I came home from Netroots Nation with a bit of a cough. I house sat for a friend and spent five awful days in bed, getting up only to feed the kitty and check email. In retrospect her house has a serious mold problem, which I didn’t detect due to having the cold when I arrived.
Add some furnace like temperatures, a few trips to the gym, and suddenly I find myself in what is almost certainly a full blow Lyme flare up.
This is not what I needed this month …
First, some symptoms. My eyes got dry, but that could be allergies. Then digestion got a bit funny, but that’s been the norm for me post Lyme – I don’t make enough cortisol, even with the supplements I take, and that means I have to be careful about what I eat. My neck is stiff, but at first I wrote it off to going back to the gym. But the nasty metallic taste in my mouth, the pressure and fog in my head? That can’t be anything but Lyme.
This is what had me in the summer of 2007 – arise, stagger around, eat, then two hours later lay down because I simply couldn’t keep my eyes open. Being young, strong, and in fantastic shape at the time, I fought it for about six months. This all caved in at the end of 2007. Long time readers here may recall my adventures in 2008, summarized in When I Was Sick.
I am … not afraid. I had to check to be sure, hence the ellipsis, but this is the case. I am mostly annoyed. I know what this is now, I know the steps to take to resolve it, but they take time, money, and I was busy being a Progressive activist when this popped up again. OK, the flash of irritation has passed; time to get to work …
Diet: Eating is problematic. Your body makes cortisol, a flood in the morning, declining into the afternoon. When you eat it’s an inflammatory process. If you eat and you don’t have enough cortisol it’s a miserable, painful experience.
I was on hormone replacement therapy for a while as part of the Lyme symptom treatment. Cortisone, aldosterone, and I was able to work again full time. I got off that a while back, switching to a natural supplement that boosts my adrenals. This has mostly worked for the last year, until just a few weeks ago. Lyme causes adrenal stress and this is the source of a great deal of the suffering attendant with a flare up.
So … eat smaller amounts, drop a lot of things from my diet, extra supplement, and it’s unpleasant, but tolerable. I lost thirty pounds in 2008 and I’m going to go that way again until this is resolved – when eating leads to hours of discomfort weight loss is a breeze.
Your digestive tract has a lot of muscles. If things are inflamed, muscles cramp up, and then things get ugly fast. There’s nothing like Miralax aka polyethylene glycol, to take care of that. Kind of an odd counterpoint to an all natural approach, but it’s what works.
One thing I do not do enough of his probiotics, which are strongly recommended for anyone who has had the long courses of antibiotics required to get at those sneaky Lyme bacteria. I spend the time and money mail ordering VSL3 because it has some properties over the counter probiotics do not. I have a friend who was dealing with IBS to the point where they thought a marrow transplant would be needed. VSL3 largely cured the symptoms within a few days and now, a couple of years later, her blood counts are actually going up, which is practically a miracle cure for that disorder.
Cognition: Lyme has been compared to having your head stuffed with cotton. A simple solution for this is 5-HTP. A bit in the morning and things just work better all day long. I took this while I was doing the hormone replacement therapy, but ended it at the same time, for no specific reason, and found it was the right thing to do. I’ll be picking it up again after I get paid tomorrow.
Pain: My neck is stiff, I’ve got joint pain in places that don’t normally hurt, but this is old hat for me. I’ve had arthritic tendencies since I was pretty young, I already take Tramadol due to damage from a crash in the mid 1990s, and I take SAM-e for joint maintenance and the other benefits it provides. I mention this in case someone new to the disease is reading and puzzling over what to do.
Do not be afraid to aggressively deal with pain. You need to be able to function well enough to walk the path to recovery and the chronic aches of Lyme just suck the energy right out of you. I used the last dose of Imitrex I had a few days ago and there are a handful of Vicodin in a bottle in the medicine cabinet, left over from a surgery long ago. I got into that supply once this week as well.
Mood: It sucks to have your life interrupted like this and constant pain changes your personality. I can not speak highly enough of SAM-e as a possible solution for this. It’s good for joints, liver, and mood wise it’s like swallowing sunshine – you feel the effects within a day or two, and as long as you’re not bipolar it’s all good. Those negatives that come with prescription anti-depressants just aren’t there with this one.
So that’s all about symptoms. As far as actually treating this I am taking a two pronged approach – I’m going to make an appointment ($700, overnight trip) with the Lyme specialist and I’m going to aggressively treat the symptoms and hope I can resolve this without resorting to antibiotics.