My Lyme Story
Focus of this post: A brief history of doctors and treatments before diagnosis.
Around 2005 I started to have lots of intestinal pain. Now, my gastrointestinal system has never worked easily or normally. So that’s probably why that area started to hurt first.
I wasn’t doing well, but tried to work around it and work through it. Around 2006 I started going to doctors, and I don’t go to doctors unless I really need to. I went about 12 years without seeing any doctor at all at one point, before the Lyme Disease.
At first the doctors thought it was Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS). I tried some treatments for IBS but most of them just increased the pain. I considered exploratory surgery to see what was wrong in my abdomen. I did a ten day fast at one point and that actually helped quite a bit to relieve the pain.
But the pain came back. I had a colonoscopy done and an endoscopy, and the results were normal. My joints started to hurt a lot. One doctor did an “Upper GI Series” where you drink nasty stuff and then they take X-rays. He thought I had an ulcer (but I didn’t) and I did unnecessary treatment for that.
My legs started getting really weak and I couldn’t stand very well. Extreme fatigue set in and I needed several naps every day to get through. These symptoms came on gradually over many months and years.
I went to a neurologist, an endocrinologist, and a rheumatic specialist. I had a massive case of Candida on top of everything else and went to a specialist for that, which did help some.
Major Fatigue
All this time I continued to work in my own business. I just dragged myself to my computer between naps to do more work. Then depression and memory loss started also and I was a real basket case.
One doctor thought I had gall bladder disease and recommended I have my gall bladder taken out. We did that but it was a mistake and only made digestion more difficult than it already was!
Finally one Naturopathic Doctor (in late 2008) asked me, “Have you ever been tested for Lyme Disease?” I knew little about it and said no. We did a Western Blot test and it came back positive!
This diagnosis was later confirmed by a low score on the CD57 blood test. I’ll provide more info on the CD57 test in another post.
It took three years to get diagnosed and I hope this site will help some people to get the proper tests and treatment early on. Once you know what is going on, then you can make some progress.