My Best Friend

I seem to have a bad habit of either being too sick to update my blog, or being too thrilled about feeling OK that I'm too excited to sit at the computer. Unfortunately, I know that leaves you waiting anxiously to find out what I'm doing (*insert sarcasm here*).

But before I indulge your curiosity, please take a moment to look at the blogs I'm following, and click on Jessica's Journey. Jessica has Chronic Lyme Disease with some really serious complications. She's been fighting these issues for years now, but she is starting to make progress thanks to a procedure called "Ketamine Coma". If you click the link, you can read all about it, and all about Jessica.

What you can't find there is why Jessica matters so much to me, personally. As you know (if you managed to read the whole story), I've had Lyme disease since I was three years old, but I was diagnosed with Lyme and several other tick-borne diseases when I was 21 (four years ago). Treatment helped initially, but I relapsed, and suddenly I went from being a college student with a 4.0 to being crippled due to illness and losing my job. It was that second time around, when I felt like all hope was lost, that Jessica entered my life. I joined a Lyme Disease Awareness support group on Facebook, which she created, and we became fast friends. (That's the same group I now help administrate -- a group with 9,629 members who are Lyme Literate, thanks to Jessica. )

Jessica brought people into my life who were able to provide real solutions to my quickly worsening problems. She introduced me to my hero, Dr. L, and personally instructed him to take excellent care of me -- and he's never failed to do so. When I started to have strange neurological symptoms, she made sure I got an appointment with Dr. B, who figured out that I had severe epilepsy as well as narcolepsy, and found new ways to manage my treatment that minimized the number of pills I had to take and the side effects from them.

More importantly, however, Jessica brought her goodness, love, faith, and hope (as well as a shocking depth of knowledge on tick-borne diseases) into my life. Her support, candor, advice, and ability to laugh when anyone else would have cried -- both at her own struggles and at mine -- provided me with a light in the darkest hours of my illness.

Jessica needs our prayers right now. Please, read her amazing story, and tell your friends about her. She saved my life... I want to do everything in my power to make sure she gets hers back, too.

Love y'all,
Cat

PS: In case you are reading this for an update about me: In July, I switched from Minocycline to Amoxicillin as my antibiotic (ABX). Almost immediately, my life turned around. I went to the beach on Hilton Head, SC, where I started swimming, playing tennis, walking, laughing, laying in the sun, listening to music, playing golf, shopping, horseback riding (I actually fell off!) and doing a thousand other things I never dreamed I'd do again.

Most of all, I started to hope; to think of the future and to believe I might have one.

Unfortunately, one month later I managed to get swine flu. I didn't even know it was in America, let alone that there was an outbreak in my town, so I didn't seek treatment right away. I did get Tamiflu after about 12 days, but my immune system was already down by then, and I picked up another infection. I suffered through that for another week before calling my doctor and telling her I'd now had a fever for almost 20 days. She said I had to go in for a physical exam. I did, and the doctor said that I was clearly sick (my temp was 100.1 degrees), but she had no idea what was wrong with me. So, she put me on a really nasty ten day course of Biaxin, a very strong antibiotic in the macrolide family. It makes me feel icky, but it does seem to be working.... hopefully it won't work so well that it starts agitating my underlying conditions, like Bartonella and Mycoplasma -- I'm in no mood for a herx!

I am very much looking forward to being done with all of this. I highly recommend not getting swine flu in the first place -- WASH YOUR HANDS!

I'll write updates about what's new in my personal life soon -- but I wanted to get this post up ASAP so you could read Jessica's story and start sending positive thoughts her way!

CCC.

Need to know

Who am I? Ok, so it's not all that deep, but it's essential information if you plan to read this blog with any frequency. Here are the basics:

1. I am a difficult woman.
2. I have chronic, late-stage, disseminated neuroborreliosis.
   

Those two statements are related, but if the latter were to be resolved I suspect there would be no change in the former. This translates to:

1. You want to stay on my good side (hint: I don't have a good side).
2. Pretty much every system in my body has been fucked up by tick borne diseases. I'll elaborate on that ASAP.

So why have I taken the plunge into the Blogosphere? Well, my decision to chronicle my journey stems from a desire that I believe is dormant in all of us, waiting to be indulged; a will to record, for posterity, our experiences with the vast unknown. But don't get me wrong. I know this blog is, first and foremost, for me. It is the one thing still under my control; a domain where my desires reign supreme. It is a place where I can tell my story in my own voice, the way I see it, without the distorted lenses of other people's eyes.

Consider me "unleashed".