Lyme Disease

How I Spent 2018

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment
Sideways Teal
A selfie where I am lying down and the picture is oriented sideways. I am wearing a teal shirt which compliments my green eyes

2018 began with an e-mail letting me know that the results of my Lyme test were in my patient portal.

I wouldn’t have my follow-up appointment with my doctor for another few weeks to let me know what to do about it, but there the results were. Positive. I hadn’t been mentally prepared for it, not really, even though my personal medical intuition-informed by literal years of reading about anything and everything related to my symptoms-had been honed to a sharp blade and I was rarely wrong anymore. I sought out a Lyme Literate doctor because by September of 2017 I was pretty damn sure. I wanted very much to be wrong. No one really believes in Lyme as a chronic illness. Tests are not the most accurate. The treatment is often not covered by insurance and treatment is physically hard on your body. The science is not 100% there…yet. And if I gave myself over to a treatment that amounted to nothing more than potentially hazardous snake oil? My credibility as the expert on my own body and competent caretaker of it would be shot through with doubt. I was not sure I would trust myself again if this went wrong, nor was I sure that other people would or could or should trust me on matters of my own illness. That was excruciating.

My husband and I talked about it a great deal. We talked with other people who had personally gone through diagnosis and treatment and had good results. I had a doctor who was insistent from the start that we would never overwhelm my body with more medication or supplements than I could take, that this was never going to be a miracle cure-I would always still have Lyme, it would just be an infection that was appropriately kept in check, that I had final say over what course of treatment I consented to-and that she would never pressure me into consenting to something I was wary of, that the goal was to get the infection (actually infections, as I have Babesia as well) in check and get me off of antibiotics and supplements sooner rather than later.

Do you know what it means for you to have faith in a doctor when so many failed to help you? There was only one doctor who was outrightly belligerent to me when I desperately needed help. Most of my overwhelming disappointment with doctors was that I would have a life-altering symptom, we would run the standard tests to see what the matter was, and when I walked away I would have a few negative tests results and a shrug. No information about how to control my symptoms. No clues as to what went wrong in the first place. Just shrugs. Doctors only spend every waking second trying to solve a mysterious diagnosis on TV shows. Most of my doctors were well-meaning but overworked, experts in difficult and widely known diseases I didn’t have that occupied most of their research time, and specialists who are dealing with different body symptoms who rarely consider that pelvic pain and hypoglycemia and hives and plantar fasciitis could possibly belong to the same systemic problem. I never gave myself over to unquestioning faith in my doctor, but I began to let myself have some faith in her.

I started treatment in late January 2018. I want to say I tapered off of the majority of my supplements and medicines by mid-March. The whole of February I spent the first half of every day in a haze, a fog so thick I mostly ate and sat and slept. I would take the kids to school, then take my medicine, then deal with the fog. By early afternoon it would lift. I would get the kids, complete the few tasks we needed completed to keep our world running and rest again. I recently looked back at pictures where I didn’t hide behind make-up. I looked grey. My face and lips and eyes looked like the color was drained away. I wore my softest clothes and binge-watched a lot of TV, something I’ve never really done being normally just a bit too restless for that. When I stopped the bulk of the serious medication, I kept on with maintenance supplements for a while. Many of my most problematic symptoms had faded away. Slowly I began working back up to my normal life (and my oldest broke an ankle just a few weeks after I stopped the bigger part of my treatment, so normal life wasn’t normal until about June). I still looked grey in early May. By one each afternoon I would fall into a dead sleep.

By July I realized that I passed out nearly in a dead faint after eating gluten at lunch, shaking with sudden chills, unable to stand upright. There is more to the story than that, but I’ve mostly told that story in an earlier blog post. Since August my youngest and I have been gluten-free. And my immune system seemed to come back on line. It sent my body for a loop. Suddenly immune-regulating medication I was on was dosed too high, and hormone replacement therapy I was on was dosed too high and I had skull-crushing headache verging on migraines for weeks at a time until I finally got the appropriate doses figured out just these last couple of weeks.

And I feel…good.

More often than not, I feel good.

I had given up on that ever being possible.

One thing that most helped me realize that I could trust that going into treatment was going to be the right thing to do? It’s that I had done a lot of work over the last several years to work through the grief of being sick and I had come to accept that my life-my smaller, less capable life-was absolutely still a valuable one. I really had accepted that feeling good might never be a possibility again, and I had made some amount of peace with that. But my heart-my heart was struggling to beat as quickly as it should have been. My heart was slowing down to dangerous levels. I had decided both that my disabled ill life was worth living and that it was in danger that needed to be addressed.

Lyme can infect your heart.

I wasn’t looking for a miracle cure, one that would let me climb Everest once treatment was done. I wasn’t in a desperate place grasping at straws, clinging to gold-plated hollow promises that I could be “fixed”.

I was looking to stay alive, because I loved the life I had in the middle of illness.

It was in that place where a leap of faith was possible and as measured as a leap can be. I knew what cardiologist I was going to approach if my heart rate didn’t recover or got even a little bit worse. I had an EKG through the local hospital that told me that my heart was strong but slow for some (to them) unknown reason. Now, about a year later, my heart rate stays within normal ranges for a person of my activity level. My heart is now beating in a way that makes it more likely that I’ll survive the next year, and the next.

This has been my 2018. I’ve done a million other things in the meantime, but from beginning to end it has been a year where I listened, figuratively and literally, to my heart. There were risks where I gained rewards I literally didn’t think were possible a year ago. There were risks that could have made this coming year a one of recovery from very bad failure. This isn’t prescriptive. If you don’t need to jump, maybe don’t? That leap can be very dangerous. Whatever your leap of faith is about, if you’re thinking about that leap, don’t go about it willy-nilly. Don’t jump with your eyes closed. Weigh everything. Research, examine your mental state, your motives, don’t jump out of a plane without checking your equipment five hundred times. Have contingency plans, and be cautious. But, if you’ve done all those things and you still find that the risk-whatever that may be- is worth it, I certainly can’t tell you to always play it perfectly safe. I didn’t. For once that worked out better than I dared hope.

Happy 2019 Everyone

 

Love,

Kristin

Keratin

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment

My nails have been breaking. I don’t know if they got weaker while I was going through the most intense parts of my treatment for Lyme disease. Both index fingernails broke. My thumbnail has started to show signs of distress, jagged lines where it looks like the layers of nail haven’t been able to hold together. My instinct is to try to hide them.

I’ll be hiding my toenails for a while. The right big one pulled the trick where it grows over itself every six months-a little like a paper jam in a printer, I end up with two layers where there should be one. I bruised the left one when curcumin was thinning my blood too much and so will lose that one soon. Another I have left the nail polish on from last November to chart for myself how slowly it is growing compared to the one next to it. Closed toe shoes will be the norm. They are so far gone that a pedicure can’t save them this spring. But for all of their flaws, my nails have always been strong and tough. I have never had to worry about them being brittle.

Until now. I worry about nail polish and its removal causing more issues. I felt a twinge of vanity that usually escapes me (I rarely have any idea the state of my cuticles and my nails are never an even length). I’ve been watching my nails with curiosity. Does their breaking mean I am doing worse even though I feel better? Am I skimping on vitamins or macronutrients I need? Did I do something to them as they grew from my body or did they get damaged by something I did afterwards? Are they something to hide? Are they something I need to protect from my impulse to cover up?

 

nail
Image Description: My thumbnail with jagged lines almost parallel to its curves (which have gotten worse since this picture was taken) resting against a red and yellow piece of fabric

 

On my birthday one of the books I happened to pick up was a National Geographic compilation of some of their best Instagram pictures. I opened to a random page and was immediately struck by a brilliant toucan. The astonishing thing for me that makes photography so spectacular is that there are details that escape our notice when we see stylized versions of the same. A cartoon or painting of a toucan is still gorgeous-but I don’t know that any of them have captured the jagged lines that this toucan’s beak has. I stared and stared because they were the same as my own. I googled what beaks are made of.

 

 

Toucan
Image Description: A large two page spread of a toucan’s beak and head. The red and yellow beak has jagged lines running parallel to its curve.

Keratin.

The same substance our nails are made of.

When I looked at this bird I didn’t see a creature I was worried about, I saw a creature who has lived. And is beautiful. It may be trite, but I am grateful for little synchronicities that remind me that my experiences and imperfections are not unique, and are not embarrassments, and are not alarming problems to always be “fixed”. And that being seen as who I really am connects me to other creatures in ways I had never thought about before.

My Digital Home

~ Kristin DeMarco Wagner ~ Leave a comment
Digital House
Image Description: a house with most of it’s siding removed
and some grey siding newly installed on the side

I haven’t blogged in a long time. It isn’t for lack of trying-I tried to post something just a couple of weeks ago and a glitch erased it all, pictures, image descriptions, the whole text. Which is probably a good thing as it was kind of pitiful, as in, I was feeling a lot of self-pity. It felt like the universe correcting me, telling me to try again with a little less blah.

Here I am. I started this blog in 2014 as a creative outlet for myself, a place where I could get short essays down and into the world and feel more connected to it. To have a space that was mine to shape and polish and decorate as I wanted, away from the needs of my two kids and the needs of my errant (and in a nod to Roxane Gay, “unruly”) body. I haven’t been able to use this that way for a bit. Oh, there has been self-promotion here and there, but a little essay every other week? Not so much. And that has started to bum me out.

Sure, there are somewhat good reasons for it.

I got warned by ambitious freelancers to never post a piece to your blog for free until you try to sell it. You know, realizing that writing is work and should be appropriately compensated. A great idea in theory-in practice I am absolutely wretched at pitching, and waiting forever to see if a submission has been accepted or if a pitch has landed is bad for my mental health. It was unsustainable for me. And I have discovered that I am really bad at coming up with timely think-pieces that have enough foothold for a broad audience.

Another factor was that I didn’t want to take what little time I had away from actually completing the book I am working on. It’s a work-in-progress, a collection of essays, a memoir about being chronically ill, that is going incredibly slowly at the moment. Part of the problem is that my illnesses, the subject of the book, keep shifting and changing requiring rewrites and reimagining and review. Time is eaten away quickly.

A third factor has been managing my health. I was diagnosed in January with Lyme disease, and I have most likely had it since I was six. The infection just took over when my immune system was under so much stress from two pregnancies and two C-sections and a recession about eight years ago, and I couldn’t cope anymore. So many mysterious and seemingly unrelated systemic problems came from that. Treatment is hard, many hours of the day it feels as if even my individual cells need deep breathes and stillness. Most of the day is spent letting my body rest. I never let it rest before-because I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia which has no known cause and no known cure I had opted to play through the pain, pushing through because my life was going to stagnate if I didn’t. I had social media schedules where I planned on Sunday night what Facebook posts I was going to post that week. I tweeted. I participated in every group I could get into. I got a blog post done every two weeks. I submitted and submitted and submitted. Then I got tired. And more tired. And more tired. And finally had to stop. Because I just couldn’t go anymore. I submitted, finally, to my body’s needs.

In the midst of this I asked myself what was it I wanted out of writing and getting published. I really thought it through because moving the goalposts was wearing me out. With the election of 2016 I wondered if what I wanted most was to be a voice for change, an activist. I asked myself if what I wanted was to be famous, like David Sedaris, or Jenny Lawson (The Bloggess), having fabulous fun book tours and interviews and the like. Did I want respect, to have the approval of the upper echelon in the literary world? Did I want to have a followers who can’t wait to see what I say next?

Then it hit me. All those things are wonderful. Any of those goals fulfilled would be rewarding. When those goals are achieved by other people I feel envious and there is a tendril in my heart of longing-especially on days when illness and treatment make those goals dance further and further away from my grasp. My real goal? I will do anything in my power to keep being allowed to tell what the world looks like from my point of view.

To achieve this goal, there are barely any gatekeepers. I can do that here, any time I want. I don’t have to wait for editors or agents or the Submittable queue. I don’t need to have an MFA to be allowed to do this. Nor do I need to wait the six months after I enter a contest to find out if the judges enjoyed my work. I don’t have to start my own literary magazine. What I want to be able to do, I already can do. It’s rare that that is true, especially in my body. What I really want to do is what I already am capable of doing.

This is my digital home. If I want to write about what Vanellope Von Schweetz means to me I don’t have to wait until I find just the right quirky paying home for that essay. If I want to talk about my son’s broken ankle and how people think he is perpetually miserable about it when he isn’t, I can do that without fighting for a spot in the Washington Post Talent Network, pitching the idea and hoping it doesn’t end up with a misleading title.

I want a place to show the peonies in my garden, and a little girl refusing to play Duck, Duck, Goose just to give the appearance of friendliness. I have that place. I just forget that I already do.

The other day at Ulta I found myself looking at every shade of lipstick, drawn again and again to the reds, which is unusual for me. I almost shelled out 35 bucks for a lip liner and lipstick. Then I realized that although I hadn’t used it since a gala fundraiser in 2015, I had an almost identical red at home. Here’s to using the clothes and the makeup and the utensils and the tools we already have before going out and buying more. Here’s to remembering that if what I want to do is be allowed to tell my stories, I already have a way to do that.

Here’s to putting up siding, painting the hallways and redecorating my digital home.