by Kathleen Liporace

You are invited to come along on a 20 year journey of one woman's story of ultimately being properly diagnosed with Lyme disease. In this story, you will see the unraveling of health that many Lyme patients endure prior to their ultimate correct diagnosis. 

Lisa was conclusively diagnosed with Lyme and the co-infections of Bartonella and Babesia on June 4, 2008. Of all people to think of Lyme disease, it was not an MD, but a dentist who first suggested the possibility to her. Lisa's dentist also has Lyme and was very familiar with the protean manifestations of this disease.

Lisa Meserve's medical journey began in 1988. By this time she had given birth to two children, a three-year-old daughter and a nine-month-old boy. Curiously, both children's umbilical cords were disintegrated at the time of delivery. Lisa's first child was born without an intact umbilical cord. This child amazingly had no physical side effects of Lyme. Lisa's son, who was born second, had febrile seizures from nine months old until the age of three when they spontaneously resolved. Notably, these seizures coincided with a round childhood vaccinations. Both children, however progressed normally in school and both have outstanding academic records, yet there is a mother's lingering concern as to whether Lyme could possibly have been transmitted vertically to them.

The medical merry-go-round started when Lisa was misdiagnosed with Lupus when her second child was six months old. Her symptoms were a pregnancy mask, severe exhaustion, insomnia, anxiety, hypotension, heart palpitations, joint pain, muscle aches, flu-like symptoms and her legs would go numb periodically. The symptom list also had seemingly unique psychiatric presentations of post-partum psychosis and severe depression. These latter two elements caused many to overlook the signs and symptoms of Lyme in its earliest stage. At the same point in time, the evening news was replete with information about Lyme disease making its way up the coast from Connecticut to Maine where the family then resided. Yet no connection was made by the medical professionals who she sought diagnosis and treatment from. At this stage, proper treatment would have cured Lisa of Lyme, but this was not to be at that time.

From this point on Lisa was thrust into a misdiagnosis of mental illness and inappropriate treatment of the ever-looming underlying condition. Instead of being treated with compassion and empathy, given her severe psychiatric presentation, she experienced the stigma attached with any diagnosis of mental origin. 

While being treated with antidepressant and antipsychotic medication, Lisa would have fared well with antibiotics needed to rid her of the etiology of her psychiatric presentation of Lyme. Instead, she received shock treatment and psychiatric in-patient care inappropriate for the underlying condition. With each shock treatment Lisa received, it caused further complications with Trigeminal Neuralgia, TMJD, and worsened her further cognitive and attention deficits. 

Especially acute was her short term memory loss. She could not recognize faces and places periodically at that stage in her life, which in her recount of her medical ordeal, was quite devastating. 

Years went by like minutes. During this time, her children were in high school and needing the direction and support of their mother who had previously been very involved in their schooling and extra curricular activities. Lisa was a shell of her former self. This caused many personal struggles in the family over time, as is sadly common with Lyme patients. This disease took a vibrant, fun-loving person and reduced her to a non-functioning individual. She fought recurrent battles in her mind with suicidal ideation, knowing she didn't want to act on these thoughts, but desperate for a sense of relief. 

Looking back it seems a huge cost was paid in that she lost precious and irretrievable time with her family and was mislabeled as a psychiatric patient. After the series of fifteen shock treatments, her attending psychiatrist arrived at the conclusion that Lisa had not derived any benefit from this modality of treatment. Instead, it actually exacerbated her mental condition. This confounded the attending psychiatrist who concluded that it must be her hormones, since she had undergone a hysterectomy, yet hormones were overlooked in blood testing. 

Four months later, Lisa went to a Fibromyalgia and Fatigue clinic and was then tested for hormonal imbalances. The tests conclusively showed that her hormonal system was in much distress. Estrogen, Progesterone, Testosterone, Cortisol and Thyroid hormones all came back low. As well, Mycoplasma was detected at this time and Chronic Fatigue testing revealed other abnormalities in Lisa's immune function. She had both a low white blood cell count and red blood cell count. She also tested positive for HHV6. For twenty years she had been told that her problems primarily existed in her mind, yet there were many outward physical manifestations of Lyme throughout this entire time. Part of Lisa never gave up the idea that her condition was primarily physiological and not psychiatric. 

Chronic Fatigue and Fibromyalgia were more misdiagnoses that Lisa was labeled with. Further, she suffered with food allergies, hair loss, weight loss, frequent bladder infections, metabolic dysbiosis, migraines, nutritional deficiencies, continued depression and anxiety. 

If Lyme wasn't bad enough, her body was virtually a toxic waste dump. Because of Lisa's employment as a dental hygienist, she carried highly elevated levels of mercury (not including her own 14 amalgam fillings). This was further compounded by wearing braces for two years. Where there are dissimilar metals in the mouth, a situation is created in which more mercury vapor is released into the body. If heavy metals are present in a patient's body, there may be a link to systemic Candida which might have an affinity for toxic metals such as mercury. Candida is another root cause of many complaints similar to Lyme. 

After having her amalgams improperly removed, Lisa experienced an episode of psychosis again, due to the inhalation of mercury in the process of having her fillings replaced. It is truly an amazing journey that this woman has gone through and her story is not yet finished. It really is just beginning. 

I see the light of God's grace in how her prior profession as a dental hygienist came back to bless her through her dentist who first suspected Lyme.