My Experience with Lyme Disease and Its Silver Lining

Introduction

Everyone seems to have a Lyme disease story these days, including myself. My experience with Lyme disease has been like a roller coaster ride, with many twists, turns, ups, and downs. However, unlike a roller coaster, I quickly found out that the ride tends to last a heck of a lot longer than just five minutes. In fact, I felt like the ride would never end.

No two days were the same, and the challenges weren’t limited to just the battle my body was waging against this disease. As a matter of fact, the challenges went beyond the physical because this disease has a tendency to affect one’s emotions as well, so it was very draining to say the least.

Before I Knew

Long before I became a doctor, I unknowingly dealt with this disease. During that time, I spent a number of years experiencing a variety of weird symptoms, never truly understanding what was happening and why they were occurring. Then, one mid-September morning, something changed. None of the symptoms that I experienced prior to this day could compare to what was about to happen next.

The Symptoms

During that morning I was awakened by the sensation of my heart beating out of my chest. I discovered that my blood pressure was very high and I had a feeling of extreme anxiety and even paranoia. This feeling caused me to immediately go through the medical checklist in my head of what could be happening to me. Of course my first thought was, "did I have a bad dream?" Well, the answer was no, so that couldn't have been the issue.

After eliminating all other possibilities, I then thought to myself, "am I having a heart attack?" I tried to calm my body down, but what I was feeling wasn't going away. If this was a dream, my body would have settled down after 15 or 20 minutes. So, I'm sure you know what I did next, I went to the hospital.

Like the experience of many others who unknowingly had Lyme disease, this hospital visit proved to be fruitless. They brushed my symptoms off like it was just a panic attack. For the record, I have never had a panic attack in my life. I have always been a stable individual who has followed a healthy lifestyle (healthy diet, exercised 4 - 5 days per week, etc.). This experience was not normal for me and, unfortunately it was about to get worse.

Over the next few months, the roller coaster ride worsened. The symptoms that I was experiencing began to manifest into something that could have broken the most strong and stable-minded person. I felt like my days on Earth were numbered.

Here are some examples of what I was experiencing:

• air hunger
• wheezing
• heart palpitations/irregular heartbeats
• headaches
• lightheadedness
• fatigue
• Fever (constant)
• hearing issues
• visual disturbances
• high blood pressure
• P.O.T.S. (Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome – basically, your blood pressure dropping while your heart races over 100 beats per minute after you stand from a seated or lying position)
• brain fog (word recall errors, confusion)
• acid reflux
• anxiety
• paranoia
• tremors
• muscle twitching (in legs, arms, and eyelids)
• tingling in my hands and feet, slurred speech
• joint, bone, and muscle pain (especially in my neck & ribs - common in both Lyme & Bartonella infections)
• Back Pain (intermittent)
• numbness and other neurological issues
• digestive issues
• sensitivities to almost all medications (pharmaceutical and natural) and some foods as well
• and I'm sure there are some that I am missing in this list.

With symptoms such as these, I'm sure you can understand why I felt like my days on this planet were about to end.

As time passed, my health continued to get worse, and no doctor had any real answers to what was actually happening to me. Each day became more of a challenge because my symptoms kept constantly changing, leaving me more confused.

Confusion to Enlightenment

As you can see, this was a very difficult time for me since, at the time, there weren’t any answers to why I felt so bad. My doctors suggested a number of different possibilities for my health issues, including, but not limited to, an autoimmune disorder, hormonal imbalances, and old age. They even suggested the issue was psychological.

These last two "suggestions" made me laugh, and at the same time I was annoyed. I knew that it was a cop-out for them to suggest that old age and psychological issues were the reason for why I felt so terrible. For the record, I was only in my mid-40s and my mind had always been perfectly sound. This just meant that they didn’t have answers. In addition, when considering the totality of my symptoms, a diagnosis of autoimmunity or hormone imbalances didn’t make sense as the root cause of my condition either.

Additionally, the brain fog that I was experiencing at the time prevented me from thinking clearly, which was one of the reasons why I went to see other doctors. However, I quickly realized that if I ever wanted to get better, I needed to fight through these symptoms and start relying on my own training and skills.

As I started to take matters in my own hands, I asked myself at some point, “Is this Lyme disease? Though, how could it be?” I was tested for it in the past, but the tests always came back negative using the current Center for Disease Control (CDC) testing guidelines. Well, as it turned out, the standard laboratory tests frequently tend to be inaccurate and as a result, many people who actually have the disease test negative like me. See my article: 3 Reasons Why It's So Difficult To Diagnose Lyme Disease..

At this point, I started to search for more information on Lyme disease. And, as a result, I learned a lot more information than I had ever been taught in medical school. With this new knowledge, I asked my doctor once again to test me for the disease and, fortunately, this time my test results came back positive and confirmed that I did in fact have Lyme disease.

By saying fortunately, that’s not to say that I wanted Lyme disease, but it’s better to know sooner rather than later so that treatment can begin right away. Delaying treatment can make the disease so much worse, which is one of the reasons why my symptoms were so difficult to handle in the first place. After finally finding out what was actually happening to me, it was such a relief. I wasn’t losing my mind. There was a real reason for the sudden change in my health, and now I could develop a proper plan that would address this issue.

The Great Imitator

It isn’t always easy to recognize the symptoms of Lyme disease. That’s because this disease can present in a number of unusual ways. This was true in my situation (see above – “The Symptoms”). As a result, many doctors won’t suspect that your symptoms are associated with Lyme disease, and may not even test for the infection.

New standards for testing and treatment regarding this disease need to be established so that medical schools can start properly teaching doctors. Until that time, many people will continually go either undiagnosed or misdiagnosed and mistakenly treated for some other condition, further delaying proper treatment.

I experienced this issue firsthand. Now, as I look back, it's not difficult to see how someone who doesn’t deal with this disease on a daily basis would mistake my declining health for some other health condition. I don't blame doctors for this confusion. Even with proper training, the disease can be very tricky to understand. That's because the Lyme spirochete (bacteria) has an uncanny ability to mimic so many other diseases. In fact, that’s why it's often called the “great imitator.” Anyone who has struggled with the disease, prior to getting an official diagnosis, can completely understand.

So many people get misdiagnosed with all kinds of other health conditions, including, but not limited to, Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, Lupus, heart disease, and thyroid and adrenal issues, among many others. This is not to say that all of these conditions are only caused by Lyme disease, but it should always be ruled out first as a possible cause.

If you suspect that you have Lyme, don’t give up pursuing a true diagnosis, even if doctors keep telling you that your tests are negative. As stated earlier, laboratory tests for this disease are known to be inaccurate and tend to miss a positive test result for the disease at least 50% of the time. Making matters more challenging, the accuracy of the tests for coinfections is even worse.

Lyme Has Friends

During the time of infection, Borrelia burgdorferi (the bacteria that's thought to cause Lyme disease) tends to be accompanied by at least two or more other microbes or coinfections (bacteria, parasites, etc.). This usually, but not necessarily happens, through the same bite from a tick that was also infected with the Lyme spirochete. This is most likely what happened to me. I tested positive for at least 4 other infections in addition to having Lyme disease, but there were probably more.

Dealing with numerous infections can make the recovery process so much more difficult. That’s because the coinfections usually complicate your overall sickness, leading to an increase in the amount of symptoms experienced, as well as making them much more intense than if you experienced one of the infections by itself. Together, these infections can cause much greater damage to your body while also adding to the complexity of getting a true diagnosis.

The Symptoms Aren’t Always Universal

Lyme disease symptoms have a tendency to vary from one person to the next, which I alluded to earlier. Most people do not typically develop all the same symptoms that I experienced, at least not all at the same time. Some people infected with this disease may not even have any symptoms at all – that is, not unless their immune systems become worn down at some point as a result of physical and/or emotional stress.

As for me, I was most likely infected with Lyme disease and coinfections a long time ago, which I believe is another reason why my symptoms were so intense. As stated earlier, if left untreated, these microbes have time to set up shop in areas of weakness within the body where they hide from your immune system (why they are often called "stealth pathogens"). Once they establish a foothold in these regions, all bets are off, and the disease can become so much more difficult to eradicate or treat.

Stress and Disease

I have known for many years that stress is one of the main triggers of disease, and it was the very thing that allowed the mostly dormant Lyme infection to activate in my body. Once again, the Lyme bacterium is considered a stealth pathogen and can sit dormant in your body waiting patiently for an opportunity to take advantage of a stressful time in your life, which can cause a weakening of your immune system.

A weakened immune system leaves you open to all sorts of diseased conditions. This is exactly what happened to me when I experienced my first major episode with this disease. It happened after an extremely stressful life event. Though, before you think this only happens with Lyme disease, it doesn’t. It can also happen with all other types of diseases as well.

And, to be clear, stress isn’t caused just by an emotional event. Stress on the body can also occur as a result of a poor diet (major cause), an injury, or being exposed to all sorts of environmental toxins (usually through your diet).  Together, these obstacles increase the overall stress on your body, weakening your immune defenses, increasing internal inflammation, and making you more vulnerable to disease.

Fortunately, outside of the unusually stressful event that I experienced, my lifestyle was, and still is, very healthful. Living a healthy lifestyle almost always helps you ward off most health issues. Though, once Lyme disease has been diagnosed, a healthy lifestyle alone does not ensure a full recovery. There are reasons for this, which I discuss in more detail in my other articles. Just know for now that following a healthy lifestyle is only part of the journey to recovery (a very big part). Nevertheless, if I didn't already follow a healthy way of living during treatment, I'm sure I would not have recovered from this disease.

The Silver Lining   

You may be saying to yourself that all this sounds awful, how could there have been a “silver lining”? At first, I would have agreed with you, but, over time and through a lot of healing and patience, I have come to the realization that everything in life has a purpose, even if that purpose isn’t always easily understood. Sometimes a purpose will come with what seems to be drawbacks, such as my earlier experiences with Lyme disease, but that didn’t mean that I wouldn’t be led to something bigger and better as time progressed. However, before I could allow myself to feel this way, I had to make some tweaks to my thought process.

I learned when dealing with a health crisis that there comes a moment when you must make a choice. For me, that choice involved my thought process. I had to be mindful not to allow negative thoughts into my head. Thoughts can be very powerful and, if not chosen wisely, they can lead you down a very dark path, especially when dealing with this disease.

The following is a list of some of the additional lessons that I learned along the way, which I now use to help many of my patients:

1. Do not trust the tests that are used to make a diagnosis of Lyme. Current Lyme disease laboratory testing tends to be unreliable and can cause a lot of wasted time before appropriate treatment is started.
2. There are alternative tests that are very helpful in determining Lyme disease.
3. What a patient tells you is the most valuable information in diagnosing this disease.
4. There’s nothing like firsthand knowledge. Not that I would want to do this with every disease, but having firsthand knowledge allows me to understand this disease much better.
5. There are a number of ways, other than conventional medicine treatment, to heal from this disease. This lesson was very important in my recovery, and I will be discussing this in future articles.
6. There’s so much more to life than what most of us believe. Life and time are so valuable, and living in the moment is so important. Experiencing a chronic illness can help you realize that very quickly.

I also learned that all my experiences gave me an opportunity to understand in some way what many of my patients go through when dealing with a chronic health condition. In addition, it provided me with more comprehensive and effective ways to treat people who have this and many other types of diseases. Knowledge and experience are both so important in helping people avoid unnecessary suffering and in getting the treatments that they need, whether it’s through naturopathic or conventional medicines or both.

Though, the most important lesson that I learned from having Lyme disease is that you always have to keep believing that you will get better. Even more importantly, convincing your mind that you are already better can be more powerful than any other medicine that there is to offer. The mind is very powerful, so I make it a point to always be aware of my thoughts.

Yes, to most people, this disease was an unfortunate occurrence, but as I just explained, I believe it has provided me with additional tools to help so many other people, and on a personal level, it made me a much stronger person, hence the silver lining.

More Pearls of Wisdom

During my most difficult time with this disease, I started to focus on those things in life that brought me joy. This especially included things that made me laugh. Laughter has been a powerful tool of medicine for so many people who have healed from sickness, including myself.

Meditation and/or prayer can be a very helpful tool when recovering from sickness. It helped me get through my darkest times, as it has for so many other people. Without it, I seriously don't think I would be here right now writing this article for you.

You may also want to seek counseling, but I’m not referring to your friends and family (that’s a no-no). Don’t get me wrong, family and friends care about you, but if you only talk about your health, especially if it is in a negative way, you will eventually burn them out. People have their own issues and can only tolerate so much of other people’s problems.

The counseling I’m referring to is that of a psychologist, religious leader, doctor, life coach, etc. These people are trained to help, and they will not only listen, but will usually provide you with strategies to help change your thought patterns and help you continue on with your life.

With all of this said, I’m not trying to tell you what to believe in or what to do, I’m just sharing with you some of the tools that I have used to get through the toughest times while recovering from this disease.

Dealing with chronic disease may not be easy at times, but once you recover, the way you look at life will most likely be completely different than the way you looked at it in the past. And, I bet it will make you a much stronger person as well.

Final Thoughts

Lastly, I recovered from this disease to the point where I was able to go back to work again (after missing a whole year). I have been slowly improving every day since that time. And I did it all through Naturopathic (natural/nature based) and alternative medicines. Full disclosure, yes, I still have some residual symptoms, but nothing like what I was feeling two years ago.

I would say I'm about 90% better, and still improving slowly every day. But it took a lot of willingness to learn new things, a lot of work, and a whole lot of dedication. And, I know that I soon will be free of any residual symptoms because I have the will and knowledge to make it happen. I believe with the right guidance, determination, patience, and a little faith anyone can be healed from Lyme and its associated coinfections, as well as from practically any other health condition.

Though, to start, you may want to find a medical professional with the necessary knowledge and experience in successfully treating people with these diseases to help guide you along the way. And, it's also important to have an open mind to alternative treatment which are different from the conventional ones that are currently offered.

For those of you who are experiencing difficult health issues, keep the faith and remember to work on being positive, even if it seems like there’s nothing to be positive about. It tends to be one of the most effective tools in the recovery process. Keep believing you will get better because the alternative is not acceptable. If you would like to set up a 15-minute complimentary consultation with me, click on the button below.

Believe that you can, and you will!

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