My Journey with Lyme Disease By Sharon Sklar, Certified Advanced Rolfer
I
don’t suppose you can call it lucky, but I knew I had Lyme disease within the first few days. No rash, no bull’seye. I made some mistakes but also found some amazing truths throughout this adventure that I’d like to share with you. Every Sunday for the past six years, I hike with a group of friends and our dogs. We are out in the deep forests; temperatures usually don’t matter for our regular Sunday morning romp, but I do draw the line at pouring rain! I am always careful, especially in the warmer months, to spray my boots, my clothes, and my dogs with tick preventative. In the shower one day after a particular June hike a few years ago, my hand rubbed against something near my groin. It didn’t move. I tried to look closer while at this awkward angle; it appeared to be a small black something stuck to my skin. I casually scraped it off my body with my fingernail, oblivious to the danger ahead. I later put it under a magnifying glass and saw it was a tick. Erg!—scraping it off was the wrong thing to do. I knew I should instead have handled it with tweezers. I dropped by my doctor’s office later that day and to my surprise, they told me they don’t test ticks. Rather, I was told to wait and see if I got any symptoms or a bull’s-eye. That seemed very wrong to me, but I felt I had no other recourse, as I was totally new to this experience.
After a few days, I began to feel like I had the flu—achy, uncomfortable, with a headache that felt like I was being squeezed with a vice-grip. Not my usual self, I waited a couple of days in case I had merely caught some kind of flu. If that were the case, it would resolve quickly as things typically do for me. Instead, it only got worse. I called my doctor, who knows me and knows I am not a medication person. She listened to me, heard about the tick I had removed a few days before, and gave me the standard dose of three weeks of amoxicillin. However, I am not your uninformed consumer. I have had many clients and friends who have experienced Lyme disease, and some of them have chronic Lyme. The window is around a month to receive treatment after the tick bite, before the disease begins to take effect. Unfortunately, some people have been misdiagnosed early on, and the disease progressed for years without proper treatment. These individuals live with many forms of inflammation and distress. One woman I know could, on a good day, get out of bed and get dressed by herself. On a bad day, could barely get out of bed and spent the day in her nightgown. She realized she was very ill when, while driving home from work one day, she saw something on the side
of the road and didn’t connect with what it was. She realized as she pulled into her driveway, that what she had seen had been a stop sign, but she’d had no idea what it meant as she drove by it. That’s when her chronic Lyme turned the corner. She had such brain fog she had to stop working, take to her bed, and seek out care to preserve what was left of her brain. This was not going to be my future. I read everything I could on Lyme disease, interviewed those I knew with chronic Lyme, and had the opportunity to engage with recordings from a national conference with leading experts in the alternative field around that same time. Everything they said was against the traditional three-week course of antibiotics—they suggested four to six weeks as a minimum for an early diagnosis of Lyme. The cycle of the spirochetes, the spiralshaped, slender bacteria that causes Lyme disease (and other diseases such as syphilis and relapsing fever—a tropical disease) is mostly complete after three weeks. But, in cases where there are some replicating forms of spirochetes still present, the problem is not solved and the spirochetes again begin to multiply. This can create neurological, cardiac, and/or joint abnormalities and chronic infection. Another considerable variable is the host’s immune system.
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