My Life, the Past Five Years

Today I want to share with you all an excerpt from a recent school presentation. Most of this I have shared with my blog readers in the past, but here I go again.

My Life, the Past Five Years

Lyme disease is spread by insect bites, most commonly ticks but also fleas and mosquitos. Any tick borne pathogen can be spread to the host in less than a minute. It does not take a tick 24 hours or even several days to transmit a disease. The most common symptoms are migrating joint pain, headaches, dizziness, brain fog, and swelling. There’s a catch, most common is a very loose term. Lyme disease can mimic over 300 diseases and can imitate nearly every symptom known. Recently it has even been found to cause tumors, certain cancers, and 8 out of 10 Alzheimer’s cases. 

Lyme disease is a lifelong disease, it has no known cure. About 80-90% of patients never reach long term remission. The ones that do reach remission commonly have a port placed in their chest or PICC line in their arm, and receive intravenous antibiotics several days a week, multiple times a day. There are very few clinics that treat full blown chronic Lyme disease in the United States. Most doctors do not believe the disease exist, for reasons unknown.

 

To pursue remission and stop the damaging effects of Lyme disease, I traveled to Wichita, Kansas. I chose this clinic because it is the only clinic in the United States that utilizes only natural methods to heal the body, better than before contracting the disease. There is only one other clinic like this in the world, the Paracelsus Clinic in Switzerland. I have stayed at the clinic a total of three weeks this year and will return for another week in August. I have reached about an 80% improvement; it is expected for me to reach remission this year.

As a child with chronic disease I have had the opportunity to learn so much more than others. I now have a Master’s degree in using Google, I can find the health section at the library walking backwards with my eyes closed, I learned compassion and understanding, and most of all I learned the importance of faith.

At 13 I had to become my own doctor, because no one knew what was wrong with me. It was my own persistence and research that brought me to where I am today. After reading countless books, internet articles, and watching every video I could find on YouTube I came to the conclusion I would not use antibiotics as a long term treatment method. In the last five going on six years of research I have not found one case of Lyme that has been cured without damaging, lasting side effects from antibiotics.  On top of that it takes on average 3-5 years of intravenous antibiotics to bring chronic Lyme disease into remission.

No Lyme literate medical doctor will tell you this. Only looking at other people’s experience will you find this information.

Lyme disease is not a disease recognized by most doctors, not just in the United States but all over the world. Every Lyme patient has to search, ask around, and dig for that one doctor within reach that could possibly help them find relief.

One thing I learned for sure, without a doubt is patience. It took four years to find a doctor that had enough experience under his belt to not just relieve symptoms, but to bring me too remission-possibly to the point of cure. Time will tell.

Lyme disease has totally and completely changed my life. The last normal, scheduled, teenager program I was involved in for fun was Boy Scouts. I was the first in my patrol to reach the Rank of Eagle, I was the first to completely fill my sash. When I was 14, I had to quit that too because I no longer had the energy and focus to move further in the program. I have stayed a member and go to meetings whenever I am needed, but that’s all I do for them.

It took a long time to realize this, but my life experience truly is different than the standard. I have not missed out on anything; I have been given my own unique opportunity.

Any teenage male from the ages 12-18 can join the Boy Scouts and earn a Merit Badge. It’s a black and white process, fill out the paperwork and do the required activities-you just got yourself a badge. Having a chronic disease is anything but black and white. Every day is different; I do not know what I will be doing or what will even be able to do until the minute I do it. Even throughout the day things change, it’s normal to wake up sick, perk up at some point, crash, and then reach what seems to be a steady medium. This day is not a literal 24 hour day, 80% of Lyme patients are insomniacs, and this whole process could cycle for 36+ hours without ever sleeping.

Even on the worst days where I never left the bed or stayed up for two days in a row, I had my faith. I knew everything would be okay. God’s timing is perfect; it takes time to learn life lessons. They cannot be taught in school, because school is only a program, it cannot teach you the every up and down swing life can and will throw at you.

I would have never learned compassion for other people, suffering in ways that cannot be seen by those who have not had the experience themselves. I would never had seen how perfect Gods timing really is if I didn’t have a reason to look for it. Waking up feeling dead is quite the motivator to look!

I would never have seen the groups and droves of people with chronic illnesses that have no one to reach out to them. Most importantly of all, I would have never seen the reason to be the one to reach out, if I hadn’t been there myself.

 

When I wrote this for my presentation, my goal was to not show people that all suffering is worthless and horrible. Everything happens for a reason and through all things there is a lesson. If you can see the reason for your own life, you will always be able to pull yourself out of depression and you will always conquer you battles.