I went to my very first Lyme Support Group on Thursday night. It was eye opening. In some ways, it reminded me of the camaraderie of the room where I went to get iv Rocephin for three months. It was nice being around other people who understand the struggles, the triumphs (large and small), the relapses and so on. I will definitely be going back.
Yet I felt a little like the odd duck, as the only one using a coil machine. I wasn’t sure how much to share about it, although the other folks seemed interested. They knew a lot about antibiotics (as I do) and more about herbs and other remedies (many of which I’ve tried). They were all still infected after many, many years, with no real end in sight.
That made me feel different as well. I may not succeed, but my intention is to eradicate completely Lyme Disease and all the other tick-borne infections from my body. I don’t want to be battling Lyme or attempting to keep it at bay for the rest of my life. I want a cure.
I wish, deeply, that someone in the medical device industry would figure out that a coil machine could be made cheaply and easy to use, and that the number of people who could benefit from it (and would therefore buy it) is both a huge and growing market.
I like to imagine a day when Lyme Disease treatment cost about $1200 for the machine that could be prescribed by a family physician. Or better yet, that doctors had coil machines in their offices, and that the test for Lyme (and other tick-borne infections, and maybe other chronic infections) was whether a person had a herx after being exposed to the appropriate frequency. How amazing would that be?
For now, I’m glad I’m off the antibiotic merry-go-round. I like to conquer my challenges, not learn to live with them.
History of Depression
I’ve avoided talking about my own psychiatric history on this blog because I’m not anonymous. (You can learn about me and even see who I am by checking the About page.) But I have a history of depression that was long and sordid, and quite horrible for my family to witness.
I wonder sometimes if having Bartonella, which I think I got as a child, contributed to how I responded to some traumatic events of my young adult years. I don’t really know.
Skipping all the details of how it happened, I ended up on antidepressants (and a handful of other psych drugs) for almost 5 years. But three years into the ordeal, after I’d been told countless times how I needed to take these drugs for the rest of my life, I had an epiphany. I didn’t want to be 75 years old and still taking the pills. My brain had worked, quite well I might add, for the first 21 years of my life. I assumed that it might work well again if I got off all the drugs. It took almost two years of withdrawal symptoms and a lot of negotiating with my psychiatrist to stop taking them. In the process I built for myself the life I wanted to lead.
It was an experiment. It was long before all the resources on the internet of how to come off drugs or exposés of how the drugs can cause suicidal tendencies or questions of whether they actually work long-term. I did the experiment on myself to see if I could “cure” myself of depression, or whether I would have to go back to square one and take drugs again. It was risky, but worth trying. I was lucky to succeed.
Eventually Lyme came and knocked me off the path I was on. Now, having had my life derailed a second time, I firmly believe that much more is possible than what has been studied in double-blind tests in medical clinics. I believe that accepting a life sentence of chronic illness is a failure of imagination. Not all of us will figure out how to get through to the other side of these illnesses, but every one of us has the opportunity to try.
I’m trying. I’m putting everything I’ve got into the effort.
Meanwhile, I don’t see myself as living with depression or managing it. As I got off the drugs, I took time to heal from the original traumas as well as the damage caused by the mental health system and drugs, and learned how to live outside the framework of mental illness. To meet me now, you would never guess what I’ve been through. I have a different perspective on depression (and other things labeled as mental illness) as transient states that may take up to a few years to pass through but that don’t have to be a life sentence.
I may have been lucky not to “relapse” (although that’s what my shrink said was happening). I may have been stronger than I originally realized. I may have been lucky this time as well, having run into another person who was having success with a coil machine herself. But I have hope for myself and my life. And I have hope for other people as well.
Coiling
I’m continuing the Bartonella program with increasing coiling sessions. Since the last post which details how I got started with round 2 (Please note that I’ve been coiling for Bartonella for over a year. This is not the way to start coiling for Bartonella at the very beginning of trying to kill the infection.), I’ve done the following sessions:
- January 24: abdomen 5 mins, chest 2 mins, back of head 2 mins, each side of head 1 min, top of head 1 min, each shoulder knob 1 min, upper spine 2 mins, middle spine 2 mins, sacrum 2 mins
- January 25: abdomen 5 mins, chest 2 mins, back of head 2 mins, each side of head 1 min, top of head 1 min, each shoulder knob 1 min, upper spine 2 mins, middle spine 2 mins, sacrum 2 mins
- January 26: abdomen 5 mins, chest 2 mins, back of head 2 mins, each side of head 1 min, top of head 1 min, each shoulder knob 1 min, upper spine 2 mins, middle spine 2 mins, sacrum 2 mins, each side of rib cage 1 min
The Bartonellla herxes have continued. I had my first really bad tension headache on Thursday (Jan 24) night after I started coiling my sacrum. The insomnia continues to plague me. My bowels are irritated, vacillating between constipation and loose stools with plenty of gas, and my abdomen has swollen up again, even when I’m not gassy. I find myself tired and restless. It’s as expected.
Categories: healing process, Herx reactions, using the coil machine
Tags: bartonella, lyme, symptoms
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Coiling for Lyme 
how do you know how long to coil and where? Do you have any dr. guidance on how to use the machine and how to expect you will feel after?
Doctors CANNOT provide guidance on this technique because it uses a machine that is not an approved medical device. I am doing this as a personal trial to see if what I have read about it works. I have had a lot of success and lots of setbacks.