Okay breathe. Here is yet another thing to be concerned about. When Yolanda Foster of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills revealed that not only does she suffer from Lyme disease, but two of her children have had a brush with Lyme disease, celebrity-watchers gasped. Okay I am not a current subscriber to the BRAVO station, thanks to the cable companies high monthly fees, But social media feeds carried this story. I have no personal experience with this tick borne illness. My knowledge of it, even though I am an amateur gardener, is zero.But I got a cold pitch last week from a writer named David Michael Conner who is suffering from Lyme disease.
He recently wrote a post on Huffington Post in simple language that helped me understand the difficulty of getting a proper diagnosis of the disease and what it means to live with it. David also asked me to convey the importance of screening patients who have mental illness for Lyme disease–especially when physical Lyme symptoms are present. I mean who knew that Lyme and its common coinfections can manifest as psychological disorders, and that medical practitioners need to know this in order to differentiate these symptoms from generalized anxiety disorder, depression, bipolar and other common mental disorders (those are David’s words).
David continued by saying, “… (Lyme disease) is truly an epidemic and I’m (obviously) on a bit of a crusade because I myself ignored information about it even as it was slowly devastating my life. For about five years, doctors suspected I may have multiple sclerosis, and my mother kept reminding me that I had been diagnosed with Lyme when I was 18, that “it can come back,” and that I should be tested for it. Doctors said that it doesn’t come back and my tests came back negative, so doctors completely dismissed the possibility that Lyme could be the cause. Five years later…my mother was right, as usual. Lyme is the most rapidly spreading infectious disease in the country right now, and the tests are ~ 50 percent accurate…the flip of a coin. It’s very complex pathologically and politically, but people need to be aware of the symptoms and low accuracy of the tests so that they can protect themselves and their families.”
He shared the following statistics with me: From the mid-1990s through a few years ago, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Infectious Diseases Society of America indicated that Lyme disease is difficult to contract and easy to cure, and that fewer than 30,000 Americans contract the disease each year. In 2013, the CDC revised this number, stating that the number of annual new cases is upwards of 300,000–and these are only diagnosed cases. Because Lyme diagnostic tests are so poor, with accuracy ranging from 30 to 60 percent on average, the number of new cases each year may exceed one million. This is a bit of a mind blower.
So I am sharing his story with you because you and your family may perhaps benefit from this awareness. Many of us garden, BBQ, and hang-out in our yards. The tick does not seem to discriminate. Hopefully you never need to use information from this story in your lives.
Read David Michael Conner’s HuffPo piece here beginning with Part I : The Insanity of Lyme Disease. The Bug That Hijacked My Mind and Body. Then read Part II.
You can also visit the Lyme Disease Association‘s website.
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