So this new medicine I’m about to begin, I’ve learned two things about it so far from Google…and I’ve yet to learn anything else about it that I wanted to know.
First, it almost seems like you need to have a vagina to take this medicine. The only uses I can find for it, involve that particular body part. I know I’m taking it for Lyme, but it hasn’t been easy to find anything on the internet about it with Lyme.
The second thing is that it causes cancer. It seems each antibiotic I take the side effects get worse and worse…but cancer I can deal with and fight later on if I need to, but if I don’t beat this Lyme my body would never be able to fight cancer, so it’s really a crap shoot.
My thought on it all is that if I don’t get better, I won’t have a life to live…so the side effects may kill me, but at least I’ll have my life back to enjoy…I’d rather live a short life full of happiness than a long life full of pain. (I think most people feel the same way, yet so many choose a life full of pain when they have the choice not to).
So today was my follow up with the Dr, and I am now beginning medicine that’s referred to as a ”cyst buster”. The Lyme bacteria can take on three different forms in the body, one of them is cysts. These cysts act as a protection against the antibiotics, part of why the Lyme bacteria can be so hard to eradicate, and why we can be prone to relapse. We’ve hit the point in my treatment where we feel that the bacteria are now in this cyst form, the majority of the die off seems to have come to a crawl lately. This next step will then attack these cysts, hopefully breaking them up…and then at the same time I’ll be pumping my body full of strong IV antibiotics to kill the broken up cysts.
Are you still with me or have I already put you to sleep? WAKE UP!!!! I’ll explain it a little better. It basically means I can expect a crap storm of a war in my body over the next few weeks…as the cysts break up, bacteria will be released into my body (which can make me feel worse), and then the antibiotics kill the bacteria and will leave dead bacteria floating around in my body (which can also make me worse). I assume you’re getting the idea here that I’m probably going to be feeling worse.
Each step in this ugly journey of Lyme disease seems to begin with those famous words in the Lyme community: You have to get worse before you get better. But let me tell you my friends, that I am getting pretty sick of getting worse while trying to get better. This will make the 7th antibiotic I’ve been on in the past 12 months…each one causing die off reactions (which we call Herx reactions). My Lyme Dr recently described what a herx is very clearly. If I have 10 pieces of bacteria floating in my body making me sick, and I take medicine that breaks it up…I then have 100 pieces of bacteria floating in my body, and until that bacteria leaves my body the extra load of bacteria makes you much sicker. It’s very similar to a cancer patient with chemo, the treatment actually makes you sicker than the disease at times.
But it’s a good thing, and gives me hope. We continue to move in the right direction…I’m in the 6th day of an upswing in how I’ve been feeling, and I hope that means that my good days will continue to get better and better, and my bad days will be fewer and fewer.