Six Years

We sat in stunned silence.  My husband spoke first:  “Six years?  You think it’ll be six more years?”  It was 1994.   I had already suffered with Lyme disease for two years.  Luckily we knew what it was because my tests came back positive from the beginning, but the problem was that the medical community still did not know what would wipe it out.  So I went on round after round of different antibiotics.  Once, for a month,  I had to teach classes with an intravenous line in my arm.  I spent days in the cardiac care unit of the hospital three different times; On another hospital stay I had a spinal tap; Throughout these years I had numerous scans—all of them showing the invasive tunneling and hiding of this spirochete which had invaded my body via one tick bite.  One tick bite.  “Yes,” continued the infectious disease specialist, “that’s about what we can hope for if this current medicine works.  But after that you’ll still have a lifetime of symptoms.  This has altered your brain function (The spinal tap showed us—it’s in your spinal fluid.), changed your heart rhythms, and challenged your immune response mechanisms.”  I sat silently—staring at my trembling hands.  Finally I spoke, “So, I will never be the same as before, and, and, it will be six years before I fully regain my strength—before my legs won’t wobble when I walk, my eyes won’t suddenly blur, and my headaches won’t feel like crushed glass inside my brain?”  “Yes,” he repeated, “If the medicine keeps working.”  I had been battling this so long and the thought of those years stretching ahead of me struggling through the pain and fear and general malaise was overwhelming.  JohnBaer and I drove home in silence and then I went straight to our bedroom, got in bed, pulled the covers over my head and sobbed.  
Dear reader, the doctor was right.  In great waves of pain and recovery coming one after the other after the other, by the year 2000, at the age of 50, I had regained my strength.  And I was right as well:  I was not the same as before.  Fighting the battle against this disease had altered me.   It had made me evaluate so much of what I had always taken for granted; it had made me realize the interconnectedness of our human family; it had reminded me of my thankfulness for all the scientists working to help all of us win our fight against unseen foes like spirochetes, other bacteria, and viruses; and it had reminded me to celebrate the awesomeness of the human body and spirit—what it can endure, what it can overcome.   I still live with a lot of the damage done to me—It has left me with internal scars which I have, for the most part, learned to accept.  And so these days when I wear face gear as I walk about the neighborhood and when I ensconce myself in my house dearly missing my friends and family, I do so not just for me.  I do this for others—those I’ve met and those I haven’t.  I know what it’s like to be ravaged by disease and I don’t want others to go through it.   Wearing a mask is my way of visually saying:  I will do my part to help to  honor and support you and to wish you good health.

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