About Lisa
One Step at a Time…
It has been a number of years since I hit rock bottom and found myself in hospital fighting for my life. Through hard work and dedication to recover, I am finally in remission and feel almost completely back to myself.
Everyone’s journey is different, no pathway to recovery is linear, and recovery can be a long, slow process. No matter where you are on your journey to recovery, I believe that by making one small change at a time, you can set yourself up for success and begin to tame the inflammation that is affecting your body and support your body holistically to become a place where real healing can take place.
No matter where you are on the recovery continuum, the changes that I implemented can make a difference (research also supports this) by helping to bring your immune system back into balance and heal your brain.
It’s up to you to prioritize your health. I challenge you to become the owner of your immune system, not the victim.
Lisa Lauter, BNSc, MPH, is a health advocate, a retired nurse, and a survivor of LGI1 autoimmune encephalitis. Her career in public health has taken her around the world, from Beijing, China, to Houston, Texas. Since 2020, Lisa has served as a support group leader for the Autoimmune Encephalitis Alliance. In 2021, she received a service award for Most Inspirational Survivor in Autoimmune Encephalitis from EUROIMMUN, a global leader in the medical diagnostic testing of autoimmune and infectious disease. Lisa continues to be a proud member of the Living with AE Advisory Council for the Autoimmune Encephalitis Alliance, established in 2022.
The moment that changed everything…
It was a beautiful summer’s day on July 5th, 2017 at our family cottage on a picturesque lake several hours north of Toronto in Ontario, Canada. The temperature was perfect, the sun was sparkling on the lake, and there was not a cloud in the sky. My eldest son was at his summer job in the general store in our idyllic little town. My two younger sons and I had just made smoothies and were sitting lakeside on the deck contemplating an imminent boat ride.
We were having a lazy day after a week of company that included my two adorable young nephews, charming brother-in-law (a neurologist), and his lovely wife (a pharmacist), who had all left the day before. My husband had also left with them to fly back to Houston, Texas for work. It was a perfect day for relaxing at the cottage.
As I settled into a deep red Muskoka chair and we discussed the fun we’d had over the last few days, I looked out over the sparkling lake and suddenly saw flashing lights in the sky and a strange pulsating movement. “I don’t feel very well”, I remarked to my boys.
The next thing I remember is waking up lying on the deck, my cheek on the sandy, wooden deck boards, feeling very tired and disoriented. I could see the legs of paramedics and firemen around me and hear my friend Karen’s voice calmly repeating, “sweetie, it’s ok, you’ve had a seizure”.
This was a big (tonic-clonic) seizure. From that day forward, it would take almost seven months to finally find a neurologist to determine that the cause of my illness was LGI1 Receptor Autoimmune Encephalitis (AE), a rare disease that results in brain inflammation and can cause a wide array of symptoms such as seizures, memory loss, brain fog, fatigue, difficulty walking, and more depending on the type and area of the brain affected.
As I started learning about the disease, I read a paper, just published at the time, called “Treatment Strategies for Autoimmune Encephalitis” by Yong-Won Shin et al. What struck me most was reading that early and aggressive treatment leads to the best outcomes in cases of AE. Taking stock of my situation, I made a commitment to do everything in my power to survive. Drawing on my nursing and public health background, I knew that to reverse this autoimmune disease, it would take a combination of conventional and holistic approaches, immense strength, a lot of resources, patience, and support.
It is known that decreasing inflammation in the body is paramount to healing from autoimmune disease. My doctors were already prescribing medications to decrease inflammation and calm down my overactive immune system, and I was eager to receive all these lifesaving treatments. In addition to doing everything that conventional doctors recommended, I also looked at everything that affected my body that was within my control, could potentially help to decrease inflammation, and could promote healing. This allowed me to become a participant in my recovery and not just a patient waiting to see if the drugs would work.
Over the coming years, I used every ounce of brain capacity I had to research different strategies that could help me recover. I read countless scientific papers and attended numerous webinars and online summits, seeking out and implementing a wide variety of approaches to recovery that I believe brought me back to a healthy state, close to what I had been before.
My recovery was very goal-oriented as I never took the time to reflect on what could have caused the AE until years later. When feeling anxious and overwhelmed about how I was going to recover from the effects of this disease, a friend told me, “Your job is to get to the next step.” I approached everything I did throughout my recovery one step at a time. This is how I regained my health.
