I have Lyme Disease...and I bite
06 July, 2005 :: 9:26 a.m.
I don't actually know if I have Lyme Disease and I realize that it's supposedly not something that can pass from human to human, but I still think that'd be a great tshirt for getting customers to leave me alone...
I really do not dig house-sitting for my parents. Back when I was still in school and even after I'd graduated and moved out for a while, I didn't really mind it, but now I've got my own place and my own shit and that's where I want to be. Not in a house that has changed so much since I moved out that I can't find anything; not in a house that no matter how much vacuuming gets done there is fur on something as soon as you turn around (though being around animals is actually nice if only they didn't shed).
On a totally unrelated subject, all the tests I've had done on me in the past few weeks (EEG, CT scan, various blood tests including Lyme disease) say that I'm totally fine. Funny, I don't feel fine. Initially I didn't think there was a chance in hell that it could be Lyme disease...but after looking into it a lot more, it fits every single stupid symptom I've been having--and this isn't a case of me reading the list of symptoms and then suddenly thinking that I had them all... I didn't know shit about Lyme disease other than it was caused by tick bites until a few weeks ago. My mom and Lacey's mom both said we should look into the possibility of it being Lyme disease and I went, "No, no way is it that because I haven't been bitten by a fucking tick and I'm not an outdoorsy person so how in the hell?" (Plus, I was thinking of normal ticks and the movie Ticks with Seth Green and Alfonso Ribiero (sp?) and I knew nothing like that had been attached to me...but a deer tick is roughly the size of a poppy seed, so it's possible I could've missed that)
So Lacey's mom sent a few links to Lacey, she looked them up and told me that I should really take a look at them because it sounded like everything I'd complained about. So I did and everything fits...so of course my doctor, who brought it up as a possibility, doesn't think I have it and would rather believe that I've mysteriously come down with something like 3-5 different diseases all hitting at once. And the test is incredibly unreliable, but he'd rather take that at it's word and run all these other tests and set me up with a neurologist. It just seems like common sense to me that if a patient comes in with a list of symptoms and there's one disease that could explain them all, or there's like 4 that could each be causing a few of the symptoms, you'd check on the one disease first, right? Especially when the one disease is treatable (at least early on) with fairly basic antibiotics... I'm not a big fan of over-medicating the population, but if a patient has all the symptoms of Lyme disease and the test is unreliable and the treatment is very basic antibiotics and the longer you wait to treat the Lyme disease the harder it is to get rid of and may leave lasting problems, why not just give the patient a prescription for frigging antibiotics? If they start the medication and things continue getting worse, you can go with the, "oh, you have 38 different diseases that all started presenting symptoms around the same time," theory.
Iris from work gave me the phone number for the Lyme Disease Association which has a lot of information on doctors and symptoms and all that junk...she had the number because she's taking a friend to be treated for Lyme disease--a friend whom Iris said was on medication for four different diseases that she didn't have because apparently her doctor didn't think she had Lyme disease either.
Hey, I'm not a doctor and I may very well be wrong...it could be neurological and not caused by Lyme disease; it could all still turn out to be one bitch of a pinched nerve like I originally thought (ok, originally right after wondering if I had a brain tumor or a blood clot) or maybe it is 12 diseases all attacking me at once...who knows? Not me and apparently not any of the doctors who've listened to the symptoms and said, "Hmmm, strange," or, "Hmmm, that's weird."