Body Update
Last night was a doozy. My headache extended into my neck. I couldn’t sleep for hours, even as I lay in bed with my eyes closed trying to get comfortable. When I finally fell asleep, I woke up over and over with disturbing dreams. (I lost my only pair of shoes and searched until I woke up.) I finally got in a few hours between 6 and 9:30am. But when I woke up, my hands and feet were killing me and the pressure in my chest returned. Now, at noon, I feel a bit of a headache coming on and I’m still waiting for my chest to stop aching.
I spent some time poking around the internet and the books I have in my house. From what I found, the pain in my hands and feet are signs of Bartonella. I heard or read somewhere that when Lyme is very active, the symptoms of the other diseases are masked. It was originally true in my case. I didn’t start having the hand and foot pain until I had treated the Lyme with antibiotics for a long time. I’ve heard of similar experiences from other patients I’ve met: one day we feel fine, like we’ve got a handle on the Lyme and we get hopeful; the next day we get a symptom we’ve never had before and it hurts like crazy. Anyway, the hand and foot pain comes and goes for me. Once it started, it never fully disappeared, except during the months I took Levaquin.
This is where coiling gets tricky. As a person trained in the scientific method (MS in Chemistry from Yale), I want to stick to coiling for Lyme until it’s gone, then start on the other infections. That way I can be sure about what is going on. But I also know that Bartonella grows faster than Lyme (or at least it cycles faster, according to my experience and what I’ve read), so I don’t want that to get a lot worse before I start treating it, assuming it’s already active. So I’m considering my options for the next few days while I let my body clean up the mess from killing Lyme bacteria yesterday.
Electric Cars
I watched Who Killed the Electric Car? last night (with the brightness and the volume on my Mac turned way down). It got me thinking about all the resistance in this country to non-pharmaceutical treatments for illness. I came away from the movie with the idea of inertia overpowering intelligence. Any large company or industry has lots of political and economic mass (as well as infrastructure) and like any large mass, it is hard to change the direction or speed it moves. Coil machines (and other electromagnetic treatments), Traditional Chinese Medicine, Homeopathy, Naturopathy, body work, supplements…all these have a place in restoring health and maintaining it in people with weakened bodies. But they are all fringe. The pharmaceutical industry has a lot of reasons and a lot of ability to squash the treatments that it isn’t selling, even when it’s own treatments don’t work that well.
Choosing not to be self-conscious
My last thought this noon is that I don’t like to complain. Those who know me well are often surprised to learn how much I’ve suffered and am still suffering. Part of starting this blog is to force myself to record my reactions to the coil machine, even though it is such a downer to pay attention to everything that hurts or doesn’t work on my body.
I started dealing with my initial bout of debilitating illness in February 2007 with the attitude that the human body is infinitely capable of healing from non-lethal traumas. My job is to provide the optimal environment, internally and externally, to allow my body to heal. I’ve assumed that I will completely heal, that one day every last symptom will be gone and I’ll go on to live a fuller life than is possible now. This healing process is an opportunity, on my journey through life, to learn about some aspect of the world and to develop compassion for the people I meet along the way.
Categories: healing process, Herx reactions, pharmaceutical treatments
Tags: bartonella, lyme, symptoms
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Coiling for Lyme 
Wow, Rose. This is wonderfully rich in detail and explanation. The details of your suffering are highly readable – tho’ I wish they were fiction. Thank you for sharing. Hugs.
LOVE the bacterial avatars.
Meah