What is Lyme?
Lyme disease is a tick-borne illness. The Ixodes tick also known as the black-legged tick or the deer tick carries Lyme Disease. Ticks that carry Lyme Disease can also carry co-infection such as Bartonella, Babesia, Anaplasmosis, and many more. A tick bite has many different looks but the most common one is a red skin rash that looks like “a bull’s eye”. Lyme disease is rarely life-threatening but can affect your heart or brain if it stays unknown or untreated for a long period of time.
Symptoms:
3 to 30 days after a bite
Fever, chills, muscle and joint aches, headache, fatigue, EM (erythema migrans) rash.
Days to months after a bite
Headache, neck stiffness, facial palsy, arthritis with severe joint pain and swelling, pain in tendons, bones, muscles, heart palpitations, episodes of dizziness, nerve pain, shooting pains, numbness, and tingling in the hands or feet.
Diagnosis
When doctors are assessing patients for Lyme Disease they have to think about:
Symptoms of Lyme Disease
If the patient could have been exposed to ticks
The possibility that other illnesses could have the same symptoms
Results of lab tests
Lyme tests are designed to detect antibodies made by the body in response to infection. They can take weeks to develop so patients that got infected recently may test negative. Antibodies normally continue to show up on blood tests for months or even years after the treatment is gone, so a test won’t tell you if you are treated. Infection with another disease, including tickborne illnesses or autoimmune diseases, can result in false-positive test results. Some tests give results for two different antibodies: IgM and IgG. Positive IgM results are disregarded if the patient has been ill for around 30 days or more.
Treatment
There are many different factors to finding a way to treat Lyme. It could depend if you have neurologic Lyme Disease, erythema migrans rash, Lyme carditis, or Lyme arthritis. The most common treatment is to start with a couple of weeks of antibiotics like Doxycycline, Amoxicillin, or Cefuroxime. All of these antibiotics have side effects that go with them. Doxycycline: bruising, extreme sunburn, blistering or peeling of the skin, decreased appetite, and so much more. Amoxicillin: nausea, vomiting, skin rash headache, taste and smell changes, allergic reactions, and so much more. Cefuroxime: chills, fever, general feeling of illness or discomfort, headache, sweating, and so much more.
Post-Treatment Lyme Disease Syndrome
PTLDS is a condition that lasts for many months after treating Lyme. Not all patients experience PTLDS but it is unknown why they experience it. Some believe that the cause Borrelia burgdorferi causes an auto-immune response and creates symptoms. Auto-immune responses are known to cause other infections such as strep throat (rheumatic heart disease) or campylobacter (Guillain-Barre syndrome). Unfortunately, there is no proven treatment for PTLDS but patients usually get bet over time but it’s not fast and will take many months.
My experience:
I’m McKenna Cossack and I live in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I’m currently 14 years old. I’ve been struggling with Lyme Disease, other co-infections, and other health conditions for a couple of years now. I have had 9 leg fractures in the past couple of years from a lot of vitamin deficiencies because I have Celiac disease. I got diagnosed in 2020. Celiac disease is an auto-immune disease where the ingestion of gluten causes damage to the small intestine. Around the same time, I also got diagnosed with POTS (postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome). I never had energy and was passing out a lot from POTS. In the fall of 2022, I got diagnosed with RED-S. RED-S is relative energy deficiency in sports. It is a syndrome of poor health and declining athletic performance. This happens when athletes don’t get enough fuel from food.
In early June of 2021, I went to go see a functional medicine doctor. During the appointment, I told her all of my symptoms and I said “I feel like I’m aging faster than everyone” and she suspected I had Lyme Disease. I did a blood test and the antibodies came back positive so I started treatment. I started taking 60 days of Doxycycline and Cefdinir. Those lasted throughout the summer and put me through a lot. I could barely be outside because I was so sensitive to the sun that I would get horrible sunburns and my skin peeled off. I didn’t eat enough when taking my pills one morning so I threw up because they made me feel so sick. Once I was done with those I started treating my Lyme, Bartonella, and Babesia with herbal supplements. The supplements are small amounts of liquids that I mix with water. I increase the dosage of the supplements to a therapeutic level to cause the infections to die off. I’ve been taking them for about a year and a half and will continue to for a while.
Going through all this has been very hard. It’s hard to talk to people because they don’t understand. Many of these conditions affect your mental health so all of them together have gotten me diagnosed with depression and anxiety but I still try to stay positive!
Sources:
Comments