A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words
by Dawn Irons
Recently I was going through my old family photos as I was making a photo montage of my niece Shannon as she was leaving to start a new life with her military husband in Germany. I was taken a back at how quickly time flies! Looking at these photos, it just
seemed like it was yesterday... but it had been almost 22 years.
Something else struck me as I was looking through the photos. I noticed several photos my mom had taken of me where I was laid out on the sofa, sick, exhausted, or too pained to live a “normal teenage life”. I was too tired to really enjoy my prom!
I started remembering when I first became sick, or rather when I first started noticing it intefering with my daily life. I was a junior in high school. It was 1986. At that time, my symptoms seemed more of a nuisance than anything, but by the time my senior year rolled around I was in the throws of a personal hell. I had become so sick that my mother moved a bed for me into the living room so that I would not be secluded from the rest of the family.
My life had drastically changed in those few short years of high school. I went from being a very athletic cheerleader to being a bed ridden girl riddled with migraines and severe vertigo that made death seem a welcomed alternative to the pain.
I missed 87 days of my senior year of high school. It was not so much that I missed the classes as much as it was I spent that time sleeping in an almost comatose state.
There were times that the brightest part of the day was when my niece would toddle over and crawl into my bed or wake me up just to kiss me. She was better medicine for the
soul than any of the gazillion drugs the neurologist was pouring down my throat with his official diagnosis of , “we don’t know what is wrong with you so take this drug until we figure it out” syndrome.
The more I look back and remember, it seems I see things with a different perspective now that I have been diagnosed with Lyme disease.
Cheerleading was one of great joys. I loved the activity. As a freshman in high school, I remember the horrendous pain I would get in practice and during the football games in my shins and muscles. My fellow squad members would tell me that was normal and it would eventually lessen. It never did. My muscle and join pain kept getting worse.
The next year I tried the pep-squad and tennis instead. It was less strenuous, but still fun. But even that was short lived. By my junior year I left all aspects of sports or physical athletics. It was simply too much between the pain and the ongoing fatigue. It was then that I took up journalism again after leaving it behind for the pursuit of athletics.
Back to the photos... looking through the pictures I realized that they had captured a truth that I would not understand for almost 20 years.
Lyme disease was still fairly new on the scene in the 1980’s and falsely believed to be only an east coast disease.
The best diagnosis that my neurologist could come up with was an educated guess that my symptoms might be caused by a brain tumor or epilepsy. The MRI revealed no tumor, but the EEG did reveal a seizure disorder, though it was not epilepsy.
Not one doctor ever questioned me about my hobbies or interests to know that I was an avid outdoors person who loved camping, hiking, and fishing with my dad. I roamed the prairies on our family ranch where my grandparents were constantly battling ticks, though I personally never remeber getting one, I do remember the tick checks!
I wish I could gather all the medical records from way back when... I would love to show just how many rounds of antibiotics I had been prescribed in the beginning of my illness (supposedly the acute stage)... then to be finally diagnosed with positive blood serology in 2005, some 19 years later.
Do Lyme symptoms persist after standard antibiotic treatment? I am almost 40 years old, recently diagnosed, and all I can say is, “A picture is worth a thousand words!”
