The Early Signs
Little clues, strange patterns, and things that didn’t add up yet. I’ve gathered these moments here in the event they are “things that make you go hmmm…” with your own journey.
Although the floodgates didn’t burst open until late 2018, there had been signs that something wasn’t right with me for a long time - years, even decades. I’m part of the 30% of people who don’t get a bull’s-eye rash, so I never knew when I got bit. Something tells me it may have happened in childhood, and that the little things over the years - things I could have easily brushed off as something else, may have been the Lyme bacteria quietly working its way through my body’s systems.
I was fatigued and lethargic at a young age, enough that I went to the doctor and found I had a low-functioning thyroid and was put on medication. I had chronic strep throat that should have been cleared up after many rounds of antibiotics but it persisted for years. I had OCD, and I was depressed. Yes, even as a young person, and I’ve had depression most of my life. My memory hasn't been great either. I have few memories I can recall - not just from when I was little, but all the way through high school.
As the years went on, I got headaches a lot, dizziness, nausea, and a bloated stomach that came on randomly. I also had knee pain and hip pain that would come and go, and occasional numbness in my toes. Noise sensitivities popped up too, along with a few instances of rage out of nowhere - yelling and slamming doors, which is completely unlike me. I couldn’t concentrate. I felt like I was in a fog. I would forget words I normally used. At some point, frequent urination started which was odd - like getting out of bed every 10 minutes at night. And even still, I chalked it up to stress, or random things that would probably go away, or to me just getting old. Yeah, in my 30s lol!
With all that said, I’ve also always been a fairly fit person. I played softball and volleyball in my younger years, and through much of school. I liked to work out, mostly weight lifting, because endurance was never my thing. And I was the type of person who watched what I ate and tried to keep meals balanced. I was going to 24 Hour Fitness three to four times a week with a friend after work. We’d do HIIT classes with weights, Zumba, Turbo Kick classes...you name it. One thing I noticed which made a lot more sense years later, was that anything endurance-related left me absolutely dead afterward, while everyone else in the class would say what a great workout it was and seemed totally fine. I’d overheat, get a headache, and feel like crap pretty much the rest of the night when I got home.
With the strength training classes, week after week, I could never increase the weight on my bar, and my muscles were literally burning - a different type of burning, and in a bad way - like they were on fire and my legs were going to collapse if I didn’t stand up real quick. To be clear, I was not squatting hundreds of pounds, more like a bar with maybe 5 pounds on either side. I didn’t understand that either, because there were new people in the class who you could tell had never worked out a day in their life before, and yet week after week I watched them increase their weight.
The point is, there were things that didn’t make sense and signs that things weren’t right all along. Whether it had to do with the Lyme bacteria or not, I don’t know. But again, it’s just a feeling I’ve had for a long time - long before it reared its ugly head.
Doctor! Doctor!
Yes, of course I went to see doctors while all this random stuff was going on. But as many of us know, it’s not like they can spend more than 13 minutes with you before sending you on your way - usually with some type of pill. My concerns that something more serious was going on were always dismissed, and many of my symptoms weren’t even acknowledged, let alone connected together as clues that something else was brewing.
I was, however, offered psychiatric medications, and one doctor was convinced I had an STD. He was pretty young and weirdly aggressive about it. I told him this isn’t an STD but he was absolutely certain. So I got the tests, and what do you know? Negative, like I said. I will never forget that interaction …you always remember the way people make you feel.
If someone had just gone a little deeper, could something have been found at that point? Maybe not Lyme disease specifically, but perhaps some of the smaller things that had already started forming - that little snowball that was making its way down the mountain and picking up speed.
Now, I’m not saying there isn’t a place for Western medicine. Of course there is. But if you need someone to look deeper than high blood pressure or the flu, and you need more than 13 minutes of face time, you may have to look elsewhere. And by elsewhere, I mean beyond specialists too. Will a specialist tell you that yes, you have joint pain and hand you a pill for it? Probably. But are they going to figure out that the joint pain is connected to an underlying stealth bacteria wreaking havoc on your entire system, causing inflammation, and migrating wherever it wants? Probably not.
To be honest, it's been a challenge to work through the feeling that the medical community failed me. No offense to the doctors out there. I know you save lives and truly want to help people. I think this is more of a systemic healthcare issue in our country - rushing through patients, throwing a pill at the problem, keeping the machine moving, and padding the pockets of insurance companies.
....and don’t even get me started on the American "food" system!
