Thoughts on my 11 Year Lyme Anniversary
Originally posted on Lyme Light Fight:
11 years ago this week I contracted Lyme disease. I was 15 years old, energetic, happy, looking forward to college, and planning to be a missionary to Thailand. I traveled a lot that summer and never found the tick bite, so it’s unclear when exactly I was bit. It was most likely at my high school summer camp, given the woodsy nature of the camp. I came down with a flu-like illness with bad body aches. But unlike the flu, the pain didn’t go away. Instead it grew stronger and more symptoms sparked up over the next 5 years before I was diagnosed. I became more and more sick as the bacteria was spread unchecked to every bodily system. By the time I finally was diagnosed with Lyme disease, I had colorful spots and large white opaque shapes in my blurred vision. I had night terrors, anxiety, and sleep paralysis, when I wasn’t fighting insomnia. I had moderate to sometimes severe joint pain in every inch of me from my hands, to my toes, to everything in between. I had terrible nausea and dizziness. My muscles sporadically twitched at random, I had hot flashes and chills. I had difficulty controlling my hands to produce legible letters; words and letters would be in the wrong order as I wrote. Both my longterm and short term memories were affected, as I sometimes got lost on my…
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