What It’s Like to Live with Lyme Disease

Nov. 1, 2021 -- From the precise archetypal leafage of Ross Douthat’s caller memoir, The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery, it’s casual to consciousness similar you’re successful the country with The New York Times columnist arsenic helium details his precise achy 5-year conflict with chronic Lyme disease.

Douthat’s travel began successful the summertime of 2015 erstwhile helium moved with his household from Washington, DC, to a farmhouse successful Connecticut. That’s erstwhile helium archetypal acquired a mysterious sickness that near him wracked with symptom and started his ngo to fig retired however to get well.

Douthat’s vivid descriptions of the myriad accepted and alternate medicine treatments helium tries and the doctors and patients helium meets on the mode is simply a must-read for anyone with a chronic disease, successful this lawsuit Lyme, which affects 476,000 Americans each year, according to the CDC.

WebMD sat down with Douthat to find retired a small spot much astir his travel and what helium recommends to anyone with Lyme:

WebMD: Your publication is, astatine times, pugnacious to read. You don’t shy distant from sharing however overmuch symptom you were in, particularly the archetypal 2 years of your illness.

Douthat: At slightest 1 reviewer has said the publication is harrowing. What I archer radical is that it’s harrowing, but it’s besides a leafage turner. It’s not a hard work and the communicative yet offers assorted kinds of anticipation and optimism. There’s besides spiritual and intelligence elements woven successful that are helpful. In that sense, you tin expect much than conscionable a harrowing experience.

WebMD: During the truly pugnacious days what helped successful presumption of enactment from friends?

Douthat: I deliberation radical are truly bully astatine helping different radical successful a crisis.

What you spot during earthquakes and earthy disasters is that there’s this play erstwhile experts interest astir a descent into lawlessness -- and yet radical propulsion together.

They’re alert they’re being asked to beryllium heroic and supportive. The situation with chronic unwellness is determination isn’t an juncture oregon a discrete acceptable of tasks to assistance someone. That’s wherefore I accent that if you’re trying to assistance idiosyncratic with a chronic illness, don’t get discouraged.

Often if you connection your beingness and springiness that idiosyncratic an accidental to speech and complain, it’s the champion happening you tin do. It besides helps due to the fact that it takes immoderate unit disconnected the radical that are complained to the most.

WebMD: What’s the weirdest remedy you tried?

Douthat: I would accidental the frequence machine. It’s alleged to usage dependable frequence to shingle up and shatter bacteria. That to maine was the weirdest followed by idiosyncratic placing magnets each implicit the parts of my assemblage wherever I had symptoms. I was alert that I had passed the fringes of medicine and was retired beyond the frontier.

WebMD: How are you feeling today?

Douthat: I mostly picture myself arsenic 90-95% better. I’m not symptom-free.

Most of my symptoms are pain, which isn’t existent for a batch of chronically sick radical who person terrible fatigue. I was luck to person symptom instead.

There are cycles wherever I volition spell for 4 to 6 weeks with symptom arsenic a insignificant annoyance and a week oregon 2 wherever it seems to travel back.

At the astir aggravated constituent successful my unwellness I was taking 10 to 15 antibiotic pills a day. That was hardly capable to support the corruption successful check. Now, I’ll instrumentality an antibiotic each 6 to 8 weeks.

It’s inactive truthful unusual to deliberation that I would beryllium taking antibiotics aft 6 years of an illness.

WebMD: Why was it truthful important for you to stock your idiosyncratic story?

Douthat: For one, I constitute for a surviving and, arsenic a writer, you privation to constitute absorbing things. This was a precise absorbing happening that happened to me.

To the grade that it’s bully to construe immoderate suffering arsenic a gift, thing you tin marque thing retired of, that felt appropriate.

Second, determination are immoderate things I privation I had known astir the complexities of chronic unwellness and the value of being your ain advocate. I besides present admit the value of modern medicine (and besides its limits).

I’ve figured retired however to combat my mode through.

WebMD: What’s your biggest portion of proposal for those with Lyme?

Douthat: Don’t beryllium passive.

In this lawsuit successful peculiar the aesculapian community’s impulse runs to inaction due to the fact that we don’t cognize precisely however to dainty this, we don’t person double-blind controlled trials and a metallic bullet.

I recovered that astir doctors person a do-no-harm cognition and they’ll accidental ‘Give it 3 months, springiness it 6 months, spot however you feel.’ Sometimes that works, but for a batch of people, it doesn’t.

It’s your assemblage and it’s your life. I present cognize that a truly terrible unwellness similar this steals your beingness away.

You shouldn’t hold for it to travel backmost connected its own. Instead, look for doctors who tin assistance you and speech to others astir what’s worked for them.

Your way to betterment volition beryllium unique, but you request to find it for yourself. It won’t travel to you.