Winning the Battle

It’s been a good week.

This week I went to see my naturopath to review my protocol to see if we needed to make any changes. When he asked me how I was feeling, I smiled, and said “you know all those phantom pains I was getting half a dozen times a day, every day, all over my body? Guess what? They’re virtually GONE!”

That lead to some high fives before we continued on with our appointment.

These phantom pains of mine used to wear at me physically mentally, and emotionally – but not any more. My pains have gone from ruling my day to being almost completely unnoticed. Not to say that they are gone entirely, I still get them periodically, but they have lessened significantly. I’m down to maybe 1 such pain every other day, which in my eyes is a HUGE improvement.

With my pain fairly under control, I’ve had a noticeable decrease in depression and anxiety. My nerves are definitely not as frazzled as they have been in months past. I feel happier. I’m smiling more!

My protocol has been altered slightly. I am now taking Resveratrol to help increase the positive results that I’ve had with the Samento/Banderol mix and a combination of 3 homeopathic remedies to help tackle my Lyme rash, which looks as if it is being caused by a co-infection.

I’m one step closer to a healthy body again…Now let’s hope we can get the rash under control…

My Lyme Rash: The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly

It started as a patch of dry and itchy skin on my chest.

I used moisturizer and increased my intake of good oils and it eventually went away after a few days. Then it came back a couple of weeks later. I repeated my treatment regiment and it went away. Then it came back again, but this time it brought a friend. I developed 2 spots. I continued with the same treatments which had worked in the past, but this time the spots were much more stubborn. They did not dissipate. They didn’t even really lessen in severity at all. They got worse.

The dry patches started to crack and bleed and got even itchier.

The next thing I knew, it was more than a year later and the spots were still there. There were 3 of them by that time. At some point the spots stopped responding to moisturizers. They actually started to fight against them. The more moisture I applied and/or exposed my skin to, the more irritated the spots would become. I tried everything I could think of. Changed every possible thing in my life that could have been an irritant, including foods, soaps, make up, everything.

Time to call in reinforcements.

Doctor #1 thought that it might be a localized infection and prescribed some anti-fungal and anti-biotic creams to try. These worked for a time, but as soon as the treatment ended, the spots came back.

Then they started to multiply.

In the span of approx. 3 months I went from 3 spots on my chest to over 50 all over my body.

Doctor #2 was a real gem! General consensus was that it was just some eczema which I hadn’t had since I was young, but that did run in my family. Nothing the doctors could do for that except give me more creams and ointments to try; which I did. When those didn’t work, doc #2 had the audacity to recommend that I basically become a moisturizing Nazi.

Oh great idea doc! (insert eye roll here)

Within 2 weeks of using eczema and psoriasis specific moisturizers my spots felt as if they were on fire! By the time I was able to get back in to see the doctor and show her what her ‘brilliant’ moisturizing idea did to me. All of my spots were inflamed, painful, itchy to no end, flaky, etc. I even had about 5 spots which were seeping non-stop. I wasn’t able to sleep more than a few hours a night because the itch would make it near impossible to fall asleep. When I would finally be asleep, and end up rolling over, it would cause those now dried-to-my-clothing spots to pull away from the fabric of my PJs and tear the wounds open again. Oh ya…Great times!

It was at this point when I gave up on the medical system and reached for help from anywhere I could find it. Thank goodness for an intuitive that I went to see. He was the only one who brought the possibility of Lyme to my attention. He was the one who told me that it was not eczema; that it was a Lyme rash.

Since that day, my life has been turned upside down. My MD didn’t believe that a Lyme diagnosis was possible and flat our refused to even send me for blood tests. She is not longer my MD. I sought the help of a LLND and am so happy that I did. I still have my rash, and whenever I herx it still gets worse, but I’m on my way. I’m now on my path towards health and wellness.

A glimpse of my Lyme rash on the outside of my left leg.

I wonder how many others out there are suffering from eczema when it may actually be a Lyme rash?

Mental Anguish

Today is a good day. There are few days when I can say that. Battling Lyme disease is hard, sometimes physically, sometimes mentally, and sometimes both; every day is a struggle.

Prior to my Lyme diagnosis, my doctor at the time was convinced that my physical pains were a result of my mental status. I was suffering from moderate to severe depression. I was numb. Happiness was a foreign concept to me, sadness was my norm, and tears regularly ran from my eyes. Through my struggle with Lyme, these symptoms have not dissipated, although they at least have a root cause that I can associate them to.

The worst part of my mental symptoms from Lyme disease are the blanks, moments throughout my days when, in the middle of a sentence, I will forget a word. This used to happen to me periodically, once in a blue moon, but never to this extent and never this often. The simplicity of the words I blank on has worsened as well. I used to blank on large or more complex words, now I blank on words as simple as ‘cat’ or ‘spoon’. It’s when these moments, these blanks, are the most frequent that I feel the most broken, the more I feel a shell of my former self, the more I worry about dementia and fear that had I not caught my Lyme soon, that I would have spiraled downward at rapid speed into the spectrum of dementia related illness which scars me to no end.

Keep in mind that although I have likely had Lyme since a young age, my own immune system has kept it in check, that is until chronic elevated stress compromised my immune system, allowing the Lyme to multiply unhindered until the symptoms became exacerbated. Some symptoms thought have been present as far back as I can remember. So to have a black cloud of worsening symptoms growing over my head, especially when those symptoms were both physical and mental, was enough to start that downward spiral I was so worried about traveling down.

Today, now about 5 months into my treatment, I still fight daily for inner happiness. I’m easily flustered, easily frustrated, easily saddened, easily stricken with despair, deeply anxious and troubled. But now that mental anguish has a source and that, in and of itself, is a sort of relief. It still scares me when I blank on words or feel my depression overpower me, but knowing the reasons behind it are helpful in being able to break out of those moods with more success.

I’ve never been one to believe that depression is a disease of its own; rather I believe it is a symptom of an even greater problem. In my case, that problem is Lyme. With that in mind, I am now mentally in a better place to tackle my depression. I know what is causing it and that there really is a light at the end of this dark tunnel that I’ve been stuck in.

This day is one where that light seems a little brighter. It’s still a long way away, but I can see it.

My Journey to Lyme

When I was young, I seemed to have endless energy (like most kids and young people today), but starting when I was around 10 years old I began to suffer from what thought was just ‘growing pains’. These pains would come and go sporadically and would never seem to happen in the same places.

The next issues which arose in my young life were some digestive problems. Severe pain once lead me to the Emergency Room where x-rays showed an excess of built up gas in my digestive tract. At that time doctors informed my parents that I would be fine and that it would just pass. Luckily, for a little while at least, the pain did dissipate. Although it would re-appear periodically, by that time, my parents owned a health food store and my mother had become quite knowledgeable regarding various vitamins and herbs of which I was given regularly. With my mother’s know-how, whenever my digestive pains would resurface and become too much for me to handle, I would be given charcoal extract or other such digestive aids as was available at the time. These supplements would help to lessen the pain, but never fully alleviate it, or stop it from returning all together.

Then, as a teenager, came the migraine headaches. The pain would become so intense that I often had to induce vomiting to get any sort of relief. These migraines would be absolutely debilitating; leaving me in agony, while no amount of pain killers would even come close to lessening the intensity of them.

While living in my second year at university, I developed a sort of head cold and fatigue that persisted for months. Once back home again, and with the head cold and fatigue still plaguing me, my mother suggested that I try getting my food allergies tested through a naturopath. She had encountered many people who had done just that, and once they had removed specified foods from their diets, they seemed to recover their health again. So we gave it a try.  I tested badly for about 15 different foods, highest on the list were Gluten, Dairy, Peanuts, and Apples. I removed all 15 items from my diet and within a month, my energy had largely returned any my head had cleared. A few months later, I retested my food sensitivities and discovered that only Gluten and select Dairy products remained disruptive to my health. During this time, I had felt healthier than I had ever felt, I
had lost around 20 pounds, and I had more energy than I did as a child.

The benefits from removing sensitive foods from my diet, although very helpful for many months, would prove temporary. Slowly my body began to fight me again. My sporadic pains increased, my headaches came back with vengeance, and my fatigue and digestive pains slowly crept back.

All of my symptoms worsened in direct relation to the increased stress from my work and personal life. By the time I was 25, I was a shell of my old self. My fatigue had gone from a regular annoyance to something so extreme that I would physically be unable to get out of bed in the morning. I would be so exhausted during the day that if I had liked coffee, I would have consumed liters of it daily. Since I’ve never really been keen on coffee, I ended up using sugar and energy drinks to help me get through my days.

It was around this time, that I developed what I assumed was a mild case of eczema. Within 2 years, the spots which I thought had been eczema, had gone from coming and going, to what seemed to be permanent. After returning home from my honeymoon, the 3-6 spots that had plagued me for the previous 2+ years began to multiply. Within 3 months I went from 3-6 spots to over 50; covering my legs, arms, chest, back, even appearing on my face. These spots, each and every one, was dry, itchy, and the worst of them would even crack and bleed.

After multiple doctor’s visit, a variety of medicated and non-medicated creams, and with only a worsening of my condition to show for it, I was at the end of my wits.

Now, as I go through my treatment protocol for Lyme Disease, my symptoms are rotating between getting better and getting worse. Herxing is a typical side effect of killing off the bacteria definitive of Lyme, and this worsening of symptoms makes going through treatment doubly hard. It’s not easy to feel worse, but at the same time, know that you actually are getting better.

So if you know someone going through treatment for Lyme Disease right now, have patience, have a heart, and know that it’s not an easy battle to win, but with the right protocol and a solid support network around them, Lyme patients can get better…I look forward to being able to say one day that I AM better…but not today…Today I fight, every minute of every day, I fight for my health so that one day I’ll be healthy again.

My Diagnosis

Lyme disease was never something that I thought could be causing my symptoms. I wasn’t until I became desperate and decided to see an intuitive (someone who can ‘see’ what’s ailing you simply by looking at you). Before going ahead with treating myself for Lyme, I made the choice to elicit the help of our medical system in order to get physical proof of my diagnosis.

So it will be of little surprise to you, if you know much about Lyme disease, that my MD was not exactly keen on sending me to be tested, nor were Canadian BioMed labs prepared to offer adequate testing. The next decisions I would make regarding my health were attributed to my MD’s flat out refusal to send me for the solitary blood test that MSP would cover; a test known as the ELISA, all because I could not specify where and when I was bit by a tick.

I had never been a big fan of doctors, and the barricades that my MD was putting up in front of my journey to health were enough to derail my opinion of doctors entirely. If you have a broken bone or require heart surgery, a well trained doctor could be your only hope for survival, but when it comes to disease or general illness issues, doctors are not always all that they are cracked up to be.

My choice was to find a Naturopath who would be willing to at least withdraw my blood and send it to a lab in the United States for testing. Fortunately for me, not only did I find such a naturopath, but the particular practitioner I found was also working to become Lyme literate. Recently this naturopath had seen an increase in his patients who were testing positive for Lyme disease when coming to see him about health issues for which MDs were unable to adequately treat. Thus my journey began…