So I continue to be sick.
I finished my course of antibiotics some time ago. Within a week it was clear I was rebounding. I’ve been measuring my wrists and trying rings on my fingers, so I have objective measurements that show that the antibiotics helped and that things got worse when I was off of them. My GP is very, very popular, so it was hard to get in with him. I saw other people in his office, and they didn’t want to continue treating me with antibiotics. They wanted to send me off to specialists – first the rheumatologist, and if he wasn’t happy treating the probably-Lyme, then to Infectious Diseases. Certainly, they didn’t want me in their hands.
I finally got in to see my GP yesterday. His take on the situation is that either I have Lyme or I have some other systemic infection that is causing generalized inflammation. Regardless, the antibiotics bring down the inflammation and give me ENORMOUS benefits to my quality of life, so he is happy to continue treating me with them. Thank god. As of yesterday evening, I am back on the amoxicillin. We talked about options, and agreed that A) I am going to see an Infectious Diseases specialist and B) we are going to use an IV antibiotic. For treating Lyme, the oral drug of choice is doxycycline, which I react very, very badly to.* Because of that, I am taking the second line drug, amoxicillin. According to my GP, oral doxycycline can be as effective as the IV drugs (though that doesn’t match up with my recollection from researching this – my recollection is the IV drugs beat doxy), but amoxicillin cannot compete on the same level. That’s why he agreed to the IV antibiotics.
He’s still treating me relatively conservatively – not really high doses, not really long courses – but given all of my other conditions and my general sensitivity to medications, I think it’s for the best. If this round doesn’t take care of things, we’ll have to reconsider what we’re doing, but by then we’ll have a specialist on board to advise. I can only hope that the people in the Infectious Diseases department believe in Lyme as a devastating, long-term illness that can be hard to wipe out rather than the image some organizations present, where Lyme is supposed to be easily knocked out with a single, relatively short course of antibiotics. I do not want to continue living like this – I am in an enormous amount of pain, to the point where it’s hard to care about anything because existing hurts. Even lying on my very soft, comfortable bed hurts – if I lie on my side, my ribs and oblique muscles on the side that is up feel like they’re getting worked or stretched very hard and become painful (which makes me need to flip often), and if I lie on my back, my back and neck start complaining. And lying down is generally the most comfortable thing I can do. Right now, I need to wake up at least a half an hour before I need to start moving, so I can take a pill for the pain and wait for it to kick in. Best of all is when I wake up 2-3 hours before I need to get up: I can take the pain pill then, and go back to sleep. If I’m lucky, I’ll wake up again a little while before I have to start moving, because for some reason, the pain fades slowly if I am simply awake. I have no idea why, I only know how it works.
Blah. All of this pain, this frustration, and I have other things that need to be dealt with. I need to see my gastrointestinal specialist because my stomach has been very, very bothersome of late, and I need to talk to my sleep specialist because of a medication mix-up. I need to make an appointment with the Infectious Diseases person, who I am quite nervous about. I need to decide whether or not to cancel the rheumatologist appointment I have for Monday (my instinct is to cancel). I need x-rays and possibly an MRI done of my neck because I have pinched nerve symptoms; for that matter, the headache people wanted an MRI of my head, too, due to my headaches.
All of that, and I am sitting here in a cloud of smelly dog-fart, writing this post, because…well. Because I know people come here to read what it’s like to live my life, with my conditions and my service dog and my dreams and my fiance. Because on some level, this gives me a feeling of having some meaning, if only to get people to understand a bit more about what it’s like to be disabled but not in one of the ‘typical’ ways. (I tend to think of being blind, deaf, and having some form of paralysis as being the better understood forms of disability, though I know that even with those, the understanding of outsiders is horribly inaccurate.)
Nnf. This rambling, wandering, probably less-than-polite post is brought to you by probably-Lyme. (Why the hell is it always probably-something in my life?! I swear, not a single condition that I’ve got was easy to diagnose, and every stinking one of them was either missed or nearly missed by at least one medical professional before I found someone who got it, and then started getting the treatment I needed.) Anyhow, I think that’s intended to be and explanation, and perhaps something of an apology. I know I am neither at my best nor writing as often as I would like (by a long shot on the latter at least!). I am, nonetheless, here. That has to count for something.
*It starts with flushing in the face and on the chest, then moves to a kind of dazed confusion. Finally, my tongue and throat begin to swell, which is called anaphylaxis. It’s one of the most dangerous reactions to medications that exists because it will eventually make it impossible to breathe. Especially in someone with asthma (like me), there is potential for the swelling to go all the way down into the lungs, at which point you are DEAD – nothing they can do. Fortunately for me, anaphylaxis set in quite slowly, so they were able to get antihistamines and adrenaline into my system before my breathing was even labored.
Brilliant Mind Broken Body 