Healthy Living by Willow Creek Springs
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Healthy Living by Willow Creek Springs
From Feeding Tube To Freedom with Sara Kelsey
A teenage diagnosis of achalasia set Sara on a path she never asked for—esophageal surgery, years of nausea and vomiting, and a later diagnosis of gastroparesis that made eating unpredictable and exhausting. Add the weight of a “permanent” feeding tube, depression, and the slow drift into binge drinking, and you get a life that looked functional from the outside but felt unsustainable from the inside. We sit down with Sara to unpack how health, marriage, parenting, and purpose tangled—and how she began to untie the knots.
The turning point arrived with a hard truth: a drunk driving incident with no memory attached. That shock ended all the excuses. She and her husband quit drinking the same day, and everything shifted—mornings were clearer, fights faded, and parenting stabilized. As the fog lifted, Sara started working out, lost 30 pounds, and rebuilt her routines. But the tube remained, and a painful replacement left her sleepless and raw. One late night, she broke down and prayed with total surrender, asking simply for the pain to ease. Days later, a surgeon who once said removal wasn’t possible took the tube out. The wound healed. The pain stopped. Sara credits sober living and healthier choices—and she won’t ignore the part that faith played in opening a door no one expected.
We explore the practical playbook behind her recovery: choosing your circle like your health depends on it, protecting home life from the pull of nightlife, advocating fiercely in a complex GI system, and structuring work to support a child’s therapies without burning through every hour of PTO. We also dig into her new purpose through Booked by Sara, where she helps mission-driven guests share stories that heal, inform, and move people to act. If you’re facing chronic illness, strained relationships, or a habit that keeps winning, this conversation offers a map: small daily wins, strong boundaries, honest help, and a belief that your body—and your life—can still respond.
If this story resonates, follow the show, share it with a friend who needs hope, and leave a review to help others find it. Ready to choose one change today?
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Well, hello, and welcome to the Healthy Living Podcast. I'm your host, Joe Grumbine, and today we've got a very special guest. Her name is Sarah Kelsey, and she's a survivor of chronic illness, and her life's been shaped by major surgeries, daily gastroparesis symptoms, and years of living with a permanent feeding tube until a miraculous turn of events changed everything. Her journey stretched far beyond the medical side. She's walked through deep grief, complexities of foster care and adoption as a parent, financial collapse, and seasons marked by destructive drinking cycles that affected her marriage and own sense of stability. Wow, Sarah, you've got quite a story to share here. Um let's jump into it. Welcome to the show. So glad you could join us.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you so much for having me. I'm really glad to be here.
SPEAKER_00:Well, I uh when you reached out, I was like, wow, that's sounds like the perfect uh guest for our audience. You know, this is all about healthy living, and it seems like your journey has touched on many layers of that, um, both the downside and the upside. So why don't you just jump in and tell us a little a bit about your backstory? Um, it sounds like you've got a quite a quite a robust story to share.
SPEAKER_01:I I definitely that's a good way to describe it. Um, and essentially it all kind of has a tendency to tie together because when I was 17, I was diagnosed with a digestive disease, and that really would carry on. Um, it was called achalasia, and I had surgeries on my esophagus, and it would carry on into my 20s, and I would have continued chronic illness and vomiting, which would lead doctors to ask questions about eating disorders, for example, um things that you might see in a normal teen, early 20s girl, but that wasn't the case with me, which led to new issues such as depression and anxiety, which turned to unhealthy habits like binge drinking, pushing into relationships that weren't ready, and looking so hard for belonging that I was getting married very young, getting married to people that it wasn't the right fit, but it was a fit for someone who was lost in every area of their life. And so I was just looking for an answer to fix all the things, right? Because everything was basically falling. I felt like my health falling apart made everything else fall apart. And really, what I was doing was making it worse by compounding drinking on top of having these gastrointestinal disease.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, those two don't seem like they would go very well together.
SPEAKER_01:No, it certainly was not doing me um any favors at all, but um by the time I met my current husband, I had I was still having daily, which that was 12 years ago. So at this time, I was still having daily nausea and vomiting. In 2018, I was diagnosed with something called gastroparesis, which meant from my stomach issues, my stomach had become paralyzed.
SPEAKER_00:Oh no.
SPEAKER_01:Um, so food was just sitting in my stomach and not emptying. So that meant a whole new lifestyle change as far as what I was eating. And essentially what happened was my quality of life went downhill. I was not keeping things down, I was doing very poorly, and they in 2019 put in a feeding tube for my quality of life. Um, I needed it, I was grateful for it, but it was also a mental load. It was something that it was a it was a big weight to carry because it's it's a lot to deal with, figuring out the feedings, figuring out how you adjust with that in your body, how you live your day-to-day life. Um, and I kept it in until 2020, and they let me take it out because I was doing better and I didn't, I wasn't using it. But then I got sick again and they put it back in, and that time they told me, this is it, even if you stop using it, this tube stays in.
SPEAKER_00:So is your stomach starting to repair itself, or what was going on there?
SPEAKER_01:So there are like with gastroparesis, you can have like a flare where your stomach will completely paralyze, and then those nerves can kind of their nerves aren't like completely dead, they can every once in a while they will start again, right? Like they're not, they aren't cut, they're just damaged.
SPEAKER_00:Got it.
SPEAKER_01:So they can on occasion work.
SPEAKER_00:It's just so would you just like get hungry, or I mean, like, how would you know that it was starting to work again?
SPEAKER_01:I would continually try to eat because it was just honestly, it was mentally hard for me to not do it. It was just something that I struggled with mentally, not eating.
SPEAKER_00:Um, I can totally imagine. I I recently faced a radiation treatment for my cancer that I decided against, and one of the reasons was because I was gonna end up being stuck with a feeding tube, and I was like, No, I'm not gonna live that way. And I I chose another path that fortunately worked, but I can totally appreciate that you know that's a whole world that unless you have to, you don't want to go there.
SPEAKER_01:So I essentially knew that if I would eat, I would vomit, but and at the end of but I could use my tube and still get the nutrition that I needed. So there was no there was no harm done if I ate. Okay, I just needed to make sure I got my calories, essentially.
SPEAKER_00:And so I was gonna eat, but it was gonna come back out anyway. So you got to kind of have the joy of eating, but you weren't gonna get anything out of it.
SPEAKER_01:Correct. But somehow mentally that was more satisfying to me because it's not it wasn't what a normal person thinks of of a bomb, it's not like the flu, it's just a very quick it's back out.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Um, so yeah, so then they put the tube back in in 2020, and that's when they told me that no matter what, this can't come back out just because you've had so much surgery, there's scar tissue in there, and your anatomy has been moved around from one of my surgeries, was an esophageomy, where they actually removed my most of my esophagus and pulled up my stomach. Oh, my so my anatomy has also been rearranged in there, so they were like, we cannot do it.
SPEAKER_00:Wow.
SPEAKER_01:So all and I apologize, there's so much to this story that I kind of it's a lot to take in and a lot to tell and talk about.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, no worries, you're doing great.
SPEAKER_01:Um so while all of that was happening, we were also in 2020. My husband and I had gotten married in 2018. In by 2020, we were foster parents of a three-day-old baby girl.
SPEAKER_00:Wow.
SPEAKER_01:Um, who we would later adopt, who is now five.
SPEAKER_00:All right.
SPEAKER_01:Um yeah, so that's great. It's been a huge, she's been a wonderful blessing. Um during that though, we were still doing the binge drinking, you know, going out with our friends, doing doing what we enjoyed, but then we stopped going out together because previously we had shared parenting, so there was an every other weekend situation where we were able to go out and be with our friends, and so those weekends we would go out and binge drink, and we would have you know these terrible arguments over nothing because we were just drinking far too much, and so in addition to the problems with my health, we were having problems in our marriage that were leading to less than ideal parenting to kids who are home and deserve better, and also the drinking is contributing to my health, as I mean, it's just not healthy, and COVID was happening at that time too, exactly. So it was just you know, nothing good was coming from the situation, and I I had found, I mean, my doctors, I am very, very thankful. I had two doctors that worked very closely together to make, you know, my healthcare plan to get me through when I was diagnosed with the gastropresis and work me through the feeding tubes, um, and were just really there to advocate for me that I don't know where I would have been if I wasn't able to find someone local to me to take care of it because it was such an unknown disease that like when I got the diagnosis, it was just printed out on a sheet of paper. And when I asked the nurses, they were like, We don't really know.
SPEAKER_00:Wow.
SPEAKER_01:Um, so I'm very grateful for that. But in about so I would say fast forward to 2024, everything was about the same as far as my health was concerned. Um, still with a feeding tube. We had, you know, all four kids and we're married. I had opened up an insurance business for myself that was not doing no, that was not 2024. I'm so sorry. I was just working in customer service at that point, and we were I had gone out drinking, and this is when this was like the first time that something changed, is I drove drunk and caused property damage. Oh no, and I didn't remember it, and I knew that that was problematic because I had always told myself that since I wasn't an alcoholic, it wasn't a problem because I wasn't doing this daily, it wasn't something that I needed to do. If I couldn't go do it, I was fine. But the problem was is I was drinking far too much, so that was a huge wake-up call. And on that day, we both decided to stop drinking completely. We um have not drank ever since the day that that happened in January of 2024.
SPEAKER_00:Wow. Well, that's pretty remarkable. I it is congratulations on that. That's uh quite an accomplishment.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you. Um, it's been some it's been something that's done a lot for our marriage, for us as parents, for our overall health, as far as how we feel and how we show up without you know, without a fog hanging over you. It's just allowed us to be a lot more present and involved. And with that, we started wanting more in different things. So that's when I actually then that year in November made a change to open my own insurance agency so that I could have more involvement in our kids' lives and be have a little more freedom of time. Um, because our daughter was needing some additional treatments and therapies. She had some drug and alcohol exposure while her mom was pregnant that we were starting to see some behaviors on. So what I had learned historically from my health stuff was continuous appointments run you out of PTO. And when you run out of PTO, you run out of you kind of run into a major problem. And I knew that I couldn't do that for her. So I opened an insurance business. Um, it did not go well, it uh was losing us money very quickly. And in about January, in it was January of 2025, I had a friend invite me to a mom's meet at a church group. And I went to that and there was just a lot of really nice people there. I kind of didn't have any real intention of anything else than just going to just meet people. She said, just come so you can not be alone all the time because you work by yourself. And I said, sure. Well, that week my husband and I ended up going to church and just since then we have been continuing to move in our faith forward and seeing our lives improve as well. Um, we've both started working out regularly. I don't know any of his numbers off the top of my head, but in June I started exercising on a regular basis, and I have lost 30 pounds. I'm in the best shape that I've ever been in. Um I hadn't used my feeding tube for I honestly don't know the last time I used it because when you use it as needed, you don't really think of it as this is the last time I'm gonna eat, you just think I'll use it next time I use it.
SPEAKER_00:Right.
SPEAKER_01:Um but so I just had the tube, and one day in October, my tube fell out, and that was something that happened when you know, over time the balloon would deflate or whatever, and it would just kind of fall out. So I called my surgeon's office and they were not in. You only have so so long to get it in. So I went to the ER to get it fixed, and it was a completely unremarkable visit, you know, nothing to speak of. So left, went home, and that was that. And usually after they put in a new tube, there's a little bit of a recovery time with some discomfort just because that tube has to settle. You know, you have a it's literally a foreign object in your body, and your body is not trying to keep it in. So it's a little uncomfortable, and I was dealing with that. It seemed like it was more than usual, but I was trying to talk myself out of that. Like, no, you're just you just feel like that because it's happening right now. You're okay, it's all right. Um, because also you know that as a patient that historically, if you're calling a doctor's office, the response is going to be what I just said, that it's a foreign object and your body needs to get used to it.
SPEAKER_00:Right, right.
SPEAKER_01:And I knew how to care for the wound that it had created, and I knew how to, you know, I knew how to do all the things that I needed to do. Um, but it had really just gotten, it had advanced so far. Like the open wound from the stomach acid was quite large and it was not healing. And it was almost as if the balloon was positioned wrong because it just never stopped resisting against my stomach, and I was in so much pain to the point that I was not sleeping. And so one night I just completely broke down, and I was in my, I remember I was in the bathroom and I was trying to clean it up. I was looking in the mirror and trying to like look and clean it, and I had never done this before, and I didn't know how to do it or what I was doing, and I just started I was praying and crying. I was I had prayed before, but I had never prayed like this, and I just surrendered and told God that I begged him to take away my pain. I said, I give you everything, please just take this pain away from me. Just meaning, you know, please put this, get this back to my normal. And a couple days later, I went and met, I went to the surgeon's office. I called, and the nurse had agreed, you know, sounds like sounds like the balloon is in there funny. Sometimes it can just sit wrong, and you're right, it can really leak all over. Why don't you come in and we'll switch it out? And I said, perfect, sounds good, I'll be there. So I get there and the surgeon starts asking me all of these questions. And I was like, This is so strange. Like, usually there's just not there's not much talk because it's very simple, they know what they're doing and it they leave.
SPEAKER_00:Right. This is just a normal procedure that millions of people go through.
SPEAKER_01:Right. Well, all of a sudden he said, Why don't I just take it out?
SPEAKER_00:I was like, All right.
SPEAKER_01:I was like, because you can't. He's like, What do you mean? He's like, I can absolutely take it out. I was like, No, you can't, and I was explaining to him, you know, like why and how, and um I genuinely I this was probably such an ego shot to him. Like, I made him explain to me how he could do the surgery again if he took it out.
SPEAKER_00:Not to take it out.
SPEAKER_01:Because it was the same team. That's why I was like, it was your partner that said. So I was like, tell me how you would do it. Because they said they couldn't do it. So sh like as if I have any control, you know. But I mean he entertained me, he answered me. Um and he took it out. And I it's still out, it's still it's almost completely healed. And I mean, I absolutely credit, you know, that I I stopped drinking and I lead a healthier lifestyle, but I also can't deny that a few days before that appointment I gave everything to God and I asked him to take away the pain. And I meant just put my tube back to the discomfort, you know, just that because it's not comfortable to have a feeding tube, it's it's tolerable, it's something that you can certainly live with.
SPEAKER_00:Sure.
SPEAKER_01:And that's all I meant. But two days later I had no pain, it was completely removed and healed, and I just can't explain that.
SPEAKER_00:Wow. So do you think that the how much do you think the drinking really had to do with the cause of this disease? I mean, it seems like on some level that while you were drinking, it was really this giant problem. And then shortly after you stopped drinking, it began to sort of become less of a problem.
SPEAKER_01:And then, you know, now that you've not been drinking for a while, it's I think the drinking and um my emotional health, having a better uh understanding of where I am emotionally as well, is I think that helps me not have that desire to drink, also, but it um I think it just helps to stay in a more positive mindset and a healthier mindset in general, because I think that makes a difference. If you you know what you take in is what you're gonna put out, sure.
SPEAKER_00:So from the very beginning, when you know doctors were telling you that, you know, maybe you had some eating disorder, you had all these issues. Do you think that that was really kind of the trauma that started this whole cycle? Was being told by medical experts that you had this problem that you knew you didn't have, or was it something else?
SPEAKER_01:Um, there was a combination of things. I had a really complicated relationship with my parents, and at the age that I was when I started getting sick, I was looking for a kind of nurturing that I was not getting from them. Um, I don't know exactly what that was, right? I was 17, who knows? Um it just was some sort of an unmet need. It was something that it was a you know, a combination of things of a trying to be a rebellious teenager, but also um I was sick, so how rebellious was I going to be? And you know, parents who were doing the best that they could, but certainly weren't perfect either, and life just gets messy sometimes, and on top of that, I was you know, I had my my oldest son when I was 20.
SPEAKER_00:Okay.
SPEAKER_01:So that was certainly not not a traumatic event by any means, um, but it it's definitely life-changing.
SPEAKER_00:That's a pretty traumatic event for most people. He was like a life changer.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, absolutely life-changing.
SPEAKER_00:So as as you've gone from where you were to where you are, is there maybe a central theme or some, you know, what our listeners are going, wow, what a transformation, right? You've gone from this wreck of a life to sounds like you've got a pretty normal situation going on now.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:By most standards. So um things happened along the way, and the things that happened to you probably are things that happen to a lot of people in the sense of maybe not the exact causes or the exact scenarios, but you know, things that you could correlate, and certainly the symptoms of going after bad relationships or not, you know, unhealthy lifestyles, unhealthy life choices, addictions, all of those things, you know, it's it's as remarkable as your story is, it's also fairly common in the sense that it's not a like, oh my God, I can't believe that happened. It's a thing that to a lot of people. And yet there's so many ways that people find their way through it. So, what would you say would be your message to our listeners that say, hey, you know, if you see yourself in this place or maybe even heading to this place, um, you know, what would you say to these people that that maybe could help them to either avoid or find their way through it?
SPEAKER_01:I would say to really stop and focus on taking a look at what's close to you, not about looking at what it seems like you might be missing out on if you say no to going out to spend time with your friends or go to that party or go see that band or whatever the thing that everybody is doing that night. Think about what you're missing at home. Think about what you're walking away from, think about how you might be missing a chance to grow your relationship with your kids or your spouse. Um these are chances that you can make uh healthier choices for yourself and grow and better your relationships and it's easier to do than you give yourself credit for. Uh it really and I'm not saying oh my gosh, it's the easiest thing you've ever done, you'll do it no problem, piece of cake. But you can do it, you need to give yourself some credit, you need to hold yourself accountable, and you need to be real about who is in your circle, and the people that think that this is temporary, that this is something that you're not going to stick to are not the people that you need to be holding you accountable. You need to find people who want you to win.
SPEAKER_00:That's a hundred percent true. Yeah, you know, it's funny, you know, your your parents, at least my parents, always, you know, gave me crap about people I was hanging around, you know, and they would always, you know, those people are no good for you. They're gonna drag you down. Or, you know, if I was hanging around a good person, they'd support that and say, Yeah, you know, you need to spend more time with this person. They're they're good for you. But turns out that's very true. You know, who you surround yourself with is got a lot, you know, you're influencing them, but they're influencing you as well. And whether that's supportive or destructive, you know, really that's the thing that you should be aware of.
SPEAKER_01:Exactly. It's really key and looking beyond the surface and not just seeing like that, well, they invite me out. Like, okay, are they inviting you out because you're available and you say yes?
SPEAKER_00:Exactly.
SPEAKER_01:Because that's a big difference.
SPEAKER_00:Then would they say what it's been time with, share their life with you? Right.
SPEAKER_01:Like, would they say yes if you invited them somewhere there wasn't drinking?
SPEAKER_00:Exactly. Well, listen, Sarah, uh so many of our guests that you know have gone through um stories like this or you know, overcome obstacles, find their way to supporting other people, um, whether it's you know counseling or setting up a website, or some people set up nonprofits, all sorts of different things. What are you doing with your experience?
SPEAKER_01:So I actually have a business called Book by Sarah, where I set people up as guests on other people's podcasts.
SPEAKER_00:Oh nice. Um we'll have to do some more talking.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I actually uh am just really convicted about who I work with, and I only work with people that I feel like are doing things that are making a big difference and that their stories are impactful. So that when I'm scheduling them, then I feel like I'm making a difference and changing story, like changing stories, and then I'm also using those same tools to myself go on podcasts and just share my story and see if there's anyone I can reach and anyone that I can help at all. And I'm gonna slowly start adding that to my socials and stuff.
SPEAKER_00:Um I love that. Yeah, it's funny. This this podcast itself has been going on for about three years, and I I did another one for about 10 years prior to that that was more human rights issue uh oriented. But um, you know, I really feel like we're building a community of people who are focused on improving their health, and that's you know, not just you know, people going through diseases and things like that, but spiritual healing, mental healing. I mean, every every which way it's all it's all interconnected, a lot of holistic approaches, but you know, I really feel like we're we're helping a lot of people this way.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely, yeah. There's so many people that listen to podcasts now. I think they're so such a great way to get the word out about different things and for people to find topics that are of their interest.
SPEAKER_00:Well, how does somebody get a hold of you if they feel like they would be a good guest and they want to get out there and start uh hitting the podcast circuit?
SPEAKER_01:Um, you can go to my Instagram, it is booked by Sarah K, or I have a LinkedIn also, Sarah Kelsey.
SPEAKER_00:Wonderful. And that's K-E-L-S-E-Y.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, it is, an S-A-R-A.
SPEAKER_00:Beautiful. Well, Sarah, this has been a fascinating conversation. And as I mentioned before, I'd love to have you back as things progress and as your uh book by Sarah starts to grow, and and you know, you're you're starting to build your yourself in the healing community. I I'd love to share that experience with you.
SPEAKER_01:Wonderful. That sounds great. Thank you so much for having me.
SPEAKER_00:It's my pleasure. Well, this has been another episode of the Healthy Living Podcast. I'm your host, Joe Grumbine, and I want to thank all of our listeners for making this show possible, and we will see you next time.
