The number has risen over the past 25 years and will continue to do so if, as experts predict, our changing climate provides increasingly favorable conditions for ticks. are diagnosed with and treated for Lyme every year. That's particularly scary given that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now estimates that more than 300,000 people in the U.S. The risk of PTLDS is higher the later Lyme is diagnosed, but it can happen to anyone, and many patients endure debilitating muscle and joint pain, anxiety and fatigue for years before finding a doctor who understands PTLDS. Recent research suggests that somewhere between 10% and 20% of people treated for Lyme with the standard 21 days of antibiotics develop PTLDS - lingering symptoms that last six months or more. In some ways, Brandi was one of the lucky ones, since she ultimately found an explanation for her health woes. I worried that I was dying, and the fact that doctors thought I was nuts made it so much worse. "I felt terrible - I was actually worried that I was dying - and the fact that doctors and some of the people I knew thought I was nuts made it all so much worse." "It was a terrifying and lonely time," she says. Over the next six months, she saw a neurologist an ear, nose and throat doctor a psychiatrist and even an infectious-disease specialist, all of whom said essentially the same thing: She was just tired and anxious because she'd recently delivered her second child. The meds didn't help, and Brandi remained unusually exhausted. It seemed to me like he was implying that it was all in my head." "He gave me Ativan for my dizziness and Zoloft for anxiety and sent me on my way. "He went through my records and said, 'I don't think you have Lyme, because Lyme symptoms are more flu-like,' " she says. When Brandi finished the medication, though, the symptoms roared back - which was why she had returned to see her primary care doctor that day in 2011. She started a 21-day course of oral antibiotics, the standard treatment for Lyme disease, and within a day or two she felt normal. I thought, Well, thank God that's over," Brandi recalls. "I was just relieved to have an actual diagnosis. Although she hadn't had the characteristic bull's-eye rash, the result was positive. But months later, she wound up in the ER with tingling and weakness on her right side, and the ER doctor tested her for Lyme disease, a bacterial infection transmitted by blacklegged ticks. "I figured I'd start feeling better soon," she says. Her primary care doctor chalked her symptoms up to pregnancy, then to her being a busy, sleep-deprived mom. Now she was so tired and weak, she had to scoot on her butt to go up and down the stairs in her home.īrandi's health problems - vertigo, intermittent hearing loss, panic attacks, fatigue - had begun 10 months earlier, not long after she noticed a bug bite on her backside. A former Coast Guard search-and-rescue soldier, Brandi had been superfit - running, mountain biking, hiking and doing yoga. I didn't know what was happening to me," she says. When she finally reached the waiting room after half an hour, she collapsed into the closest chair and broke down sobbing. But in August 2011, the 34-year-old had to inch down the sidewalk, stopping every few steps to lean on the double stroller in which her sons, ages 21/2 and 5 months, were riding. The doctor's office was just five short blocks from Brandi Dean's home in Boston, normally an easy walk for her.
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