Essay 03 — My story · 7 min read
My experience with Susan Cachay's protocol
After twelve years of treating other people's pain, I hit a wall I could not treat my way out of. This is what happened when I stopped looking for a fix and started following a protocol instead.
03.1The wall
I had spent over a decade as a massage therapist, helping people with chronic back pain. I knew the body well, and I was good at my work. Then, slowly, my own body stopped cooperating. The fatigue came first — a heaviness that sleep did not touch. Then the brain fog, the low mood, the cold hands, the sense that my nervous system was permanently braced.
I did what I told my clients not to do: I pushed through. I assumed it was stress, that a holiday would fix it. It did not. Blood tests came back normal. I felt like a fraud, giving advice about recovery while quietly falling apart.
03.2Finding the hair test
A colleague mentioned hair tissue mineral analysis, and the name Susan Cachay came up as someone who worked with it seriously. I was sceptical — I had tried enough things by then. But the idea that a hair sample could show what my blood tests had missed was worth the small cost of finding out.
When my first report came back, I sat with it for a long time. The slow oxidation pattern, the low sodium-to-potassium ratio, the calcium shell, the trace of metals I had been carrying — it described my exhaustion more accurately than anything a doctor had ever told me. For the first time I had a map of the terrain underneath my symptoms.
03.3Following the protocol
Susan's approach was not a supplement shopping list handed to me in one go. It was a guided, staged protocol built around my actual results: targeted minerals to rebalance the ratios that were off, dietary shifts to support blood sugar and reduce what was loading the system, and realistic lifestyle changes that did not ask an already-depleted body to perform.
What I appreciated most was the pacing. There was no dramatic detox, no heroic regimen. The instruction, again and again, was to go slowly enough that the body could actually use what it was being given. Healing, I learned, is not something you force. It is something you allow, once the conditions are right.
03.4What actually changed
The change was not overnight, and it was not linear. Around the third month the morning fatigue began to lift. By the fifth, the brain fog had thinned enough that I could read deeply again. The anxiety I had assumed was just my personality quieted, and I realised it had been chemistry all along.
I retested every few months, and watching the ratios move on paper — the sodium-to-potassium ratio creeping up, the calcium shell softening — was its own kind of proof. The symptoms had not been suppressed. The terrain underneath them had changed, and they had nothing left to stand on.
03.5Why I am sharing this
I am not practising massage therapy at the moment, and I am not here to sell you anything. I am sharing this because I remember how alone it felt to be unwell with normal test results, and how much it meant to find a framework that made sense of it.
If you are living with a deep-rooted chronic issue that no one has been able to explain, my hope is that this site gives you a starting point — and the encouragement to look at the terrain, not just the symptom.