Key Takeaways

Find a Functional Medicine Doctor

If you do not already have one, and you have only been seeing primary care doctors or specialists, find a functional medicine doctor. Look for someone whose website specifically says they work with chronic illness, autoimmune conditions, Lyme disease, and that they do advanced lab testing to get to root causes. Doing this could save you YEARS of searching and trying to figure out what’s wrong.

Look for Everything Else Going on

Once you have the right doctor, have them check for everything else they can possibly find - other infections, toxicities, deficiencies, autoimmune issues, or any other diagnoses that may be part of the bigger picture. You need to know everything you are dealing with, because if something is left undiscovered or unaddressed, it can slow down or potentially block some of the healing altogether.

Make a Plan for the Whole Picture

Once you know what you are dealing with, create a plan that targets everything you can, and in the best order. Sometimes the smaller or more straightforward issues can be addressed first and quickly, which helps reduce the overall burden on your body. When your system is not fighting so many fires at once, it may have more capacity to deal with Lyme and anything else major going on.

Step Back and Take Inventory of Your Life

Once you have started addressing the physical side, try to pull yourself out of the intense day-to-day reality and look at your life as a whole, as if you were a neutral third-party hovering above your environment: your home, job, relationships, thoughts, beliefs, and habits. Then ask yourself the below questions and answer brutally honest (even if it means you may have to make a change):

• Is the environment I’m living in helping or hurting me?

• Are there people I need to cut out of my life?

• Am I going against what I know deep down I should be doing with my life?

• Where have I been shrinking myself to make other people comfortable?

• What identity am I still clinging to, even though it no longer fits?

• What habits and beliefs do I hold, and are they helping or hurting my healing?

• Where am I draining energy?

• What emotions have I buried that need to be released?

• What truth have I been avoiding because it would require me to make a hard decision?

I have always been a deeply spiritual person, and this disease pulled me away from that. It drained me to the point where, when I looked in the mirror, I did not even recognize myself. It stripped me of my vitality, my joy, my hopes, my dreams, and my goals. But in reality, it was also forcing me to face some hard truths about my life and about myself. Deep down, I knew I was not living in alignment with who I was. Whether it was the environment I was in, a job that left me unfulfilled, some of the people around me, unhealthy habits that had replaced better ones, the eggshells I was walking on, the mental and emotional abuse I was enduring, the parts of myself that had stopped growing, or the “take care of everyone else first” mentality that left no real room to care for myself - all of it played a role.

I’ve come to believe that things happen in people’s lives to wake them up and show them they are not living in their truth, or in coherence with what life is really asking of them. You are meant to flow, flourish, thrive, and live abundantly, and for me, it was the opposite day in and day out. There’s a saying: “You cannot heal in the same environment that made you sick.” For a long time, I wanted to believe that did not apply to me. I kept taking action and holding onto hope that things would go back to the way they were before I got sick, even until the very end. But looking back, that saying was true for me too.

And I will be honest: if someone had asked me to reflect on all of this in the middle of the worst of it, when it took everything I had just to make it through the day, I probably would have spouted off a bunch of expletives at them. But that is exactly why I am sharing this now. If you can begin turning inward and take inventory of your life now, there are likely some things that need to change. The sooner you address your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, environment, and anything you have been holding onto that no longer serves you, the sooner you may find yourself more in coherence with life and with a greater capacity to heal.