LymeKnowledge

At some point during your treatment of Lyme disease you’ve probably experienced exaggerated symptoms… debilitating headaches, joint pain, fatigue, digestive problems, mood swings and brain fog, etc… or you may have some symptoms peculiar to you. At times you might try to shrug them off as part of the game in treating the illness, but on days when you’re relegated to the couch or bed, it makes you not want to treat the illness at all. What can you do?

Some thoughts on antibiotics and treating chronic Lyme… When I was first diagnosed in 2005, all I knew to treat Lyme disease with was antibiotics, so I went hard and heavy right away. After taking doxcycline orally for about a month and not noticing any positive results, I asked my naturopath for a PICC line. She refused, citing that it was too drastic and dangerous, so I went to another doctor who would do it.

During the procedure to insert it, the hospital staff unwittingly jabbed my heart with the line, and I started losing blood pressure on the table. They kept me for observation for about an hour and then I drove myself home. Later than night while asleep, I rolled over on it and I thought I was going to die when I experienced something on the level of a heart attack. I didn’t die and believe it or not, I actually got a second PICC line inserted a year later and I resorted to painful intramuscular injections of Bicillin when the PICC lines didn’t have any lasting effect. The doctors I was consulting at the time only knew of antibiotics as a Lyme treatment. When you only have a hammer in your toolbox, you tend to think the solution to every problem can be achieved through hammering a nail.

On Saturday, January 23, 2016 the Ticked Off Music Fest held its fifth event since 2013 and its first event off of the contiguous US mainland. It was hosted in a location that most people would think to be the last place where Lyme disease could appear… the island of Oahu, Hawaii.

Even in the Lyme community, Hawaii is thought to be a bit of a “safe zone” where no ticks exist and incidents of infection and Lyme patients is nil. I admit to being of this mind when I got a call in the fall of last year from two Lyme patients living on two separate islands in Hawaii, inviting us to host an event there.