Clammy Lydia

5. Day Seven

It slipped my mind to tell you about the results of my blood test on Day Three, didn’t it? I probably needed time to digest it myself. Actually, I can hardly believe I walked out of there without getting them to make a copy that I could take home with me and study at my leisure. Instead, I tried to memorise it all. I didn’t even take notes, that’s how stupid I am.

Apart from the fact that she used words like “enormously high levels” and “across several bands” without going into details or explaining what bands or what levels, I heard one thing really loud and clear. Chlamydia. Or as I prefer to call her – Clammy Lydia.

Now Clammy Lydia and I are old friends. I knew her before she even had a name, before she was even discovered, back in the very early eighties when Sheena Easton was singing “Modern Girl”. I had her lurking in my plumbing for two full years before she was bopped on the head by a randomly found antibiotic. But not before I was well and truly turned inside out. You can read all about how I felt at the time here: “The Elusive Wormy Germ”.

The thing about Clammy Lydia is this: she is usually a sexually transferred bacterial infection. Take a look at Wikipedia. Now without wanting to reveal much about my sex life here I can divulge this much. You know that I had sex because I told you I got pregnant, remember? But that’s about as far as it goes. You’re looking at a very married woman here. The bed-romping days with all and sundry belong to my dark, murky youth, way back in the 20th Century, even before AIDS was known about. So my question is this: what was that tick up to? Was she sexually active? Was she living up to our Benny Hill-type prejudices about all things Swedish?

It took me more than an hour of googling to find it in black and white, buried deep in a German article. Here’s a bit of German gobbledeegook for you:
„Chlamydien werden – ebenso wie eine Vielzahl weiterer Erreger, etwa Borrelien, Babesien, Ehrlichien, Rickettsien, Yersenien, Leptospiren, Coxiella, Bartonellen, Francisella und FSME – häufig durch Zecken übertragen“1 .
Put that through Google Translator and you get a very passable translation:
„Chlamydia is – like many other pathogens such as Borrelia, Babesia, Ehrlichia, Rickettsia, Yersenien, Leptospira, Coxiella, Bartonella, Francisella and TBE – often transmitted by ticks”.

Whoah, that’s a lot of infection for one tiny little tick.

By the time I was approached from below by my tiny little tick, as far as I was concerned Clammy Lydia was long gone and forgotten, like my whooping-it-up youth. Little did I know that the tick had more than one infection. Actually she had three, because Bartonella was thrown in for nothing – three for the price of one.

The upshot of the consultation was this: the antibiotics hadn’t worked and now my diagnosis had been tripled. Strangely enough, I didn’t strangle the doctor, I remained calm, left the practice and went for coffee for a friend. YES COFFEE! I know, I’m still drinking coffee. It’s the only unhealthy thing I still do! And it tasted LOVELY! So give me a break!

Somewhere in there I read that Lyme is a “pioneer disease”. That means that we lucky ones who get to have it are out there pioneering for all the patients who come after us. We get to try out all the whacky treatments and stare down disbelief. We get to march out front holding the banners and trying to drag the medical community screaming and kicking along the road we are forced to travel. Back there in the eighties, noone knew who Clammy Lydia was either. She was called “Pelvic Inflammatory Disease” in women or “Non-Specific Urethritis” in men. Whenever she was whipped under a microscope she vanished into thin air. And get this: between the Chlamydia and the Lyme disease, guess what I had? Endometriosis. That’s another one of those diseases where medical science can see no profit in researching it further.

So it looks like I’m stuck with being a pioneer for medicine. I work for the doctors in every millimetre of my life, internally and externally. The question is – do I get to go to heaven?

1 Brouqui P et al.: Guidelines for the diagnosis of tick-borne bacterial diseases in Europe – ESCMID STUDY GROUP REPORT European Network for Surveillance of Tick-Borne Diseases – Diagnosis of tick-borne diseases. Clin Microbiol Infect 2004; 10: 1108–32