More about Lyme

A Herx is when there is a massive die-off of bacteria and your body is suddenly overrun by toxins. Your system freaks out, because you are filling up with toxins faster than your body can purge them. Your liver gets overworked, your symptoms flare up, and you basically feel like you have a super flu times 80 million. In short, it sucks, and you never know how long it is going to last. Eventually, things even out, and then you come out the other side feeling better. But the journey stinks, and it is easy to think about quitting. This is why so many Lyme patients never make it through treatment - it is sometimes rather intolerable.

The most prominent feature of this Herx was a wildly gnawing, burning, pulsing pain that radiated from the base of my skull up over the crown of my head and down behind my eyes. My neck was unbearably stiff, painful, and made it hard for me to turn my head.  Every joint in my body hurts, and the bottoms of my feet still burn, tingle, and ache with more intensity than usual.  My ears are ringing on and off and have a buzzing sound in them, I feel lightheaded, and I am being graced with alternating waves of hot flashes and chills.  Mostly chills.  My bladder is on the fritz and my sense of urgency is out of control, when I have to go potty I better get there now.  I also see this with Natalia.  I have bloating and pressure and lower back pain.  I have low energy, light hurts my eyes, my brain is foggy and it hurts to think.  Imagine that, hurts to think.  I want to curl up in a ball on the floor.  Yet here I am at work looking every bit "normal."  No one would know I was sick by looking at me.  I was able to get through my 7:30am meeting no problem but inside my body is screaming.  I hope this pain ends soon. 

I am going to try to do hot yoga on Thursday, it's the only place that will help unless I had a hot tub which I don't.  A sauna would help but don't have one of those either.  Anything hot to flush out the toxins faster.   

Herxing can cause a host of stabbing and excruciating symptoms ranging from seizures, migraines, dizziness, relentless hours of crying and emotional outbursts, anxiety, heart rate issues, joint pain, inability to breathe, insomnia and episodes of rage and confusion. Because of its effect on the brain, Lyme patients may even hallucinate and suffer from memory loss or lose other cognitive functions.

Natalia herxes in other ways, she used to have seizures and now she is on a seizure med to control those.  She has outbursts of rage, fear of monsters/other creatures(halluciations?), accidents making it to the toilet, zoning out and dark circles under her eyes when Herxing to name a few.  Her Herx's are mainly focused in her cognitive functions we have noticed.  Her brain is effected where as mine is less in my brain more in my body.

Treatment is tricky as you can see there is no one size fits all which is part of the controversy on treating Lyme.  Doctors want everything to fall into a neat clean box, and with Lyme it's all over the place and less actually in the box. 
To learn more about Lyme you can watch the video Under Our Skin. www.underourskin.com/
If you have an Amazon Prime account you can watch the video for free online which I love to do every few months.
You can also look up YouTube clips or watch the trailer here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxWgS0XLVqw

The biggest thing I have learned it to stay positive.  It is really hard because sometimes I am too tired to snuggle Wade, read a book to Natalia or help Selena with her homework.  It's easy to get the "victim" attitude.  Why me?!
There is a reason.  I can beat this.  It won't beat me.  I was actually one of the lucky ones to have been diagnosed.  There are many out there who have been diagnosed with Fibromyalgia, MS, Lupus, Chronic Fatigue, Depression, Parkinson's Disease or the one I was diagnosed with, "it's all in your head." 

My sweet Lyme child.  My goal is to get her better so she can live a totally normal med free life.