I was feeling bad again. After a year of mostly feeling better and experiencing only minor flares, I was starting to go downhill again.
I was hitting a wall of fatigue every afternoon. I was so tired as soon as I put my kids to bed. I would pass out on the couch by 9 pm while watching TV with my husband, but then I couldn’t stay asleep once I went to bed.
I was experiencing anxiety. At times I would feel jittery or I like I couldn’t take a deep breath. My chest heavy from an invisible pressure.
I was having problems with my memory. I blamed mommy brain, but my youngest was 2… how long did mommy brain last anyways? I lost words in the middle of a sentence. I would be speaking normally, knowing exactly what I wanted to say and then suddenly the next words would disappear from the sentence. Sometimes I could find the word again after umm-ing and ahh-ing. Sometimes I couldn’t recover the word at all. I would move on to the next sentence hiding my embarrassment, feeling as though I sounded like an idiot.
My monthly cycle had grown long, and was extending to anywhere between 35-40 days. This may be TMI, but a woman’s cycle is a pretty good measure of her health.
I was loosing a lot of hair. A lot. I started to hate washing my hair. The many wet strands clinging to hands after a shower was frightening. I hated brushing my hair because of how much hair would be tangled in my brush afterwards. I constantly felt the familiar tickle of fallen hair on my bare arms. Lost hairs strewn all over my shirts. I found my discarded hair everywhere. On the floors of my house, in my car and around my desk at work. Dry shampoo and messy buns became my best friends. It was everything I could do to avoid washing or brushing my hair. That might sound gross, but the fear of losing anymore hair made me barter with myself on a daily basis. I knew I would be bald if it didn’t stop. I kept waiting for the hair loss to stop. It didn’t.
It was depressing. It scared me.
I figured my psoriatic arthritis was trying to flare up. Maybe my thyroid was finally having serious problems. My thyroid had been a little wonky, trending back and forth toward hyper and hypothyroidism but never committing to either, since my youngest son was born. I knew things weren’t normal, but I didn’t know why.
When I was diagnosed with my autoimmune disease, psoriatic arthritis, in December 2017 I made the decision to control the disease as naturally as possible. I changed up my diet and consulted with a functional medicine nutritionist for supplemental support. My various lifestyle changes positively impacted my life and made a big difference in my symptoms and how I felt overall. Then in the summer of 2019 I started having issues severe issues again. I began working with a functional medicine doctor who specialized in getting to the root cause of health issues to treat her patients. One of the first things she tested me for was mycotoxins, or toxins from mold exposure. The test came back positive. All of the molds toxins I tested for were commonly associated with mold from foods. I revamped my diet again and took a short term round of medication to treat the mold toxins. I started feeling a little better, but then I started crashing. That was when all the mess listed above hit me.
My doctor didn’t understand what was happening. I should have been getting better. Considering everything I was doing, she expected drastic improvements. She knew something else was wrong. She had inquired about the possibility of Lyme disease before, when we first started working together. I practically laughed at her. Lyme disease? That’s the thing when you are bitten by a tick, right? No. There was no way I had Lyme disease. I was never bitten by a tick. I never got the bullseye rash. I live in Florida. In the suburbs. I like to be outside, but I wasn’t hanging out in the woods or anything. No way I had Lyme.
During a doctor’s appointment in September, I was on the verge of tears. I wasn’t getting better. I was hurting. I was scared. I had tried for so long to stay off of medication for my autoimmune disease and I reality of possibly needing it was closing in on me. My doctor brought up the possibility of Lyme once more and said she was going to test for it. She had seen numerous patients in her practice who tested positive for mycotoxins also test positive for Lyme.
I had the blood work done within a week and then I waited. I wasn’t worried about the Lyme diagnosis. I knew that it would be negative. I just wanted to know what was really causing me to feel crappy so I could move one with whatever round of supplements and vitamins I needed to fix me.
On October 17, 2019 I got my answer as to what was going on. As I scrolled through my lab results I saw a few things I knew would need addressing; I had antibodies for both my thyroid and candida, my estrogen was off the charts high and then there was the Lyme.
I tested positive for Lyme disease.
