitive motions, picking up my toothbrush and putting it down over and over again until it felt just right. At a certain point, my parents realized there's something wrong here. It was a long journey to actually get to the pandas diagnosis.
SPEAKER_02What did it feel like within your brain? What were you going through with your toothbrush in particular?
SPEAKER_00It's a really hard experience to describe, but it's almost like this warmth, this anxiety that stems in the back of your neck, that moves up. It is difficult to describe. It's almost an out-of-body experience in that you're reacting subconsciously in a way that's very uh abnormal. It's unusual. You know what you're doing is unusual. It just feels right to do it. And so there's this crippling anxiety if you don't respond in a certain way, if you don't do these things, it can be really debilitating. Originally, my symptoms started out fairly simple, right? Like the toothbrush thing, but then it became everything I would put my hands on. It was my fork, it was my cell phone, anything I picked up. I got this anxiety when I picked it up, it had to feel just right in my hands, and if it didn't, I had to put it down and pick it up. And pretty soon the frustration of having to do this over and over again caused me to become violent and start slamming the object down on the table and picking it up and just becoming so frustrated and angry that was when I had to face the very difficult pill to swallow of something is wrong with me. I need to get some help.
SPEAKER_02I'm just as a parent thinking about what it would be like to be in their shoes.
SPEAKER_00It disrupts the entire family.
SPEAKER_02Have you ever talked to your siblings about that?
SPEAKER_00I have as of recently. I was very self-conscious for a long time. Throughout most of my childhood, even into college, I was very self-conscious, very unwilling to talk about what I was dealing with. I was embarrassed, at times humiliated. Particularly in class, my peers would see me doing these things. I had a head twitch, and I worked at the computer help desk using the mouse on my computer. I'd have to tap, tap, pick it up. And people would see me doing these things, and out of genuine concern and curiosity, would say, Hey, are you all right? And that question drove me to the brink of insanity. I was so mad. I just wanted to be normal. Like, please stop asking me this. I'm fine. When I wasn't fine, I had to get myself first and foremost to a place where I was okay, not being okay, okay in my own skin enough to admit, like, yeah, I'm dealing with these ticks. I'm fine, I'm not having a seizure, you don't have to worry. But I would just brush it off for many, many years and move on. And it didn't do anybody any favors. It didn't help me, it didn't put me in a position to be an advocate for pandas and to educate people about what I was dealing with. I was brushing it under the rug, pretending everything was fine, and the people who asked me that question were left still wondering, you know, what what's wrong with that guy who can't sit still?
SPEAKER_02I've been that and had people respond in a just leave me alone type way. It's hard to know what to do on either side of the fan. I remember one guy I was switching my classes around for college and he had a tick, and I was like, Oh, that's interesting. But then I have that feeling, don't point it out. Okay, I won't. But it was just interesting. And I asked my husband, he saw that too, right? He's like, Yeah, well, we wonder why. Then we just moved on with our lives.
SPEAKER_00I made the mistake of thinking that everyone was so concerned about me. Everyone's worried about themselves. There's so much going on, you really don't have time to do more than that. Like, oh, what's up with that guy? Oh well. And I thought they were going home thinking, oh, did you see that crazy guy? Like, what's up with him? No, nobody cared that much. You know, it was just simply asking me, Hey, are you all right? out of concern and frankly, kindness. But me dealing with all these issues, I did not view it that way. I viewed it as almost an attack, and it put me in a very unhealthy place mentally for a long time. And, you know, we can talk about healing and all the things I did physically to get over this, but but one of the big stepping stones I had to get over is mentally getting to a place where it's like, look, this is how I am. I want to get better, but this is how I am. Like accept it, be okay with it, stop getting so stressed and anxious about this because I'm already dealing with an anxiety disorder.
SPEAKER_01Do you know what the acronym PANDA stands for?
SPEAKER_00It's pediatric autoimmune neurological disorders associated with strep. Yeah, there's a lot going on there.
SPEAKER_02Does it always happen when you're younger, pediatric?
SPEAKER_00Typically, yeah, it's categorized as a pediatric diagnosis. Most of the time, young kids are getting diagnosed with this. 13 is the older end of the spectrum. So for me to start having symptoms at the age of 13 was unusual. But today it's not uncommon for me to speak to people whose 20, 25, 30-year-old is dealing with this and perhaps still has not gotten a proper diagnosis.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, let's talk about that and then let's go into more of your journey if you're okay with going there. Because I, when you were talking, I could see people saying, Oh, you have ADHD, oh, you have this. This totally ties in with your journey. But how do you help people that maybe it is this or maybe it's something similar? Because I'm sure there are similar diagnoses and similar journeys towards healing.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I was misdiagnosed uh I can't even tell you how many times as a kid. 20 years ago, there was no literature on pandas, no one really knew about it or was familiar with it. And getting a diagnosis was near impossible in the beginning of my journey. So as a result, my first diagnosis was Tourette's syndrome, which was essentially a label that was put on me. Maybe it's Tourette's. Like, we don't know what causes Tourette's, we don't know what cures it. We can give you medication to try to help it, but there's no cure. And it did nothing for me. Like, oh, I have Tourette's, that's horrible. You remember the YouTube video Tourette's kid, and it's this guy it went viral back in the early days of you. This kid just going out of control, cussing, spouting profanity, and loss of control. It was funny to most people, but you don't understand the aggravation that person's going through. They're not just trying to be funny. This is an abnormality in their brain that's causing them to do something that causes them to become an outcast. You can't hold a job. There's many things that impact your life in a tremendous way because of this. The entire family is impacted too. My parents were my advocates, they still are. They did everything they could to try to help me out. By the time I was 17, I had been on more than 40 different prescription medicines. We had seen every doctor and specialist from Georgia to uh Massachusetts, and we're just not getting anywhere.
SPEAKER_02That's a big deal. Healthcare is really great here on the East Coast. I'm close to Johns Hopkins.
SPEAKER_00I just went to Johns Hopkins.
SPEAKER_02Boston has great medical care too, so that does a lot right there.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it was a difficult journey. And before long, I developed physician fatigue where I was just a teenage boy. I was fed up with doctors' appointments and spending my weekends driving to these hospitals and doctor's offices and getting nowhere. I got to a point where I was just fed up with it. I said, no more. These medicines make me feel like a zombie. I'm tired all the time. The side effects often outweighed any benefits. If there were any benefits, it was just a very trying time for me and my parents. And then my siblings, too, really were kind of left in the dark in a sense, because I had very limited way to express what was going on internally as well as we didn't know what was happening physically. They knew something was going on, but I was getting this special treatment, going to all the doctors' appointments, and it was difficult for everybody.
SPEAKER_02Tell us more about your journey, especially for parents who are like, I don't know if my child has this, or just open up this world to them. Teachers who are wondering about their students and getting the help that they need, especially because they can't actually say, Hey, you should go and get checked for this. But they can kind of the parent there without saying the exact words because legal ramifications. Just give us more of your journey and help give more of an understanding for people who might be going through what your parents went through with their children.
SPEAKER_00The tricky part is that the symptoms can be different from person to person. I had tremendous ticks where I was twitching and had limited control of my hands, and I did a skip step and I had a head twitch, and at one point I was hitting myself in the head, and it was very exasperating. And then compound that with the obsessive-compulsive disorder symptoms, just the rituals I went through in my mind. It was very difficult to let go of certain thoughts. Some people will have fewer ticks and more of the OCD. Some people have these fears that come out of nowhere. I spoke with a young man who told me that he at one point was struggling with this thought that if he ate with a fork, his family would die. And it was like this debilitating fear, so he couldn't use utensils and he's eating with his hands. Very abnormal behavior. And with pandas, uh something that's more or less an identifier of pandas is the sudden onset. So it's not like this gradual progression. It's like your kid is normal, and then he wakes up the next day and he's acting funny, and he's got all these weird things going on, or behavioral issues, or the ticks, or the strange fears, or he or she may be closing herself off to her parents who a child who is otherwise open beforehand. So that's what I hear all the time with parents who are going through this. My child was straight Ace, and now he can't even get out of the bedroom to go to school. It's this instantaneous change that marks pandas very often. It can be very difficult to diagnose because it's not a clinical diagnosis. There's no single test you can take that says you have pandas. It involves blood work, symptom analysis, looking at infection history and putting all these pieces together to determine is this pandas or is this something else? There's still few doctors that are actually equipped to diagnose this. We've made great strides. Today I work with multiple advocacy organizations who are fundraising for education for doctors and physicians so that they can be more equipped to do this. I talk to people now who are getting diagnosed much faster than the people in my generation who took 10, 20 years to actually figure out what was going on.
SPEAKER_02Feel free to name drop through this episode for those who are like, I need this help now, or I wonder if this is the path I should be on.
SPEAKER_00There's one book in particular that I always recommend. It's by Dr. Nancy O'Hara. It's called Demystifying Pandas. I think she does a great job of just breaking it all down and giving you the treatment protocols and showing you things that can help in the short term and things to do in the long term. But most of all, just identifying is this what you're dealing with. Quite frankly, I'm not a doctor, but I am a skeptic. I am of the belief that Tourette's syndrome is essentially obsolete. I'm not even sure that it is a legitimate diagnosis anymore. I think most of the time when you're dealing with these tick disorders, there's something else beneath the surface. We can call it Tourette's syndrome, but that doesn't actually explain what it is or what's causing it at all. It's more or less a label. But with pandas, we can see the infection causing the immune response, triggering the inflammation in the area of the brain that causes these issues. It makes so much more sense on a scientific level, and it opens up the door for a treatment protocol, two-pronged approach. The first one is identifying the source of infection and treating that. You have no chance of recovering or getting better if your body is continuing to fight this infection. Strep throat can hide out in many places in the body. It can be very insidious and hard to get rid of. So you want to get rid of that source of infection so that your body has a fighting chance. And then, secondly, targeting the inflammation and getting the inflammation at bay so that your body can start to function as it was created to more normally again. So that's more or less the approach. And it can be different based on person to person. PANS, PANDUS, two diagnoses that are often grouped together, but PANS is the same disorder, but it can be caused by a number of other it can be caused by mold, mildew, parasitic infection, bacteria. Pandas is specific to strep throat, and it's the most common.
SPEAKER_02Oh, interesting. I was actually thinking, I've interviewed a functional medicine doctor, and he works with chronic pain, that type of thing. Most people that he works with, he brings it all the way back to Lyme disease at some point. So I was curious because some of the things you were saying, it felt like they correlated, and it feels like you just kind of tied that bow for me. Interesting.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, Lyme disease, I see Lyme disease all the time in our Facebook forums and stuff like that, and co-infections. Appendas is the body's inability to respond correctly to these pathogens. So strep throat. Generally, you get strep throat, you have a sore throat, maybe some cough, and a week later you recover and you get better. That's how it's supposed to work. But in my case, my body never fully defeated the strep bacteria and it kept coming back. And my body kept producing antibodies. But when we looked at my blood work as a 15-year-old, my strep titers, my antibodies were off the charts, like immeasurably high. And it was a huge indication that like you've been fighting the strep throat infection for a long time and something is not right. My body was, for whatever reason, unable to fight the strep bacteria off as it should have. So it resulted in some long course antibiotics, antibiotic herbs, natural supplements as well, in order to finally get rid of that strep infection and get me back on a pathway to healing. I had been getting blood work annually from the time my symptoms started, and it was at least 10 years before I finally got that pandas diagnosis.
SPEAKER_02So I went a decade without for the infection part.
SPEAKER_00Oh, oh, right. Yeah. Um it's funny, we look back now after getting blood work done annually, we charted it out, and you can see at the point when I recognized what was happening, and we started to treat that strep throat, how the antibody slowly ticked down over time. And that regression sped up as I did other things to improve my health, natural things that I should have been doing anyway, like exercising, lifting weights, changing my diet and eating healthy, avoiding inflammatory foods, stop drinking soda, you know, all these things work together to help in a way that medicine can never do for us. So it's important to do both.
SPEAKER_02And how has this journey led you to Green Valley Nutrition?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so another part of my journey, when I was 16, 17, going through all this treatment I've talked about, it it very much normalized the use of substances in my mind as a tool for healing, right? You know, I went to the doctor, they'd give me this pill. If it didn't work, take more. If it didn't work, throw it away, try something else. And so in high school, I was introduced to cannabis and I started smoking. For the first time in my life, it actually gave me relief. And I battled with my parents for years over this. You know, I come from a conservative home. It's not something any teenager should have been doing, but I knew that when I smoked, it took the anxiety off my shoulders. It helped me to relax. I remember coming home from school one day, and my parents smelled the plant on me and said, have you been smoking? And I said, Why are you asking me this? My dad said, Well, you're just so calm and relaxed. And I said, This is why I'm doing this. Well, there came a time when that use of cannabis backfired, and I started to have side effects associated with that, breathing issues, paranoia. I got in trouble with the law a number of times, and it was just very messy. I knew that while this was helping me, I didn't understand why, and I was also dealing with the ramifications in a legal product. So I knew something had to change. Fast forward to after college, right? This is 15 years of dealing with this. I moved to Colorado the day after graduation to work on an organic farm. Ironically, we were not growing cannabis on this farm, we were growing watermelons and carrots and Asparagus and everything you see at the grocery store. And for me, it was a chance to start fresh and decompress and live a new lifestyle and work it outside in nature every day and get my hands dirty. It was very refreshing. But it was while I was in Colorado that I was introduced to CBD, which is a cannabis compound, but it's not intoxicating. Today I call it nature's most powerful anti-inflammatory because it did a fantastic job of reducing the inflammation in my brain so that I could take a deep breath and refocus and reset without having to smoke or be intoxicated or deal with illegal compounds that came along with the traditional cannabis use. So that transformed my life, and I take CBD to this day, and I abstain from smoking and all these other things, and I'm a different person now than I was 10 years ago, and I'm much healthier for it. But moving back to Virginia, this was 2015, I'd moved back to Virginia. CBD was obsolete, it didn't exist here. It hadn't made it over the East Coast yet. There was still a great stigma around CBD and what it entailed. And so I thought to myself, I I really need this stuff, but I can't get it. So I reached out to some friends I had made in Colorado, and they sent me a bunch of CBD products. I could be making this myself. That's the kind of person I've always been. I like to do things myself. If I can make it at home, I do. So I started making these products in the spare bedroom of my house and Snapchatting them to my relatives and my friends and started to get attention. And I realized this was not only an opportunity to help myself, but to offer a product to others that could help them fast forward to today. I operate a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility in Virginia where we're making everything from oil drops to gummies to dog treats and bath products, all with CBD. We even have a hemp protein powder now. It's a really clean plant-based protein. So I've fallen in love with this plant in a bit of a different way and I have a different approach. Everything we do is THC-free, so we're not after getting people high or intoxicated, but we're using this plant in a way that it was intended to be for our benefit and for our health.
SPEAKER_02The only part that I use, and we use it in smoothies for our kids too, is there is a high amount of protein and healthy oils with it. So we use the hemp seeds. It's amazing for brain health. I did the research before I we ever started, and that's about all I remember. I remember there were tons of benefits. I know so many people who use the oils for different reasons. I had a friend who was battling cancer. He unfortunately passed away, but he found that helped him the most with the pain rather than narcotics for the doctors, and it made a huge difference for him.
SPEAKER_00I love those stories. And the cool thing about it is how versatile it is. It can be used for pain relief, anxiety management. If it's THC-free, it can be safe for everyone. I can't tell you how many people I talk to who are using it for ADHD and autism and anxiety and sleep support and all these things that we would usually be taking pretty heavy prescription medications to address. I think it's a wonderful natural alternative. And you're right, the hemp seeds are amazing. They're rich in omegas. I just watched a news report yesterday that was kind of reiterating how all these protein powders have contained lead and other nasty stuff from the extraction process. The hemp hearts that we use, the hemp heart is like the hole that surrounds seed. This hemp seed is good too, but the whole that heart I said it wrong. It's basically pure protein and it's rich in omegas, it's the best plant-based protein you can get. It's very bioavailable. It's something like 20 times, 30 times more bioavailable than pea protein. And so your body is absorbing. I think it's a great product. And we put it in our kids' smoothies too. They love it. We put it in our oatmeal. It's really cool. But then on the other side, the medicinal side, you get the CBD and the anti-inflammatory compounds as well. It truly is an amazing plant that unfortunately we've just decided we weren't going to use for the last 50 years. So it's cool to see the resurgence and people opening up to this idea that it can be used responsibly in a way that benefits us.
SPEAKER_02But I'm curious, let's go to the other side for a second. So where's the middle ground with all this? Because I feel like it's almost like you should have it in everything and for all these reasons. And it just it feels like it's a little overmarketed. What are your thoughts towards that?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, certainly. So, you know, I tell people I would never market it as a miracle pill because a miracle pill does not exist. I talk about CBD in my blog a lot, and I always mention, look, this has been one tool that has helped me greatly, but it didn't just take me from a place where I was sick to healing me. When you're dealing with disability and sickness, you can often feel like trapped, like stuck. And that's where I was. I saw no way out of this. I was totally reliant on doctors and experts to point me in the right direction, and it wasn't happening. And I didn't know where to move, so I just kind of succumbed to my illness. I said, you know, I'm just gonna smoke, and that's the one thing I know is helping me, and it was not a good lifestyle. They did not put me in the same room with people that I admired, so something had to change. So it was the catalyst for my healing and gave me the relief to step back and say what things need to change in my life. That ushered in a new era for me where I could make all these changes that I alluded to earlier, where I could get in a routine of get out of the sedentary routine and start exercising. And if you met me when I was a teenager, I was very underweight. I remember being 135 pounds and it wasn't great. I'm 180 now, and that's pure muscle weightlifting and bodybuilding. My functional medicine doctor has told me that the muscle mass I've gained acts as a sink for those inflammatory compounds. So not only has gaining this weight diluted the effect of these antibodies and inflammatory compounds on my body, but it's given them a place to go other than my brain. Gaining muscle mass and exercising was greatly healing for me. And because of that, my appetite improved. I was able to eat better, higher quality foods, whole foods, and that can be different for everybody. But doing things for yourself, changing things up, like getting out of that funk, is so critical to anybody who's dealing with disability or sickness or mental health challenges. So I always encourage people, you know, if you're not happy where you are now, change something and don't just look for a miracle pill.
SPEAKER_02I think that's the hardest thing because we are so unique, and we are over there asking the doctors, like, fix me. And modern medicine groups us all together, which we as a society love to do, label and put things in neat little boxes. We do that for health too, and we forget how unique we each are. And you have been talking about that with pandas, that so many people, their symptoms are different. And whatever our thing that we're struggling with, I don't want to say disability, because not everybody has a disability, but they have something they're struggling with, right? Whatever that thing is, you might find people who have some similarities, but at the end of the day, we are very unique. Our journey is going to be unique. There will be similarities. We will have people along the road with us. We should not be taking this alone, but it's still unique. So it needs to be unique to us, unique to our needs, unique to our passion. And for you, you found weightlifting to work for you. For somebody else, it might be something else. Weightlifting is still good for you, helps your bone density, lots of other things. The thing is that tuning in with yourself to know what you need. And we live in such a society where we tune out instead of tuning in. Somebody in church of all places was talking about the scientific article. And I leaned over to my husband, I'm like, find that for me and text it to me. So I have it for later. But he talked about this study where people had to sit still for 10 to 15 minutes, and they either had to do that doing nothing, or they get a shock. And so many people could not stand the idea that they would shock themselves. What? Anyway, I'll have to share more of that in another podcast episode because I still need to read the article. I've been in that place in life, haven't you? Where you couldn't stand to sit with yourself for that long.
SPEAKER_00Definitely. Especially my case with my ticks. I physically could not sit still. That's not a great place to be.
SPEAKER_02When you can't dive into your passions or relax because you're just trying to survive, you're not anywhere near thriving. And what a difference your journey has made to where you can get to this point and now you have a platform where you can share it with other people.
SPEAKER_00The discouraging part is that there is no miracle pill, right? Because that's what everyone wants to hear is like just give me the thing that will make me better. But the encouraging part is that healing is possible, right? It's attainable. And in the situation where maybe healing is not possible, it's still possible to have an amazing quality of life despite what you're dealing with. And I've seen that over and over again with people I admire, mentors, friends, and how they manage to overcome incredible obstacles and still have an amazing quality of life better than people who aren't dealing with that, impeding their progress. So it's very possible, but you have to start somewhere. And so I always encourage people don't give up your one decision, one new thing away from unlocking that path for yourself. For me, it took 20 years. For some people, it may take a few months, but don't give in because life is so awesome and worth living. Look where I am now. I used to be so ashamed to talk about this, and now I'm talking about it very openly. It's become the thing that I'm very passionate about. I still have the impact appendix to my life. It's nowhere near the magnitude that it used to be, but it still impacts me and my family life. And so I just want to be honest with people. I never knew if I would be 100% fully healed, but to this point, I have an amazing family. I love my life, I'm encouraging people, I'm largely healed, and I enjoy what I do. So I consider that a big win.
SPEAKER_02I think you are also teaching your family how to be compassionate. I thought about that for myself with my own healing journey from a car accident and some other things, and having that conversation with my kids of sometimes I can be here for you, and sometimes I'm here. You guys just need to be patient with me. I'm doing my best wherever I'm at in that moment or that day. And another part that you didn't say these exact words, but staying curious and trying new things because that's what got you where you are. Instead of being like, it has to be this way. You tried different things. You tried things until they worked or until they didn't, even with medicine, that's what doctors are trying to do. But you took some of that same framework and you took it here to then try, well, maybe using something that's illegal to work, hoping that someday it would turn legal. Thankfully, now it is. But it makes me think about I have family members who are addicts, and I never wanted to go that route. I never even tried it. I tried alcohol for a while and I saw the trajectory of where I was headed with that and everyone else who was around me. And I realized that's not what I wanted for my life and how much I want to be in control of my body. So it's hard for me when my neck starts freaking out from my car accident. When I can't be in control of my body, it's frustrating. And you found a way to ride that line until you found something that was legal and worked even better. There is so much there of making sure that you are stepping back and seeing things from different perspectives and seeing that you can be in control of your life, of where you deserve to be, because we all are born with passions and with paths that we can take that will bring so much joy into our lives and into the world. And we aren't meant to be stuck, and it can feel so awful when we are, especially if it's pain. I definitely understand the pain part of it on a whole different level than I ever expected to. I enjoy what I'm learning, but I don't enjoy what I'm going through, if that makes sense. It does. The thing is, I've been trying different things to find what works. Some things kind of work, some things work better. And it's kind of what you were saying, how this worked for now, and then I found something better. So I hope even if you don't know anyone with pandas, you don't have any experience with that. All of you have experienced time in your lives where you are just surviving, and you can't figure out a way to get to the thriving part of life. You are reminding us that we can get to a point where we love life and not to give up.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. It's tough when you're living in it. But I came out of this stronger, better equipped to help myself and others with a powerful message to share with the world. We've already been given all the tools we need to have a happy, healthy life, but we need to tap into that. Scripture says everything is permissible, but not everything is beneficial, meaning that there's everything out here in the world for us to try, but not all of it will be good for us. So try things, but be honest with yourself. When I realized that cannabis, this tool was not working for me anymore, I had to move on to something else. I hope this has been an encouragement.
SPEAKER_02It goes with that intuition, right? Of trusting yourself. And it sounds like you absolutely did along your journey.
SPEAKER_00Thank you.
SPEAKER_02Any last thoughts or where we can find you?
SPEAKER_00Sure. Yeah, I'm easy to find. My website is Green Valley Nutrition. I have a bio on there with my blog, some of the articles I've written about pandas and my journey with pandas. I'm on Facebook, Ethan Pompeo, and Instagram is Ethan underscore pandas. I post more funny stuff on there. Recently during the ice storm, my girls were ice skating on the front yard, which I thought was pretty cool.
SPEAKER_02Thank you for all of this. This has been amazing. And I will be thinking about this for a while. And definitely I will be sharing this episode. So I hope all of you who are listening and watching do the same. And catch us next week on Wellness and Every Season. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I hope that you found the answers that you needed, and you had some amazing awesome moments. Please share this episode with others because it helps us align ourselves and then better align the world so that we can take the feeling that we really are looking for.