It’s About to Get Real

 

Herxheimer reaction: an increase in the number or degree of symptoms caused by a rapid destruction of antigens, cell particles, and toxins, that occur during treatment.

(Mosby’s Dictionary of Complementary and Alternative Medicine. © 2005, Elsevier.)

Now that we’ve been acquainted, allow me to read to you from my journal. Ahem.

Tuesday, May 24, 2016

All I can feel is the weight of being awake. My body is a pile of bricks in the bed, my arms mortared to the sheets. Knee bone crushing knee bone. Like a centenarian after Burning Man. But for the past how many nights—15? 20?—it’s been party on the sofa. My big adventures being the hobble to bed or bathroom as my ankles and knees buckle beneath me in a kind of chicken dance. When hubs is home, he’s my human walker. I cling to his neck as best I can until my arms eventually go numb, trying to coax my sock feet to glide beneath me. When these baby steps become impossible, I let him carry me, carefully navigating the narrow spaces of our San Francisco Victorian—even a light bump of my foot against the wall makes my bones feel like they will shatter. When did I become so delicate? But the fun really happens during the day when Jake’s at school: Yesterday, I took a mental snapshot of myself as I clung palms to the wall in the hallway on a desperate journey from couch to tea kettle. The trek, usually a mere dozen steps, was a real excursion. Sherpa unfortunately not included. Right now everything hurts, everything is weak. Every joint, every muscle. I’m having shooting pains in my fill-in-the-blank. To shower, I hold onto the window sill with my left hand while I shampoo with my right. Awkward. A hair dryer feels like the weight of the world. To brush my teeth I sit on the toilet, leaning out to spit over the sink, its rim poking into my jugular. Then there is oatmeal, once a food I loved now designed strictly to buffer the laborious effort of choking down the antibiotics and 14 different supplements (that’s not total pills). I had no appetite in the first place, and now I’m going to be sick. I’m exhausted. The day must be over. It’s only 9am. I’m going to work.

Here’s to Lyme

On May 4, 2016, around the dinner table at an Oakland restaurant, my family shared an eerie toast: “To lyme disease!” It sounds absurd, but let me explain.

For the better part of a year (really more, now that I think about it—but we’ll save that for later), I had been chasing answers to my various “issues.” They were relatively mundane at first and seemingly easy to explain: a stiff neck, no doubt product of my deskbound day job; headaches, low-grade enough to let me function but so constant as to pull a dull film over just about everything; poor balance (disappointing since perfect balance was my calling card as a little girl in Miss Laura’s ballet class); blurring vision and a charming nystagmus that pitted me against all of San Francisco’s evening commuter cyclists whose flashing lights taunted me toward panic attacks; oh, and panic attacks; and a nettlesome “whooshing” in my right ear that was either (a) just a symptom of the headaches or (b) a thoughtful heads up from the Angel of Death that I was about to have an aneurysm.

I don’t know why my mother calls me a drama queen.