Story about Lyme Disease .

20 years nightmare

Feb 12, 2017

By: Cristina


I have Lyme disease since I was 11 years old or at least that's what I think because I can recall a tick bite only then. I was taking my Yorkshire dog Floppy for a walk in the woods close to my grandparents' house. When I came home my mom found a small tick on my arm and she removed it. Sardinia is considered endemic area but doctors there still don't know anything about Lyme disease, especially in the 90's nobody knew about it. I don't know if I had rash, fever or any symptom occurring after the bite as it could have been easily mistaken by a flu. My symptoms have been neurological since the beginning. I started to become very shaky in my left hand and in my head and when I was around 14 it became very noticeable and I even quit fencing which I was very good at and had become a champion in my region. I started to have huge allergic reactions almost everyday, I remember going to school and one hour later I was at the ER getting cortison or antihistaminic shots, I was losing sensitivity at times and becoming very weak all of a sudden. My mother brought me to any doctor and hospital possible, I lost one year of school because I was always at the hospital. I did all kind of painful tests, got electric power and needles in my whole body, had to spend days stuck in a bed with electrodes in my head and a camera always on me. Something a kid should never experience. But all suspected diseases were excluded, I didn't have MS, no Wilson disease and there was a little suspect of juvenile Parkinson but my mother didn't accept that I would get levodopa at such young age. Since my allergies didn't seem to subside I had to take a vaccine for three years and follow a very strict diet. They later found out that I didn't have almost any ferritin in my blood and after giving me one week of IV iron infusions they blamed all the symptoms on that. I spent all the rest of my years of high school, music academy and university trying to hide my shakings because I believed it was something psychosomatic and embarrassing, I went to take mediation classes and tried Bach flowers. But my shakings never subsided. I always thought I was a weak girl cause I would get the flu very often, throat and urinary tract infections and I started to become very clumsy. When I was 22 I got diagnosed with endometriosis, I had unbearable abdominal pain and since the endometriosis started growing cysts under my skin that got swollen during period, sometimes I had huge pain in my right leg and I could not walk. After four years of birth control pills, patches and menopause they decided to go for the surgery. That surgery was the kickstart to my nightmare.
That surgery went actually pretty good for what concerned endometriosis and they removed a lot of endometrial tissues from the organs which were affected. One month after I decided to move to Sweden to work and try to pursue my career with music (I am an opera and  metal singer). I worked at the airport for six months and eventually lost the job because I was never in shape. I developed constant back pain and I would wake up not able to stand up because of heavy dizziness that lasted two weeks. I was going back and forth from Sweden to Sardinia to see all kids of doctors among neurologists, ear doctors, physiotherapist, ostheopats, dentists because they blamed it on malocclusion, but nobody would have answers. I decided to become au pair while my music projects were going very well besides ordinary job, but taking care of kids was exhausting for me, they would give me all kinds of viruses which was hard for me to recover from, I started developing fatigue, blood circulation problems, more and more pain in my back, I was sensitive to light, had floaters in my eyes, my balance was not good at all, my ability to remember things was also lacking so it was my ability to recognize people, I would not wake up on time in the morning and had problems goin to bed at night, sleep paralysis with hallucinations, heavy hair loss. I started not being myself anymore.
One day after ending up at the ER as usual a neurologist diagnosed me with essential tremor. For me it was a relief knowing that my shaking problem had a name and it was due to neurological causes and I started taking beta blockers. After getting the flu for the hundredths time , one day I started losing track of reality. I literally went nuts. I remember playing a gig thinking that everybody around me was a walking dead. I was not seeing the kids the same way, I had suicidal thoughts, panic and general depression. I wrote very good music during that month but it was a total madness. I decided to see a psychiatrist who said I could have borderline personality disorder but these psychiatric symptoms went away as they came. This last year has been a total madness, I was barely able to sing as my muscles were losing strength dramatically, breathing muscles included. I had days where I thought I was dying of respiratory insufficiency and my heart was always racing.
In April this year I got wrongly diagnosed with myastenia gravis, I spent one month at a hospital in Sardinia where they intoxicated me with a medicine called mestinon. My mom realised I was going to die if I had taken more and she took me away and brought me to a rheumatologist who diagnosed me with possible chronic fatigue syndrome. I had an acquaintance who was diagnosed with Lyme but I never thought I might have the same disease because my symptoms were different from hers. Then one day I saw that Avril Lavigne interview and started having doubts so I began to research and talk to other people and realised that Lyme was the answer I was seeking from two decades. I saw a glimpse of light but then I realised how hard it was to get diagnosed because no doctor in Sweden wanted to listen to me. In October while I was laying on an ER bed I contacted the Italian association for Lyme disease who suggested me to call or email this Llmd in Italy and said he would have helped me. One week after I flew to Italy and for the first time a doctor knew what was happening to me. He put me on two weeks IV antibiotics and then I got sent home with nothing more as my labs were borderline negative and not even a complete diagnosis could have been made. So I decided to start a gofundme campaign where everybody from my region came together for me and raised 20.000€ so that I could see a top doctor for Lyme  disease in Washington D.C. I am currently under their clinic's care and I hope one day I can wake up from this nightmare. I am now living in Sardinia with my mother and even getting up from bed is a struggle, I have a wheelchair if I want to go out but I rarely do because the POTS gives me a hard time even sitting up. 

I wish all this one day will be only a bad memory

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