Covid-19 Vlogs (Week 13)

This week I will call "adventures in chronic fatigue". It was bad. I was sleepy almost all of the time. I pushed through. I did a lot of resting and also alpine-climb style parented. I stayed off Facebook and Instagram for my mental health, and I tried to remain active in my community. God is still good even when the world feels divisive and crazy.

This week my hot yoga gym opened back up! Huzzah! I am excited to sweat again. We also went to Goodwill for the first time since Covid!!

more musing (EBV?)

Now that I have had a little bit of time to research, read and pour over my symptoms, I don't think I have lyme. I DO think I have either EBV or walking pneumonia. Luckily, the herbs for lyme are similar to those for EBV and WP.

Right now I am on day five of herbs. I felt a lot better day one and two, but on day three when I added skullcap, I started feeling worse again. I might be dosing my herbs too fast, so I am toning it back and reducing my intake (I'll up it later if needed?). I am also experiencing horrible abdominal bloating, which can be a sign of gut die-off or intestinal worms, or gas, or an issue with salt retention. I am hopeful the bloating diminishes as I scale back on the herbs. I joined a lyme group on Facebook, and while my protocol takes one week to get on the full doses of herbs, many are saying they took a month to ramp up. 

I did have some joint pain, but after researching I started taking nattokinase in the morning and this has eliminated that pain. 

Right now I am not going back to the doctor. I'm on about $500 worth of herbs and hopeful it will help. The only way we were able to afford this right now is that I owned many of the herbs already from when Brian had lyme last year. Our total cost so far this year has been around $200. 

I have dark moments where I feel I am never going to get better but I have good days too, and I am praying. This is a season, I hope. I want to get better. I want to enjoy life again.

This past weekend I was able to go hiking. It was a good day, a day of fun!! I had to lay down the rest of the day after hiking, but it was worth it. Both kids enjoyed being out and seeing a waterfall. It was Reuben's preschool graduation present. He starts Kindergarten in August, and my hope is still to homeschool him. In order to school him, I must get better. 

Please, please pray for me and our family as we all battle this illness. The amount of time I have had to devote to myself since my May miscarriage has been astronomically disproportionate to the time my family needs me. Many days I have been unable to cook or even to get out of bed. My husband has been working from home (if he had not been, I would not have been able to survive) and basically taking care of the kids while managing his zoom calls and office work. The TV has been on a lot. I had buckets of guilt over it but I am setting myself free. I am sick. Something is wrong, and I am, with the grace of God, hopefully going to find out what is wrong and get better so I can care again for my family. 

On top of all the herbs, I am also still trying to stay active by doing hot yoga and walking. The hot yoga is for detoxing. Sweating is amazing. It's hard to exercise when I am dealing with chronic fatigue. Sometimes it is the only thing I do all day. But I do it because I believe it is integral to my health. Hot yoga costs $100 a month. Batting a chronic and debilitating illness isn't cheap.

Here goes nothing. 2020 health crisis, I hope you go back into Pandora's box. And stay there.

adventures in I Am Still Sick

Doctor Results:

Everything came back normal, as I said in my last post. I was so sure that my blood work would give me the answers I needed that I was horribly disappointed. Actually, it was a punch in the gut. Every time I convince myself to do blood work (a triggering experience for me) I am always "fine" and slapped with a mental health disorder. I mean, I guess it makes a sort of sense from the doctor standpoint-- the blood work shows nothing abnormal, must be all in her head. But it is NOT in my head. I am not depressed (the diagnoses I was given via phone with an prescription to Lexapro). I am not even sad. I am TIRED all the time and have headaches. By the time my blood work came back, I was experiencing body aches and low grade fevers with reoccurring sore throat. This is not depression, at least not for me.

My husband mentioned it might be lyme disease, as it sounded like a lot of "flu like symptoms" with fatigue, but I brushed him off. He had lyme in August of last year. He caught his super early and did a herbal protocol with antibiotics. I did have a tick bite--but it was three weeks AFTER all this "tired" feeling started, and I wasn't convinced.

But I needed to do something, and Lexapro is not the anwser. Even though I felt better for a week, the next two were awful. So, I decided to try the lyme protocol. It couldn't hurt, right? If nothing changed--if I didn't get any better, I could stop and go back to the doctor. And we already have all the herbs. At this time (last week) I was basically a non functional adult. I had headaches all day, woke up tired, brain fog, bloating, no energy. Sensory issues galore (light hurt, being touched was panic-inducing, my sons voice sounded like he was screaming at me) In short, it was awful. I was struggling so much to complete basic tasks and I couldn't parent at all. Honestly,  I gave up hope every day but I was still looking for answers in my good moments (and I have another thing to try if this protocol doesn't work).

I poured over Healing Lyme again for an hour or two, trying to understand what I was supposed to do again, because this book is not written for the layman who has no herbal science background--and came up with a protocol for myself that I started immediately, that night.

The next day I woke up without a headache for the first time in eight weeks. Let me say that again. The next. Day. I woke up. WITH NO HEADACHE!

I thought that maybe my miscarriage allowed hidden lyme to reemerge. Or maybe latent EBV, and the herbs I was on was helping me fight that. Or maybe it had been fatigue and postpartum for the first four weeks but I developed lyme at the tick bite? I don't know, and I probably never will.

Whatever it is, the the herbs are WORKING. The first full day I did have a "herx" reaction after lunch but I had energy after dinner FOR THE FIRST TIME IN EIGHT WEEKS. Like I did not collapse from exhaustion. I was able to clean things, put away dishes, and enjoy myself. I didn't have to lay down for three hours because I was so tired I couldn't move. My brain was less foggy. I felt good in my own skin.

Maybe I wasn't detailed enough in what was happening last time (because I had a few comments that said that was exactly what depression was like for them) but I am NOT DEPRESSED. I mean it. I know when I am depressed. I'm really in tune with myself. Obviously, I am not going to be right 100% of the time, but to be depressed you have to be sad. I am not sad. I am experiencing sensory issues, like Reuben making noise sounds 600x louder, and people touching me is overwhelming. I am so tired I can't do things. But I am not sad. It's something wrong with my body and its not just affecting my serotonin. Maybe other people have only physical manifestations of depression, but I do not. I have zero emotional depression and thus I know I have something WRONG with me physically, not mentally. It isn't something an SSRI could fix, this is something attacking me. I'm probably not making sense, but I know I am not depressed. If this was depression, the lyme protocol would do nothing to help.

I hope I can be okay one day. I'm going to do try and do the lyme protocol for 30 days and take 7 days after that to slowly come off the herbs. I hope this works and I will be okay, because if not I will probably have to return to the doctor for more bloodwork and invasive tests only to be told I am fine again in all likelihood.

I really like my doctor. But I still affirm that I know my body best and that doctors should listen to patients who spend all their lives in their bodies, and know what is going on. Listen to us. I asked on the phone what the next step was. I wanted more blood work, more tests. I was told I had depression and to try Lexapro first before anything--a drug I didn't want and knew I didn't need.

Lyme herbs don't cure depression.

My brain is waking back up and I am getting my life back and it feels so good. I had honestly accepted the fact that I was probably dying. I'm glad to be feeling 90% normal.