Hi, everyone.
I recently had a positive serology test for borellia. My story won't be unusual:
Long time with a strange and sometimes very random seeming bag of symptoms that had the doctor at best lost at worst thinking I was maybe a touch on the hypochondriac side -- extreme tiredness, shortness of breath after very little exertion (I'm in my mid 40s and was generally at least day-to-day fit enough for life), often felt 'air-hunger', strange headaches (resulting in suspecting TIA once after unusual single pupil dilation), fevers, sweats, pains randomly, some extreme and landing in me in hospital with no diagnosis, mental tiredness, forgetful, joint pains ... and so it goes, as you all know. Thyroid didn't show any increased issues initially (I was already taking thyroxine for under-active thyroid), standard blood tests were otherwise normal, apart from low Vit D which is common.
Taking a large dose Vit D diid give me at least some working energy, but not at all restoring me to my self.
I live in England in a place not at all known for Lyme Disease, but I was racking my brain as to what was going on and it came to me I'd been bitten three times on my ankle over 2 years ago, and then everything made sense. I had some knowledge of the disease because of a friend in America who's been suffering with it for years.
Armed with this insight I went to my doctor and asked for a fresh round of all blood tests, including for auto-immune indicators, and .... Lyme. He was more than a bit un-convinced it was worth testing for saying it wasn't a thing in our area, but he agreed, maybe for a quiet life.
That was a few weeks ago. Crazily they're so unfamiliar with it that when the blood test showed positive for borellia they didn't phone me up but sent a routine letter saying my results showed nothing urgent! And then, sadly my treatment was delayed more because he didn't realise a Line Test was the same as Western Blot Test and ordered a Western Blot even though he had the results he needed from the first test they did at the UK public health lab which was actually a thorough and good full test for serology and Blot in one go.
So here I am. A few days into my antibiotics, Doxycycline 100mg twice a day. 4 week course.
I was just at the verge of neurological issues. Some had started actually.
There's a lot of negativity I've seen about using abx as an effective long term solution. I'm hoping they work for me, but I know there's a lot of work to do, like getting on top of my doctor to check for co-infections, finding a good LLMD here in the UK, which is proving difficult -- the leading clinic is so busy they're not accepting new Lyme patients.
I also want to get my head around this biofilm business. I saw a post by tj1 that I'm going back to look at now. I also want to see if I can find a full list of co-infectios that need to be tested for. I'll be searching the threads for that and other things. (I've made a start on the co-infections list and found the places I've seen online don't all have the same lists.)
Thanks for the site. And best wishes to all.
John