Issues → July/August 2007 → Feature Stories →
Lyme Disease: One Woman's Journey
(page 2 of 8)
Whenever people heard that I had Lyme, they had stories to tell. That's how I learned about Lauren Lemay.
At her Gilford, New Hampshire, home, she sits on her deck looking out across the gentle view of the distant hills. For six years she has struggled with this sickness. "The day before I got sick, I ran 10 miles, played nine holes of golf, and then I painted the living room. That was my typical day," Lauren recalls.
Lauren, now 58, was an elementary school teacher, a long-distance runner, and a vegetarian for nearly 40 years. Health was her constant companion. "The next day, I was getting ready to go teach, and I just couldn't move," she says. "I was so tired, like nothing I ever remember in my life; I just wanted to sleep. I dragged myself to work, got through the day, and came home and slept and slept. And I was freezing. It was a hot day, and I crawled into a sleeping bag and curled up in a chair, shivering."
That was only the start. With increasing desperation, Lauren consulted 15 or 20 doctors and was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, Crohn's disease, anorexia, depression, and empty nest syndrome. When she ran out of physicians in her local area, she consulted doctors at Boston's Lahey Clinic and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. When she found no relief there, she continued to seek. She visited a Chinese doctor, a psychic, a Venezuelan shaman, and a woman who conducted business out of a yurt in the middle of the woods in Western Massachusetts. "I was ready to try anything," she says.
She wasted away to 94 pounds and could hardly walk: "I was so scared. I would see it in people's faces; I'd be hanging on to my husband's arm, hanging on to the grocery cart. Me, who was always on a bike or running up a mountain. By that time, there was so much wrong with me, I felt I was dying."
Lauren was tested for Lyme half a dozen times. The results were negative -- but Lyme blood tests are widely known for both false positives and false negatives. In New York, finally, a "Lyme literate" physician, or "LLMD," determined that she had advanced Lyme disease and put her on a doxycycline derivative. "I was on it a year and a half," she says. "The medication made me sick to my stomach, and I had to go off it sometimes. But I'm so much better now. Now I'm off the antibiotic and seeing a Vietnamese practitioner in addition to my doctor in Portsmouth. I'm not all the way there yet, but I'm back to work part-time."
Lauren wasn't the only Lyme patient I met who has wandered helplessly through the narrow, darkened hallways of conventional and alternative medicine, seeking relief from their myriad symptoms. It turned out to be a rather common story, in fact -- one that stretches back in time some 50 years. During my research, I came across a book called The Widening Circle, by Polly Murray. Published in 1996, it tells the story of the early history of Lyme disease.
In 1956, Polly Murray, an artist and housewife in Essex, Connecticut, began to suffer an array of inexplicable health problems. Doctors couldn't find a cause. While she was pregnant with their second child, she and her husband, Gil, moved across the Connecticut River to Lyme, a pastoral place with views of the big river and of Long Island Sound.
A precise person, Polly kept a record of her family's complaints. By 1964, they had four children, all suffering from rashes, fevers, aching and swollen joints, and diarrhea. Visits to the doctor were frequent; relief was rare. In fact, thumbing through the symptoms Polly recorded throughout the 1960s, you might think you were looking at the notes of a severe hypochondriac -- except that her entire family was suffering from these complaints.
Reader Comments
Comment from Donna Zuk on June 6, 2008
I have Yankee magazine emailed to me every month, but in June last year I moved back to Connecticut after spending 2 years in North Carolina near my grandchildren and missed this article until now. I have been having weird ripping pains in my hands that heal in about 4 days only to return. I could hardly hold a pen today with sharp pains shooting in my hand whenever I tried to do normal activities. After a year of this, and it not getting better today after my usual 4 days or so of healing, I decided to go to the walk-in. I have lab work that I have to get done, and I noticed a Lymes disease test.
Funny thing I thought. Many years ago (16) a doctor tested me for hypothyroidism, Lymes, and Epstein Barr/mono. The Lymes and thyroid tests were negative. The Epstein Barr titer test was positive. I was diagnosed with Chronic Epstein Barr.
Years later after getting a tetanus shot, weird things began happening. Pain, severe pain, muscle spasms and muscle jerks spread all over my body, then 2 months later burning, boiling pain. Tender pain I used to call "it feels like raw hamburg pain." Then if I did some sit ups, I would have serious tender pain between my muscles and rib bones. I'd say, it feels like someone hit me with a baseball bat multiple times. My exhaustion for years continued. I would wish for death. I would cry from the pain and exhaustion. I didn't want to be in a relationship so they wouldn't have to deal with my limited life.
After seeing multiple doctors, I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia. I always feel sick. I have a hard time getting up in the morning and a hard time falling asleep, or staying asleep. I always hurt.
I came home tonight with thoughts of the meaning of my painful hand symptoms and what they might have to do with Lymes disease? I began my internet search again. Again I was reminded of another search I had done, and the tell-tale sign of the bulls eye rash. It's a funny thing because I had that once... (27 years ago) more than one on the same leg, so I counted it out. It was more than one area so it can't be Lymes. The Lymes test was negative, and there was also more than one bulls eye area at the same time (and it didn't get better). Then I read on the net, you can have more than one even if there's only one bite.
Ok, so now I continue searching trying to find any type of bite that might have the look of my bulls eye. My bulls eye was not the red rash. I distinctly remembered mine were bruises. You can imagine after all these years of never mentioning it to a doctor. I am now a nurse, (and after 19 years of nursing at 50 years old going back to college because my repetitive 'injuries' and exhaustion is making life miserable if not impossible at times) I was not a nurse when I had these bulls eyes but niether was I taught about lymes disease in nursing... never mind atypical BRUISE-type bulls eyes! Thank you so much for this article, and please, please thank that nurse!
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