Greetings everyone! My name is Ken and my wife and I live in Louisville, KY. My wife is being checked out for Lyme disease.
She has been sick for 7+ years and numerous doctors haven't been able to help her.
Before the shoe fell, her only medical problems were asthma and a severe latex allergy which made her give up her job in a hospital as a nurse. I will tell our story now to see if it rings a bell with any of the group.
Seven plus years ago, in the early fall my wife was working in a physician's office as a triage nurse. She came home one evening and said that she had a bite on her leg and she thought she had been bitten by a spider at work.
The area was red and there was a pit in the middle of the redness that looked like the place the spider bit. The pitted area began to look like it was getting necrotic so the physician in the office put her on Cephalexin for 10 days.
The bite cleared up and that was the end of that we thought.
We skip forward to the following spring, and she woke up one Monday morning and was have a lot of nausea and vomiting. At the time, I worked as a pharmacist in the same building as the physician office where she worked.
We both kind of wrote that off as a virus because I had seen a lot of people come into the pharmacy because of a stomach virus that appeared to be going around.
Well, the n&v went on for the full week and by Saturday, I took her to the ER because she was worried about getting dehydrated.
They admitted her and started IV fluids. She was having some abdominal pain along with the n&v so they ordered a Hidascan to check her gall bladder.
It turned out from her reaction to the tracer that they used that the pain in her abdomen became worse and the nurses, etc at the hospital said that if the person reacts this way to the tracer then that in itself confirms gall bladder problems.
So the next morning, the surgeon took out her gall bladder laproscopically. He did not find any gall stones and said that the gall bladder was slightly inflamed toward the top.
We both thought that the problem had been solved but she kept vomiting.
Instead of sending her home on Monday, they decided to keep her until Tuesday. She came home Tuesday but continued to throw up so she went back into the hospital on Wednesday.
Long story short, she has been nauseated and vomited since then.
The GI doctor ran tests and thought it was gastroparesis so she was treated for that. The medications did not help much so we went to the Cleveland Clinic and they implanted a gastric stimulator which hasn't done much good.
She continued with the n&v after that.
Skip forward, a year or more and she began waking up in the middle of the night with what appeared to be an absence seizure. We went to a neurologist and they put her on several seizure medications that didn't stop it.
They did a video EEG test here but let her go home early because after 48 hours there was no evidence of seizure activity. We went the University of KY and a neurologist there thought it was due to cluster migraines and she put her on medicine for the migraines.
The "seizure" activity stopped although the migraines did not. We really didn't think much of the migraines, since they run in her family.
Now we skip forward a year or so. She began to have trouble breathing and she thought that her asthma was kicking up.
We went to the ER and they thought the same thing but they ran a CT scan and it came back that she had bilateral pulmonary emboli.
They got that cleared up and she went on Coumadin to prevent any more embolism. All along this journey, I kept asking each of the specialists that we were seeing, if the stomach problems, neurological problems, and coagulation problems could be related.
They all said no that they weren't connected.
I finally heard a guy on the Coast to Coast AM radio show one night talking about Lyme disease and telling what he had gone through. He was diagnosed by a doctor when he presented with a high eosinophil count.
That caused a light bulb to go on because once when my wife was in the hospital, she had a high eosinophil count and they put her on steroids to lower that which it did.
As I began to recall the previous years, I remembered the bite she had gotten in the office. It was about4 to 6 months after that she began having the GI problems.
I began reading about Lyme and how difficult it is to diagnose.
I came across the fact that it can cause neurological problems and can hypercoagulability. I then had a "AHAH" moment.
We found a LLMD in Tennessee and went to see him in March. He ran all kinds of Igenex lab tests which all came back negative.
He also did a stool culture which just came back so I don't really know what he thinks about it.
We returned to see him at the end of May. He gave her some herbal things for her to take.
He did say that he has patients that show up negative on the blood work but that he will treat them with antibiotics and some of them have responded well in 4 to 6 weeks.
So that is where we are right now. She continues to struggle with the abdominal pain and the hypercoagulability.
She is very depressed and anxious having all this go on for the past 7+ years.
I try to keep her spirits up and remain positive but that is a tough thing to do. I just found out there is a local Lyme support group and they meet in a couple of weeks and we hope to go to that.
I am sorry that this is so long, but maybe somebody else can relate to it and validate things.
Thanks,
Ken
Post edited by: gimbel, at: 06/10/2012 01:43 PM
Post edited by: gimbel, at: 06/10/2012 01:47 PM
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