That Which Doesn’t Kill Us Is Liable to Make Us Nuts

This is my brain on Lyme.

Mindfulness is the key to happiness no matter how sick (or broke, or isolated, or victimized) we are. At least, that’s how the story goes in the many books on Buddhism, neuroscience, and meditation Husband and I are reading/listening to pretty much around the clock these days in our absurdly self-conscious quest for peace of mind no matter that we’re waist deep in shit. But you know something? The mind can be a real bitch when it’s mindful that it’s waist deep in shit, especially when it’s mindful of its own mindlessness.

Are you still with me?

It may be because I’m still a poser of a meditator—after a full two months of practicing, I still have to rely on Headspace’s British Andy to talk me through my 15 minutes (clearly I am not enlightened)—but I can’t escape the irony of seeking contentment through being mindful of my hurting body, my jagged breathing, my yo-yo-ing emotions, and my sometimes disturbing thoughts.

Day 6: The Scene in Which She Shakes Her Fist at the World and Then Hides Under the Covers

Today may have been my sixth of ten days of treatment at the West Clinic in Pocatello, Idaho, but it only took about three days for the staff at West to figure out that I’m a special case.

And I don’t mean that I have a special case of Lyme disease. Nope, I have a moderate case of Lyme (4 out of 10, Dr. J says) and, next to Jake, I am, as far as I can see, the second healthiest person to sit tethered to an IV here in the last six days. Rick, an elderly father who’s being treated for seizures induced by his many stroke medications, is in far more dire shape. And Rori, a woman about my age who’s lost her voice to Lyme and gets around with a walker, has it way worse than I do, and she’s even here alone. And yet, I’m the special case: the mental spaz who can’t seem to turn off the waterworks in the IV lounge until they finally move me to a private room, more for the sake of the other patients than for me, I presume; me, the nutcase who had a panic attack after neural therapy so now the hypnotherapist has to make special late-night and early-morning cell phone calls in a desperate attempt to get this particularly difficult patient through the necessary treatment.

See, I had imagined that days of IVs, cell therapy shots in my butt, and Procaine and B12 shots in my skull would eventually wear down my phobias of needles, of doctors, of cruel and unusual punishment strange medical therapies; I had imagined that I’d walk into week two with the nonchalance of an old pro—You’re busy, Misty, I’d say, I can do my own IV today. But nooo.