Category: Uncategorized

Boring Lyme to death

This blog post is going to be a real snoozer.

Rest is one of the most powerful weapons I’ve found in fighting Lyme Disease. So I’ll try to liven up the topic by talking about things like power napping, mega-meditating and super sleeping!!!! Now didn’t those exclamation points perk you up?

Maybe the most important trick to dealing with chronic Lyme is never to let yourself get tired and rundown.

I came across an article a while back that described it this way – “It’s a question of whether your voltage is adequate for your immune system to keep it (Lyme) under  control.”

I like that. It’s about your voltage. And how do you keep your voltage high? By making frequent visits to your battery charger, otherwise known as your bed.

I’ve still got a way to go before fully getting over Lyme, so I spend a fair bit of time charging myself on my queen size battery pack. Not usually for very long. Five minutes here, 10 minutes there, a few times throughout the day. A little rest after meals, a little rest after exercise, and a longish sleep at night.

If I were working in an office, this would be more difficult, but I know a friend who spends lunch hours and breaks taking catnaps in his car. I remember another friend who installed a small couch in his office and did likewise.

Even when driving, naps can be managed. If I drive for an hour, I’ll find a place to stop and shut my eyes for five minutes. I could go farther, but I stop before I get tired, so I won’t get tired. Keeping the voltage high.

Experts suggest that getting to bed early can be extremely helpful for anyone managing a case of Lyme. They say the hours of sleep you get before midnight are considerably more valuable to your health than any other sleep hours.

Taking their advice, I’ve gradually pushed my bedtime back from 10 p.m. to 9:45 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. I’ll make exceptions for social events of course, but I diligently try to stick to a regular lights-out time whenever possible.

This is not a particularly exciting way to do things, but it works. Frankly, I just want to get fully well, and I’m willing to sacrifice all the late night TV in the world to reach that goal.

So you may be thinking that anyone doing this sort of thing might as well become a monk. I don’t think that’s necessary, but I find that it’s a good idea to take a page from the monk’s playbook and meditate regularly.

Following their lead on living a peaceful, restful life would also be sure to give Lyme a hard time. Come to think of it, I wonder if monks get Lyme disease. Hmm.

I do a very simple 20-minute meditation exercise once daily. It’s called “Soften and flow”, and it works, reliably shifting me into the parasympathetic nervous system relaxation response if I’m not there already. You can find tons of other meditation approaches on the web.

So that’s all I have to say about sleep, naps and meditation. You could say I rest my case. Anyone still reading? Anyone still awake?

LDI: Part 2. On hold

For me, LDI started out well, and I believe it’s going to end well.

But lately, it hasn’t been going very well,  so for the reasons I’m about to share I’m taking a break from Low Dose Immunotherapy.

I’m not sure why, but at about four months into treatment, the positive trend I had been enjoying started to shift. I hoped this would quickly pass, but it didn’t. I’d feel a bit better, then a bit worse, or maybe a lot worse.

Some days were okay, others dreadful.  “This reminds me of something,” I thought to myself. “The year when I first got sick with Lyme.”

Before going further, I should briefly explain LDI to those not familiar with it. It’s a treatment for Lyme disease and co-infections developed two years ago by an Alaskan doctor, Ty Vincent, that seeks to improve patients’ immune system tolerance and effectiveness. Many have seen fantastic results, and the use of LDI is rapidly spreading among Lyme physicians.

But while response has been mainly positive, some patients have had mixed results or even seen their situations get worse.

After investing a significant amount of time and money in LDI, it was hard to admit to myself that I was starting to go backward health-wise and that I had to do something about it.

Fortunately, I chose the right something – antibiotic herbs. I started with a microdose and gradually upped it from there. I’m happy to say that I’m now feeling a whole lot better.

I realize that Dr. Vincent says patients had best not take microbial killing protocols while doing LDI because that makes it more difficult finding the correct dose, but sometimes you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.

I didn’t think it would happen this way, because, as I said, my LDI adventure had a good start.

My first dose was a fairly standard 15C (doses are diluted homeopathically and contain a minute amount of dead microbes). I had moderate flaring the first week or so, but the symptoms weren’t problematic. Following this came about a month of feeling pretty well, a bit better than I had been feeling in the months before starting LDI. Then came a couple of weeks where things slid a bit, although that was barely noticeable.

This is called a mixed reaction. I felt a bit worse when flaring, then a bit better afterward.

Because I had flared,  the LDI rules said I had to wait at least seven weeks for the next shot. My doctor weakened the dose to 17C, and again there was some flaring, this time milder, and again lasting about a week.  And again, I then experienced a month or so of feeling pretty well, followed by a couple of so-so weeks.

I hadn’t hit the magic target dose, but overall I was making progress. Until just before I was scheduled to take the next injection. I woke in the middle of the night feeling a bit nauseated, and my doctor decided later that morning to delay the shot until that cleared.

Good call. That bit of nausea turned into a two and a half week flare that I had an awful time shaking off. When I did, I received an 18C injection.

Again, a week or so of flaring followed. But then there was only one week of feeling a bit better. Following that, I felt like the flare had come back. That added up to nearly a month of nausea, body aches, and a general malaise to a degree I’d hoped I’d never experience again.

What went wrong? I’m almost positive it wasn’t some flu, because no one I was in contact with had anything like that. And I’ve had enough Lyme flares in my life to be almost certain that this was the culprit.

My main theory is that I was biting off more than I could chew. The LDI doses are homeopathic nosodes of Lyme and co-infections, and the purpose of a nosode is to stimulate the body to fight the microbes. I also found it interesting that an energy medicine practitioner I know said he was seeing strong evidence that LDI patients he worked with were significantly reducing their loads of the Lyme bacteria.

So I think I was killing more Lyme than my body could comfortably handle. It may have been a cumulative thing where I reached a tipping point where I could no longer manage the die-off nearly as well.

I believe winter was also a problem. I live in Canada, and even mild winters like this one mean that my immune system gets a lot less help from sunshine and fresh air and a lot more challenge from spending extra time indoors and from having to deal with the various colds and other bugs that circulate this season.

For the time being,  I’ll continue taking antibiotic herbs. But the reason I decided to try LDI  was because it has the potential to bring me from a point of being shy of fully well to being fully well. So I plan to resume LDI sometime in the spring when conditions seem more favorable.

For some people, LDI works right away, like magic. But it’s my sense that the majority of patients find it a winding road. That’s certainly what my path has been like, and I’m hoping that the bumpiest part of the journey is now behind me.