Sometimes the Horse is the Zebra

I had too many doctors, too many egos, with no one willing to be accountable. I was trapped in the middle, passed from one specialist to another, but with no one looking at the big picture. Throw in all of the side effects no one liked to talk about and I was certainly caught in a nightmare with one end in sight. In the back of my mind, I kept thinking how much bad luck could one family have? Statistically, it didn’t make sense. If each event was a separate random event, the odds were astronomical. Could there be another explanation?

A few days after arriving home, I was getting out of the shower and noticed several long red streaks traveling down my spine. I called my daughter and asked if she noticed anything?

She said, “You mean those bright red streaks on your back?”

After the neurologist had questioned my ability to perceive changes, I could have kissed her. I may have! We got a camera and began taking pictures. We recorded the streaks on my back, my hands and the dark veins under my eyes that varied with my prednisone levels.

Then the phone rang, the call that would save my life. My neighbor was checking in on me to see how I was doing? When I described the week’s events, she quietly said, “The only time I ever had a headache like that was when I had manifestations of Lyme disease, I was sweating profusely and I remember my eyes were bloodshot. I’ll be right down.”

In her arms, she carried a brown box filled with files she had gathered over the years regarding Lyme disease. A newspaper article of a young man from Ann Arbor who told a similar story took my breath away because there was a photo of his hands. I gasped, “ Those are my hands!”