All day I’ve been thinking about priorities. When I worked, there was always more to do than time in the day to do it. It was a simple fact of life. I would figure out what most needed to be done and do that first. Sometimes I prioritized correctly, sometimes more urgent things would come up. No matter what, there was always the next day to finish whatever was the next most pressing issue. My big struggle was in training people to do some of my work as I took on more or larger projects
Since I got sick, prioritizing has taken on a whole new meaning. For the past several years, I’ve been behind on everything, from the dishes to the bills to correspondence to ordering the drugs and supplements. Even worse, if I don’t manage to do something on the day (or during the few hours) that I’m coherent and have energy, there’s no telling when the next opportunity will arise. It could be the next day or the next week or it might take three weeks during which tons more things will pile up. So I often have to choose carefully, knowing that my friends will be disappointed that I didn’t write or call back, that I’m going to run out of something and it won’t be delivered in time or that for one more day I’ll be rewearing some clothes that need to be washed. Lately, even though I’ve had more good hours and more frequent good days, I’ve discovered that I’m very slow and things take so much longer than they did before I got sick. I get slower and slower as the day progresses or as I wear out and need to nap.
I’m still learning how to ask for help. I always tell people with chronic illnesses or overwhelming responsibilities (e.g., parents): ask for more help than you need. I tell myself that, too. Sometimes I listen. Sometimes I just want to be able to do everything myself. But the reason I try to get more help than I need is that I’m usually juggling what needs to be done and don’t get to the things I want to do. That has changed a little over the past year partly because I’m in bed less and partly because I’ve given up on many of the things I thought I needed to do.
I say all this knowing that I won’t be able to answer the comments I get on this blog. I read all of them and appreciate your thoughtfulness. I take to heart your encouragement.
One question that two people asked me was about Herx reactions. I’m including a link to Wikipedia, which gives a brief description, but anywhere you look it up, you’ll find something interesting. My basic explanation is that certain infectious microbes are toxic to us when they die…so toxic that our bodies get backlogged in cleaning them up. Lyme disease is one of those microbes. Most descriptions give a short list of symptoms that come from the toxicity. I have found that I also get a general, sudden, acute worsening of all the symptoms I had before the die-off began. So it might include joint pain, back pain, tingling in my extremities, digestive tract disturbances, etc., in addition to the more typical headaches, fatigue, chills, lowered blood pressure and muscle pain.
The second coiling session
Tonight at around 7 o’clock, I coiled for 20 seconds at the Lyme bacteria resonance frequency. It didn’t give me the heart problem tonight. I did feel a headache coming on at around 9 o’clock and waited until it had the characteristic sharp pain in my eyes before I took a bile binding drug with a handful of sunflower seeds (to convince my gall bladder to eject some bile). The headache didn’t get worse, but it didn’t get better either. I’m having a lot of floaters in my eyes today, especially visible as I look at the computer screen. Earlier today I had a lot of muscle pain in my back. A heating pad for an hour and a half while lying down diminished that pain almost completely. I continued to rest for another two hours after that.
The only other problem is that I’m getting a funny muscle spasm in my jaw. I had reduced the amount of supplemental minerals I was taking because of the kidney stone. I’m thinking that I need to add them back in because the muscle spasm and muscle pain both decrease when I take enough magnesium.
One final note: hair loss. One thing I liked about certain antibiotics, including Rocephin, is that I didn’t lose so much hair from day to day (or really shower to shower). Before 2001, I had thick hair. Now, it isn’t so thick. Thank goodness it’s curly so it still looks okay. Anyway, since I stopped Rocephin I’m losing more hair again. I’m hoping that when enough of the bacteria in my body die I won’t have to worry about this anymore.
Off to bed. Hopefully to sleep.
Categories: healing process, Herx reactions, using the coil machine
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Coiling for Lyme 