Tag: lyme disease

  • The Bay

    At my age a thought starts to emerge like a small moth flapping at the window: what will it be like to age, to die? It is not a great age, fifty-one, but it is an age where one can speak of experience. More than half a century to look back on, five times older…

  • Reality kicks in

    13. Day Forty-two You haven’t heard from me for a while, not since day twenty-seven and today is already day forty-two of this Lyme Diary. I’ve been concentrating very hard on two things: planning for next year and what I want to do when I’m healthy again (that’s real proactive positive thinking, or what we…

  • Learning to Fly

    12. Day Twenty-seven The observant among you might notice that the numbering of these posts has changed. This is because I changed them. All of them. Day One is the day I started writing about my illness in order to externalise it, as part of the healing process (along with all the pills, dietary changes…

  • Heal the World

    9. Day Sixteen Hey, I feel great. Almost no pain at all. Two whole days already. Probably because I stopped taking the Colestyramin. Or because I took it. Is it a good sign or a bad sign that there’s no pain? Was I having Herxheimer reactions (sign of bacterial die-off) and now I’m not? Well,…

  • This is it

    8. Day Twelve People look at me askance when I say how much I love Michael Jackson’s music. Except my husband who feels exactly the same. And now my son is in love with him too. He probably would never have bothered to listen to him had he not upped and died. We went to…

  • 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…

  • The Disease Path

    6. Day Nine There seems to be a major improvement in the neck. I’ll just ignore the fact that two new regions of pain – my hip and my coccyx – have taken over instead because I’m so glad to be able to move my head without being in agony. Small price to pay. So…

  • 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…

  • Steamed Pudding

    4. Day Five Yesterday I tried out the sauna therapy. Well, to be exact, I went with a friend to a hamam in Kreuzberg where they also have a sauna. For those of you who are not “Lyme literate” (you are in good company with 99% of the universe), you can also detoxify through your…

  • A Pain in the Neck

    3. Day Four This is not like your run of the mill diary. I’m not going to just write down what I did today. That would be worse than Twitter. This is a therapeutic diary. Xanthe hanging out her bacterially dirtied emotional washing. Not even Ariel can get it clean – we need some really…