Five Days at a Leading Atlanta Hospital and No One Wanted to Test For Lyme Disease.

First, she thought she had a summer flu.

Then she felt poisoned.

Within thirty days she lost the ability to walk.

This is my mother's story of contracting Lyme Disease in our backyard in Georgia. -Brooklynn

Hello, I am Brooklynn's mother, Kristi. I am the contributing writer for her newly launched website LymeLivesHere.com and will be the one managing her blog page. I will be writing about my own journey with Lyme, along with HER journey as a caretaker of someone with chronic illness. Let's begin.

Prior to getting sick I was a go-getter. Always on the move, I thrived on running my busy chiropractic office and building our ever-expanding hobby farm. Rarely sitting down, I kept the family hopping from one fun thing to the next, and during my downtime I had three or four hobbies always at the ready. I gardened, trained my young filly, sheared and processed the wool from my sheep, and was writing a memoir about raising our family on our farm.

The summer of 2020 changed all that.

While working with patients I began to feel dizzy and would break out in cold sweats.

Concerned about my heart, I scheduled a thorough checkup with a cardiologist. Not only was I negative for COVID-19, but the doctor reported, "Everything looks normal."

A month later, after having cancelled a week of work, I told my husband I felt poisoned.

I could barely get out of bed the fatigue was so severe. My legs felt floaty and my brain was slow to process things. Regular conversations were exhausting. "I feel like I am dying," I told him.

I scheduled another appointment with a renowned functional medicine specialist in town. In the meantime at home, we bought carbon monoxide detectors, looked into radon testing, and checked for mold in our 1970s farmhouse.

The MD was concerned. Together we put together a list of 15 different possibilities, ranging from hormone issues to brain tumors. We ordered a brain MRI to begin ruling out the worst possibilities.

While waiting for the MRI results the floaty feeling in my legs began to creep up toward my waist. I began requiring a cane to walk and was now having severe balance issues.

A follow up with my cardiologist on a particularly bad day, when I could not walk without a cane, resulted in his astonished, "You need a neurologist! Now."

The soonest new patient neurology appointment was in three months.

That night my husband drove me to the Emory ER department.

Five hours later I was admitted as an inpatient.

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Certain I had a brain tumor, they placed me in the seizure ward.

I did not have a brain tumor.

I did not have MS. I did not have meningitis.

I had not visited the North East, so Lyme was ruled out.

Guillain Barre (GBS) was also dismissed because my reflexes were excessive, not absent.

When the first night sweat happened on day three, I was so wet from my waist down that we thought I had wet myself. That began the search for a spinal tumor.

I did not have a spinal tumor.

Day four, I begged them to reconsider Lyme Disease.

Nothing else explained my symptoms. I had read articles about it and Lyme had been on my functional medicine doctor's list of possibilities, even though we reside in Georgia.

She said it is found here too.

They grudgingly ran the Western Blot test. I was positive on three bands, but not five. According to the CDC I did not have Lyme.

On day five they discharged me with PT and an order for a wheelchair if I needed it. They did not know why I was sick.

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Returning home with no diagnosis, no treatment, and progressively getting weaker, I returned to my functional medicine MD.

Having ruled out all of the big, scary stuff, she looked me in the eyes and said, "I am giving you the clinical diagnosis of Lyme Disease. We see this all the time where the current Lyme tests fail to properly diagnosis the illness."

She gave me sixty days of doxycycline, an antibiotic effective against acute Lyme cases, she told me to return in thirty days.

Within 30 days I was stronger.

Within sixty I put away the cane.

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I wish I could say that this is where my Lyme journey ends. It is not.

Later, other symptoms would take over my body and weakness would return.

I had gotten treatment too late for a simple course of antibiotics to be the answer.

This is why my purpose is now to educate the people of Georgia and their health care providers.

To hear more about the months following my clinical diagnosis, the treatments I would endure, the finding of friends and experts through a support group, and the improvement in testing and prevention, SUBSCRIBE below for future blog posts.