Tag: Lyme disease awareness month

Try And Try And Try Again – – Or Not

Gardens in early spring are broken, dry, and brown, but if you look underneath the leaf litter and last year’s mulch, you’ll find green.

It’s the same every year. I snap off the old dead stems and seed heads and toss them into the compost where they rot themselves into nourishment for the new florae. I try to clear the way and clean the slate. I add new plants, divide the ones too big for their own good, and remove those taken by the cold.

Every year, I start over.

But front to back, and side to side, my plot is filled with stubborn invaders.

Gooseneck loosestrife is lovely, but I didn’t research it, just stuck it in the ground delighted by its drooping cluster of dainty, white blooms. I soon learned it’s not meant for containment but needs its own space and will choke the life out of everything else to get it. An apt name, it is on the loose and causing me immense strife.   

There’s also common speedwell – – not native to North America, it’s certainly made itself at home.  Every spring, I think I’ll just give in and call it my ground cover. But, every spring, I tug and tug and tug it out, knowing my efforts are futile. It’s long runners will produce new shoots faster than I can say, “shoot.” I apply mulch like a pillow to a face and hope against hope it won’t resurface.

So, my gardening season begins in a sort of panic. Pre-Lyme, I was a butterfly – – fluttering from task to task; soaking it all up, productive and happy. But, I’ve become a caterpillar. I inch along, stay low to the ground, always seated. I pull the garden cart – – two steps then rest, two steps, then rest.

I am defeated before I start. It’s a simple fact.

I know gardens are never finished, even for the healthy. That used to make me happy, but now I’m more acutely aware that my growing season is limited and feel pressure to get it done; make it perfect. I want to make the most of what I have, but spring and summer outpace me. I can’t keep up anymore.

Gardens are places of constant change and perpetuation. They’re filled with decay, death, and disease, but they heal, even resurrect.  A garden can be suffocated by alien life; its residents killed by ignorant gardeners who don’t bother to learn what their plants need.

But, they endure. They not only withstand fire and freezing but rise new and vibrant from the ash and snow.

Gardens keep trying.

I am also in a perpetual state of succumbing to disease and decay, then standing again in healing and new growth; succumbing, healing – – always starting over. There are days, when dry, brown, and brittle are all I know and days of flourishing, of feeling bright, full of color and hope.

But, this year’s different. After four years of treatment, and at the risk of being overrun, I decided to stop. I told my doctor I was taking some time off, that I didn’t want to spend the warm days as a patient, keeping appointments, and swallowing pills, or worse, those brown, acrimonious tinctures so popular among Lyme-killers. I have had the same symptoms for a long time, without change, so I need to think.

Can I live with some dry twigs? Develop a rapport with these invaders? Can we function as one?

Do I have to keep snapping off the brittle remains of my old self, making room for new shoots only to find them dead again? Must I continue plucking and pulling at invisible bacteria, viruses, parasites only to find them alive because their roots are many and strong? No amount of pruning or pesticide has destroyed my vermin. Can I just call them my cover? Pretend they belong?

Is it possible to simply look away?

I mean, they aren’t unobtrusive.

The fatigue crushes. Pushing a spade into the earth is not always possible.  Somedays, I’m too weak and  worn-out.

I bend to plant, then raise up gasping for air, heart pounding, hand to chest wondering if it’s a heart attack or just a Lyme-fake. Can I ignore this?

The depression is dark, an immovable mass; the anxiety like pieces of paper in a blender, swirling, coming close, but never hitting the blades. Some days in the garden, I spend in numb defeat, ruled by blight, sitting in slumped surrender. Other days, I cry, knowing it’s too much, and like me, will never be what it was. How do I keep planting hope when I’m buried? How do I take root and find peace, when I’m scattered?

The roaming, restless pain can’t find a place to land. It rears its head without warning, subsides without a hint. It aches, stabs, stings, burns, spasms, pounds, pierces, throbs. Sometimes, my insides are a bug zapper, overrun by bugs, constantly sending useless zings through my neurons; firing without apparent purpose and with miserable aim.

My brain is another world, where the barometric pressure is prone to dramatic shifts. It swells with damp clouds; blooms with a disorienting mist that steals words, thoughts, the ability to spell, converse, or feel things. Can I be fruitful in a stupor?

As I yank speedwell, and ponder what to do, a tiny green butterfly stops for a sip from one of the relentless weeds. I smile. My nemesis, is this little pollinator’s vast spread of sugary nectar. I’ve heard it before and have said it myself – – weeds have purpose. Struggle and suffering feed our character, nourish our souls, and point us to God. I could end this post on this inspirational note; could list the benefits of trials and the hidden blessings of chronic disease. In my writer’s brain, the butterfly is metaphor for mind and heart; for the way they discover sweetness in weeds. 

But, that rosy conclusion wouldn’t be an honest picture of how I feel, not right now. From my little stool, in my big garden, in front of me, I see a small circle, cleared of weeds, filled with multi-hued snapdragons. But if I look left, right, in front of, or behind those flowers, I see speedwell. I see gooseneck loosestrife. I see my perennials looking for air, for light, and finding little of either. I see small gain and huge loss. Clearing this circle was costly and painful, and it won’t last. The dragon slayers are waiting to move in.

This ring of frilly, radiant dragons represents a few good days and some small victories, but mostly, treating Lyme has been like pulling weeds with long, stubborn roots that worm through my body, finding and taking everything. Sometimes, it seems treatment only clears the way for a new batch as soon as the medicine stops.

A successful garden, free of weeds and pests, starts with healthy soil; invites good soldiers – – ladybugs, toads, spiders – – to stand at the ready and make quick work of those bugs that would do harm. It has just enough hours of sunlight to warm the ground without thieving all moisture. It catches the rain and draws it toward the roots; doesn’t hold it on the surface in pools and puddles that corrode.

My “soil,” my internal bed, isn’t healthy. I’ve been looking for green, digging in, doing the right things – – diet, exercise, sleep, meditation, prayer. Ideally, these actions should feed my defenders – – those good bacteria and antibodies. They should open a path for nutrients, supplements, and tinctures to reach the places where they can do their promised work.

But these things work until they don’t. Sometimes, they just don’t. And that’s the problem.

This disease keeps finding its springtime. It keeps starting over, forcing me to do the same. I just don’t know if I can keep it up, keep pulling internal weeds, when to the left and right and all around I see illness – – a snaking, complex, foreign system – – that has made itself at home and thrives at my expense.

This disease will never be finished. I know this, and I know that means my efforts to vanquish it will never be either. It’s one of the first things I learned about Lyme – – that remission and maintenance are the goals, not cure. But, I feel so weary thinking of a life spent clawing out small circles of open space, a life of choosing, over and over again, to try and get done what I cannot. That choice, repeated many times, is wearing me down.

Of course, I won’t give up my garden – – not yet. I’ll do the best I can and try to be content when my efforts to eliminate speedwell or all that strife fail. I’ll try not to look at them, but instead focus on the plants I choose – – the ones I’ll nurture. I’ll look at butterflies when they show up, if only for a moment.

But, my body . . . I don’t know. I am losing the drive to clear the way and clean the slate and am, perhaps, at a place of surrender to the reality of more weeds than snapdragons, more shade than sun, more gasping than breathing. I am understanding that I may have to dig a little deeper to find the green and that I may not be strong enough to do it.

Lyme Disease keeps trying.

 

Lyme feels like this.

 

Psalm 119:49-50 Remember your word to your servant, in which you have made me hope. This is my comfort in my affliction, that your promise gives me life.

 

I Have a Real Disease

I have a real disease.
I have five real diseases.
I have five chronic, incurable, infectious, real diseases.
They avoided detection by burrowing, wriggling, turning, twisting, and wrenching their way into the walls of my blood vessels, into my glands, heart, lungs, muscles, and joints. They have wrapped themselves in the very white blood cells meant to destroy them and used them as a cloak of invisibility; have crippled my immune defense by simply switching it off. But like all living things, these bugs have a DNA sequence, and turns out, all I had to do find them – – to break their secret codes – – was pee in a cup. Now my enemies have been laid bare. I have a list of names, and I’m going to call them out one by one; going to wave them like a flag and wear them like a badge of truth.
There is an insatiable craving within the Lyme community. Like a single-minded hive, we don’t need to say it out loud, we all sense it. We understand the dance of sagging shoulders, heavy sighs, clenched jaws, and frustrated tears.
Validation.
Beyond a cure, it feels like the thing we want the most. We are weary of walking away from conversations and questions about our disease feeling like frauds, knowing we’re not, asking ourselves if maybe we are.
At times, we are bitter. Greater in number than victims of HIV/AIDS, breast cancer, or Zika, we watch the concern and compassion with an ache in our chest. Not that we desire less for those victims. After all, we understand suffering and know what it’s like to lose our health. But it is disheartening to reveal our diagnosis to responses like, “Well, did you have a blood test?” or “Did you see a tick?” If we seem to set our shoulders and tighten our jaw; to snap out a short answer, it’s likely because those questions imply doubt. Imagine asking a cancer patient if he’d had a blood test – – if he had proof.
At times we are jealous. Before a single case of Zika had made its way into the United States, a request went out from the White House for 1.8 billion dollars to fund research and education. We, on the other hand, are more than 300,000 thousand strong per year and still struggling to be heard. We cry for help, but it falls on deaf ears because we reside behind an invisible wall of ignorance, greed, and closed minds that continue to deny our existence. We pound our fists and shout our pleas anyway, but this feels like an awful secret that, try as we might, we cannot seem to reveal.
We have an “awareness month” during which we bombard our Facebook and Twitter feed with scary stories of Lyme victims whose hearts have needed replacing, who wake up completely paralyzed, who were institutionalized for psychiatric disorders only to learn they had Lyme on the brain. We plaster the faces of Lyme-infected celebrities on social media in hopes their name recognition will lead to our affliction’s. We blog; typing, deleting, typing in hopes of finding the right words to describe a fatigue that’s more than fatigue, a brain fog that’s more than a fog, and pain that travels from joint to joint, muscle to muscle, and coats are skin. Our special month is May, when most begin to bask in a new spring. But we know it as a dangerous time. Visions of poppy-seed-sized tick nymphs fill our heads while we obsessively check for them, slather our skin in repellent, and our clothes in permethrin.
Like cancer, Lyme disease eats away at our insides, the treatment makes us so much worse initially that it has to be given in stages, and the best we hope for is remission, not cure. Like HIV, it disables our immune systems either to the point that we get sick with everything else, or we get sick with nothing else because our bodies, already overwhelmed, cannot respond. Like Zika, it is vector-borne and can cause birth defects, miscarriage, and still births. Though most cases are transmitted via deer ticks, the bacteria that causes Lyme itself has been identified inside the guts of mosquitoes, gnats, and fleas.
So here are my results, those secret codes revealed.
IMG_20170518_224418606
Five check marks represent what my chronic Lyme truly is. It isn’t really Lyme. Borrelia is the causative agent of Lyme disease, and I have it, but a tick’s belly holds a lot. The chronic version of the illness, is a conglomerate of hideous microscopic organisms, each one, classified by itself, as an infectious disease; each difficult to treat and never completely eradicated from the body. This is chronic Lyme for me. This is chronic Lyme for everyone who has it.
So take us seriously because we know what we’re talking about. We know of panic attacks in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat, eyes open and bloodshot. We know pain that moves through the body like a rat in a maze; like millions of tiny lightening bolts. We know tired. So tired. The body winding down, every step like climbing the steepest hill; the lift of an arm to massage a constant headache too much effort. We know the loss of a mind. Roads familiar all our lives, to and from work, to and from the grocery, no longer recognizable. We know what it means to feel lost, unable to find the way home. We know racing hearts, the feeling of not having access to enough air.
So don’t be the person who asks about our illness, witnesses sorrow cloud our face, hears the catch in our voice recounting the loss of mind and body, and then casually mentions that you had a tick bite with a rash “a couple weeks ago.” Don’t wave off our warning to get tested and treated immediately. If you do, we’ll inform you that Lyme reaches the central nervous system within hours of a bite. Don’t laugh and say, “Well, too late for me, I guess” then walk away while we are left remembering days when we could not walk, laugh, or speak. Don’t be the mother who tells us your child as been bitten and has a rash, fever, and is vomiting; that your doctor offered antibiotics, but you turned her down because you felt it too “risky” for your child. Don’t tell us you consider a temporary course of antibiotics more dangerous than a lifetime of neurological damage and pain; a lifetime with a disease that has ended our life as we knew it. Don’t leave us perplexed, wondering how you can be so dismissive of all we have endured.
I say ‘we’ and write of ‘us’ because we are a community of sufferers. This is not just one person’s Lyme experience but the experience of millions of people around the globe so don’t think it unlikely you could one day join our group. Lyme has no trouble finding hosts. Know that if you have a multitude of symptoms, there’s a real chance it may already have you.
I have five diseases. They are chronic, incurable, infectious. They are real.
I have a real disease.
Lyme feels like this.