Infection

7. Day Eleven

Infection creates inflammation; inflammation is war: dangerous enemy pathogens invade the body and encounter a defence system that attack and fight them. War in the body. If the body conquers the pathogens then the infection is over. If the pathogens conquer the body, then you die. That is the analogy that Dethlefsen and Dahlke use in their book “Krankheit als Weg”.

The problem is not the pathogens. They are always there. The problem is that we can’t live with them, when they get into our personal territory. They are the aggressors, the invaders. But it doesn’t help to wage preventive war, as Bush would have us do, killing anything that moves with disinfectants and insecticides, just in case it might get in us. You can’t live in a pathogen-free world.

The answer is to develop immunity, a defensive defence, by keeping the body healthy enough that the pathogens cannot survive in such a world and surrender. Pathogens don’t invade healthy bodies, they go for the weak points. So far, so good. Any doctor would subscribe to this.

But what role does the psyche play in the health of the body? Is the body’s immunity weakened when there is an inner conflict? Dethlefsen and Dahlke would have us believe that in not allowing ourselves to open up to the conflict, we open ourselves up instead to the enemy: the pathogens. And the place that they settle on to infect can tell us more about what our weak point is and this helps us to understand the underlying conflict.

Here’s my problem: Lyme disease shifts around the body attacking joints, muscles, organs, the nervous system, the brain, the skin. You name it, Lyme attacks it. So where is the weak point? The body is supposed to be the visible expression of the consciousness and each part of the body represents different psychological substance, emotion and a problem field. So if there is a full-body attack, what does that mean?

Added to this is the nature of the disease. Apart from it being unrecognised or even denied, it represents a pioneering field in science, a relatively unknown disease that is little understood. It is a disease where the carriers are not only under attack from within but also from without, because they are misunderstood and rejected by the medical community, ostracised, disbelieved and branded as hysterical. Pioneering diseases lead their carriers to build supportive communities and encourage each other to realise “they are on their own” when it comes to medical or formal support. They become exotic creatures that even their partners can’t really understand, but only others with the same disease.

I remember meeting another patient in the doctor’s waiting room, looking at him and knowing that he had Lyme disease. Sure enough when he was called, he got up and his gait told the same tale that mine does. In the ensuing weeks we meet every day to be attached to a drip and began to exchange experiences and information. There was an immediate bond between us that would never existed had one of us not had Lyme disease.

So is Lyme an all-out war rather than a simple inner conflict? Are we fighting on every level of consciousness, with all our emotions and involving problems in every corner of ourselves? Is the complicatedness of the disease symptomatic of the nature of our underlying problem, so difficult to identify, impossible to know it is there except for the evidence of the raging battle. It can also disappear to all intents and purposes and fool you into thinking you have won, only to break out again later with a vengeance. Insidious, sneaky, more like guerrilla war than full-out on the battlefield with uniformed soldiers and the Geneva conventions in play.

Looking for clues, I dug out the last piece of writing I could find from before the tick bite. And it was called “The Exploding Bomb”. It sounded like I knew there was something about to come. But I had no idea it would take place inside me. And of course the other thing that happened shortly afterwards, was that I got pregnant.