My Lyme disease experience

Thanks for the suggestion I write of my Lyme experience. I had a very bad, virulent case of Lyme disease in 1987 that was caught fairly early, maybe 9 months after the tick bite. I was given a course of heavy penicillin shots daily for 10 days and fully recovered.

A little more detail. I was bitten on Shelter Island, NY when I went for a hike while attending a church camp. I had no idea I had been bitten and it took me 2-3 years after to finally find the bite – in inside of my ear. Eight months after the bite I had a high fever for a week and in the months after that began to develop soreness in my joints – elbows, shoulders and knees. A psychic I communicated with regularly told me I had Lyme disease. I went to a Reiki practitioner who worked on me and all the soreness went away except for my right leg which immediately swelled up to double normal size.

I attempted to get a Lyme disease test from several doctors in the NY-NJ area, telling them I had been diagnosed with Lyme disease by my psychic and was refused with several telling me there was no Lyme disease there, the lower Hudson River Valley of New York and northern New Jersey. As many now know this area has the highest prevalence of Lyme of any area in the US, or probably the world. One doctor who refused me a Lyme test made me go down to NYC and get a sonogram for a blood clot. Idiotic. One doctor did relent and said that just to humor me he would add a Lyme test to the many others he ordered for me.

The doctor called me and told me I had the highest Lyme titer the lab had ever seen and I should undertake a course of antibiotics. I thought about it for 3 weeks or longer with the doctor calling me regularly and work colleagues dropping newspaper articles about Lyme on my desk. I told him I had no money so he ordered me a set of 10 pre-filled mega-dose syringes filled with penicillin and told me I could pick them up at a pharmacy and to find someone to give me a shot every day. By this time my leg had gone stiff and I had to use a cuff cane in order to walk.

It was quite interesting creating people who would give me daily shots. I began to get better right away but had a lot of residual swelling in my right leg that lasted for at least 3 months afterward and I had some paralysis in my calf. Interestingly, my guru from India came for his regular summer visit about that time and he severely injured his leg tripping. But my own leg went back to normal at that exact time and I always attributed this to Gurujii taking on my illness and working it out in his own body.

In 1989 I moved to California and in the first year or so hooked up with a group that had a sort of renegade medicine man from Taos area doing real Native American sweat lodges. I did one and noticed that even more residual paralysis left my leg. I never think about my Lyme experience anymore but have concluded that if I had not moved to California I would be dead or bedridden as I am outdoors all the time hiking.

I also note I was cured from a VERY bad case of polio by experimental heat treatment in 1956. I am reluctant to say to much more specifically due to liability reasons but I know a lot about the disease process and I have had to recover from at least 3 bad ones. From The Plague by Camus - “Who taught you all this, doctor?" The reply came promptly: "Suffering.”