Blake's 40 Day Fast to Beat Lyme
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My name is Blake and I have Chronic Late Stage Lyme Disease in my nervous system, brain and heart. I have had Chronic Lyme for 21 years and it went undiagnosed for 17. I have been fighting it now for 4 years since I finally got a diagnosis in 2014. I have had close to 100 tick bites in my lifetime. Currently, I am trying to raise enough money to go to a fasting clinic in Costa Rica, after accomplishing a 39 day medical fast on my own this May. In comparison to every other treatment I have undergone, of which there are many, this single long term fast proved the most efficient at killing the infections that are making me sick and healing my body from the damage they have caused. The tick diseases that I have tested positive for include Borrelia, Bartonella, Babesia (American Malaria), Mycoplasma, Tularemia and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever (past infection). Additionally, because chronic illness dramatically weakens the immune system, opportunistic infections take hold of your body’s lowered defenses and move in as well. My additional systemic and chronic infections include Epstein Barr Virus, HHV6, Candida and a chronic MARCONS Staph infection. I also have absurdly high levels of lead and mercury in my body which are endocrine disruptors and cause severe neurological problems. The level of lead in my body is over ten times the amount that is considered safe and the amount of mercury is more than 22 times the acceptable level because chronic infections and a weak immune system impair the body’s ability to detox harmful substances. I admit it took me a month to put this all together, but I want to make sure that people are able to get as full a picture as possible, and that there is no lack of information available, because part of what makes Lyme so dangerous is the fact that it exists under the radar… Sometimes I can’t believe how far I have come when I think about how bad things were for so long. I know others aren’t as lucky. The greatest number of deaths from Lyme are actually suicides. Nothing better describes what it’s like to have this disease other than the term “living hell.” Now that I am getting so close to the point of eradicating this from my body once and for all, I am getting more and more windows in time, where I feel like myself again. I had almost forgotten what it was like to not be sick, since I spent 17 years spiraling deeper and deeper into severe chronic illness, and the past 4 years treating it. Please help me go all the way. I am so very close and ultimately, there is nothing more I want than to just be myself again. It has always been very difficult for me to ask for help because I am a very independent person. At this point though, I know I need the help to reach my light at the end of the tunnel. I would greatly appreciate anything that anyone would be able to contribute to assist me on the road to recovery or just sharing my campaign even if you can’t donate. Everyone in my immediate family also has Lyme. All of the money made beyond the 9000 dollar goal will go into a family medical account used to treat all of us. Almost none of the treatment for Lyme is covered by insurance because of the politics involving insurance companies, Big Pharma and integrative and holistic medicine. I have uploaded a video, but for those who would rather read or are interested in both, there is a comprehensive summary below which includes my medical history, symptoms and treatments, my “Lyme story” and information on medical fasting. I have also included a link for Tanglewood fasting clinic, a CDC map of Lyme cases, an explanation of how medical fasting works, and a link to an extended version of the above video for awareness purposes. For those who are interested, this additional information is available below.
Extended video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zCAw43O1K8&t=2s
Most people have probably heard of Lyme Disease but perhaps most don’t understand the incredible severity of this illness, how difficult it is to treat, and how it completely ruins your brain, your body and your life. When I say “Lyme Disease” I am referring to any and all infectious diseases that can be contracted from the bite of a tick. You see to me, “Lyme” isn’t just Borrelia Burgdorferi, which was the original strain of bacteria identified in Lyme, Connecticut in 1975 (only 23 miles from my house), it is a whole sinister host of pathogens that gain access to your body through the bite of a tick, or oftentimes other insect bites such as those of mosquitoes and flies. Tick bites tend to be the worst however, because the tick spends a long amount of time embedded on the body, leaving you vulnerable to a far higher load of infectious disease during the lengthy transmission period. I have had doctors ask me “when did you get your tick bite?” which I always think is a funny question because I will simply laugh sardonically and reply “which 100 of my tick bites do you want to hear about?”
This may sound absolutely unreal to some people and I wish it was. You could say I live at Ground Zero for Lyme Disease- 23 miles from Lyme, Connecticut, 24 miles from Montauk (famous for “Montauk Knee- the agonizing joint pain of the knees that comes from Lyme) and 13 miles from Plum Island (for more information research Lyme and Plum Island.) If you look at the Center for Disease Control map of Lyme cases, you can see that where I live towards the eastern end of Long Island is basically the epicenter.
https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/resources/reportedcasesoflymedisease_2016.pdf
“100 tick bites” should sound absolutely outrageous because it is. This is not an exaggeration. The tick problem here has gotten exponentially worse over the past 50 years for whatever reason... It has gotten to the point where it’s impossible to spend any significant amount of time outside on eastern long island without contracting ticks and the diseases that come with them. Growing up, tick bites were just part of life. You took them out with tweezers, flushed them down the toilet and never thought twice about the fact that even a single tick bite can ruin your life, cause severe physical and psychiatric problems, kill you or all of the above. My first documented tick bite on my medical records is when I was 5 years old and after that they keep coming according to my pediatric file… although after a while, my mom stopped reporting all of our tick bites to the doctors because they would never do anything about them. We never received antibiotics after bites even after we would develop acute symptoms like fevers and then go on to develop more severe chronic symptoms... Most of the time we were never even given blood tests to test for the disease, although when we were, it was oftentimes a false negative since they were only testing for 1 disease (Borrelia) out of about at least 20 that you can get from a tick and they were only testing (and still are) for 1 out of 300 strains that exist of the Borrelia. This year alone, I got 3 tick bites and for someone who spends most of their time focusing on how to treat Lyme and avoid ticks, that really is obscene. One of those tick bites was 2 weeks into my 40 day fast, which you can imagine was extremely upsetting.
When I was very young, my symptoms began as very vague, but correlated with my family’s move into a heavily wooded area and a sharp and dramatic increase in the amount of tick bites I began to get. After acute symptoms such as fever, chills, insomnia and body aches after a bite, I began to develop other more chronic symptoms. I complained of stomach upset and didn’t want to go to school when normally I loved school. I all of a sudden began to feel more depressed, tired, irritable and sometimes unreasonably angry and I started getting acne as a 7 year old, which is highly unusual. It wasn’t until 8th grade in 2004 though that it began to become clear that something was very, very wrong. I started getting migraine headaches that can only be described as feeling like you’re getting slammed in the head with a sledgehammer repeatedly for six hours. Right before I would get one, I would start to lose my vision and then the next 5 plus hours I would be non-stop hysterically crying and vomiting over and over again from the pain. The Lyme had begun to hit my nervous system and was moving deeper into my brain. At the same time, before this started to happen I had been a straight A student and all of a sudden I completely could not concentrate at all. I felt like out of nowhere I just became stupid. I started to also develop severe insomnia, depression, anxiety and fatigue. I would stay up until 4am wired and then fall asleep in class. I had joint paint that would come and go in my knees and back. And I had 2 very strange episodes of experiencing something that felt like severe brain fog- a mixture between being the most tired you’ve ever felt and feeling like all of a sudden you had lost the ability to think- like the gears in your brain had just come to screeching halt… At the time I remember thinking it must be Lyme or mono, but when I got tested, both tests came back negative. This was in 2007. I was diagnosed with “asthma” at this time which was weird since it wasn’t really an issue where my throat was closing up, but a shortness of breath where it felt like I wasn’t getting enough oxygen occasionally.
Freshmen year of college was a catastrophic disaster. I was put on Yaz, a birth control pill that has spurred thousands of lawsuits because of its horrific side effects, and being already sick with multiple tick diseases, this toxic drug crashed my immune system and made the Lyme and Candida go insane. Two weeks after being put on Yaz I experienced my first panic attack, where all of a sudden out of nowhere I felt the urge to throw myself out a window. A couple months later I began to experience the “panic attacks” all the time, everyday, and they would last for hours… They weren’t so much panic attacks as episodes of psychosis. They would come out of nowhere- no outside stimulus would trigger them. The only way I am able to describe it is imagine the moment in your life when you have been the most scared and then imagine that moment not ending. It lasts for hours, and then you come down, get a couple hours of depression, and a rational anxiety based in real fear that you’re losing your mind, and then it starts all over again. Its like a bad drug trip that never ends and all you want to do is kill yourself so you don’t have to live in this reality of insane horror any longer. You’re hallucinating and you’re terrified and you know you’re crazy, but you have no idea why. In addition to the fact that I was losing my mind, I was so tired at this point that I was sleeping all over the ground anywhere I could. I couldn’t make it back from class without taking a nap on the grass or a bus stop bench. I was drinking 5 sixteen oz. coffees a day just to stay awake for an amount of time long enough to go to class and do my work and if I went out at night I would have to drink a 6th one and I would put 4 teabags in it. I also started getting that weird fog in my head again. It almost felt like my vision was blurry, but it wasn’t a problem with my vision… it felt more like my brain was incapable of focusing on more than one object at a time so it was blurring the other ones out, like a processing problem. I was put on Lexapro, an SSRI, and Strattera for “ADD” which were enough to stave off anxiety and early onset dementia symptoms through school, but only ended up making me even sicker in the end.
The month I graduated college- May 2012, I got very sick. I was throwing up for no reason, had horribly swollen glands, sore throat, thrush in my mouth, achy muscles and joints (more so than usual), congestion and I was just incredibly exhausted all the time. I was diagnosed with mono and “acute Lyme”… The doctor said I had just contracted the Lyme in the last month… According to him, I would be fine with 1 month of Doxycycline to get rid of it. The Doxy was actually enough to get rid of the acute Lyme symptoms (probably due to reinfection via insect bite) and so I moved from New York to California. Once again, in California, I experienced another radical and dramatic increase in my symptoms. No one had been able to tell me what the brain fog was, but all the while through college it was getting worse and worse. Finally in California, it was so bad that instead of being something that happened on and off, it became something I was in all the time. It felt like my brain had slowed to a fraction of its normal operating power. I was starting to forget things often, experience confusion frequently and feel a complete disassociation with reality. The panic, anxiety and psychosis worsened and my sleeping pattern became absolutely ridiculous. Oftentimes, I would have insomnia until about 5 am every night and then, regardless of how much sleep I had or when I went to bed, I would be so tired I would try to sleep until 4 or 5 pm in the afternoon. When I went home for the summer the brain fog was so bad I could barely drive because I felt like I was wasted all the time. I started losing feeling in my hands and my feet and I was getting facial swelling where my eyes would nearly swell shut and my lips would swell up and I was told this was caused by “anxiety.” Actually it turned out that my liver was so overloaded from the Lyme toxins plus the massive amounts of ibuprofen and Advil I was taking for the headaches, joint pain, back aches and severe period pain that it was no longer able to process NSAIDS with the exception of aspirin, which strangely enough, would make my anxiety and psychiatric symptoms improve when I took it. Turns out this was because all of the psychiatric symptoms were being caused by inflammation from the Lyme and aspirin is an anti-inflammatory. Other symptoms that worsened and appeared around this time included shaking, bouts of nausea, vertigo, light headedness, ringing in the ears, increased severe light sensitivity, decreased hearing and there were these constant dots that were always floating in front of my eyes.
Still no doctor could tell me what was wrong and continued to push drugs on me and blame it on anxiety. At this point I knew the psychiatric medication was just making me sicker. It was annihilating my thyroid function and I had a sneaking suspicion that it might be exacerbating a lot of my symptoms even if was tempering the “anxiety” to a degree… When I went off of the Lexapro I went through 9 months of excruciating withdrawals, which was basically waking up every day with a feeling that my brain was getting zapped- like it physically felt like it was “dropping” or getting “zapped” inside of my head, full on hallucinations, extreme panic and paranoia and recognizing why it was happening and saying “I’m not going to kill myself today.” When the withdrawals cleared finally after 9 months, I could no longer buy the doctor’s justification that all my physical symptoms were being caused by the psychiatric symptoms because even though the psychiatric symptoms were starting to clear with the end of the Lexapro withdrawals, my physical ones were getting worse… On my 24th birthday, I experienced a very high fever, with excruciating pain in every muscle and joint in my body. It felt like my entire body was on fire. My job fired me for calling in sick because they thought I just wanted my birthday off. I went to the hospital where once again they couldn’t find anything wrong with me… Serendipitously, I came across something about Chronic Lyme on Facebook. It sounded like exactly what was wrong with me and I read about how the testing for Lyme is wildly inaccurate. I went to an LLMD (Lyme Literate Doctor) and got a more accurate test by the lab IGENEX. It came back positive. Finally I knew what was wrong with me and that was half the battle. I went to 2 doctors who took insurance and claimed to treat Lyme. All they did was put me on oral Doxycycline which did nothing but actually make me sicker and worsen the already horrible candida infection in addition to the Lyme. By Spring 2015, my memory and cognitive skills were so terrible I was mixing up my words when I was speaking like a stroke victim and forgetting where I was and for split seconds who I was when I was driving. At the age of 24, I was told I would have full blown dementia by the time I was 35 and not remember anything. Yes, you read that correctly. And I knew it was happening. So this is what it felt like… That was what that sneaking slowly worsening brain fog all these years actually was… after the 6 months of Doxycycline, the only thing it managed to do for me was stain my teeth and give me horrible GI symptoms for a month, which eventually ended up in another ER visit after I puked up something that looked like blood.
I went to about 10 more doctors after this to try to find someone who would help me. Most told me they didn’t treat Lyme and tried to diagnose me with other things like MS or juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, even though I had the positive Lyme test and tests for all these other things had already come back negative… I realized that no doctor that took insurance would be able to treat me because of the massive political controversy over Lyme. Thankfully, however I was able to find an amazing doctor’s office that specializes in Lyme, chronic illness and integrative medicine and they saved my life. Unfortunately though, almost none of the treatment has been covered and I’m not out of the woods yet. I have done many treatments and it has been very difficult, but totally worth it.
Dr. Burruscano, a Lyme expert, created a symptom checklist which measures symptoms by their frequency and severity. When my symptoms were at their worst which was for about a 10 year period I had 34 severe symptoms. But after working extremely hard at treating myself for the past 4 years, now I only have 9! At my worst, I had 19 symptoms that were constant- now I only have one! This is incredibly promising for me and it makes me feel proud for how far I have come and shows how close to the finish line I actually am. The remaining severe symptoms include occasional severe joint and muscle pain, occasional severe brain fog/cognitive issues, occasional severe breathlessness/lack of oxygen and night sweats from the Babesia and often moderate and occasionally severe fatigue… The only symptom that remains severe and constant is excessive and constant peeing, which occurs as my body tries to rid itself of all the toxins created from killing off the Lyme and other organisms, which also creates the necessity for me to drink double the amount of water a normal person is required to every day (about 120 oz). I also still experience to a degree back pain, nausea, light headedness, vertigo, mood swings, lyme rage, anxiety, light and sound sensitivity, ringing in the ears, depression, headaches, eye floaters, sensitivity to cold, period pain, skin issues, neuropathy/numbness in hands, low blood pressure, low body temperature, insulin and blood sugar issues, insomnia, and heart arrhythmia but most of these symptoms are no longer severe… there are probably some that I am missing, but all in all, most symptoms have been greatly reduced and even completely eliminated after these past 4 years of treatment. I really want to be able to live a life where I don’t have to experience any of these symptoms though and daily functioning isn’t a battle. I am 28 years old and there are many things I want in my future including a car, a job and a family and unfortunately none of these things are in my grasp while I remain sick.
I have done the following treatments: Oral antibiotics, herbal supplements, 9 months on intravenous antibiotics through a piccline, The Rife Machine, The Biomat, Ketogenic Diet, Ozone therapy, UVLRx (Intravenous Light Therapy), heavy metal chelation for the lead and mercury toxicity, and most recently a 40 day water fast. I have experienced very strong Herxheimer reactions from all of these things which is what happens when you kill off a large amount of the pathogens at once and they release their endotoxins in large quantities as they are destroyed. Your detox pathways and organs become overloaded because they can’t process the large amount of toxicity all at one time. A large enough Herxheimer reaction can send you into sepsis, which is what happened to me in January earlier this year and lead to, a thankfully brief, stay in the ICU. The Herxheimer reaction was too big because I had been doing too many treatments at once, because I so much wanted to get better and to be able to have a life outside of being sick. I had also been drinking reverse osmosis water which didn’t give me the electrolytes I needed to detox and was very acidic, so I was also suffering from electrolyte imbalance and acidosis. For about a week my temperature was about 95 degrees as I was going into sepsis. It was pretty scary...
After the hospital disaster, I stopped all my treatments and decided to look into a very, very simple method of healing that has been utilized by animals and humans to treat illness for thousands of years: fasting. I attempted a 40 day fast, where I would drink nothing but water for 40 days. The premise of fasting is that your body goes into something called autophagy where it begins to consume everything within itself that it doesn’t need for fuel- including pathogens that make us sick like viruses, bacteria, fungi and parasites. It also consumes old, unhealthy cells and cell parts and regenerates completely new healthy cells and cell components. Additionally, the infections starve to death as you cut off their food supply. Thankfully though, the human body is much better equipped and even evolutionarily programmed to not only survive long periods of fasting, but benefit from them. For thousands of years fasting for humankind was a normal part of life, as it is in much of the animal world. Through natural cycles of feast and famine, our ancestors were able to sustain relatively low infectious burdens within their bodies. Below is a link to explain autophagy which is activated by fasting and how it induces a natural process of self-healing :
http://www.cavemandoctor.com/2012/04/06/autophagy-turning-stress-into-health/
On my 40 day fast I made it about 3 weeks on simply mineral water alone and then I became concerned about electrolytes . Even though the mineral water contains naturally occurring electrolytes, I decided to add electrolytes to my water because I wasn’t sure what my levels were and couldn’t test them at home. The fast definitely got pretty nerve racking towards the end and on day 36 I began to consume bone broth- about ¾ cup per day for the vitamins, minerals and electrolytes…. Long story short, I ended up making it to day 39 when I was forced to stop the fast because I tried adding lemon to my water and the citric acid on 39 days of an unbuffered stomach made me throw up, so I decided that 39 days was close enough to 40... All in all, the 40 day fast was wildly successful. In 2 weeks I was completely back to normal and felt even better than “normal” for me which was the whole point! This summer, After this fast, I felt the best I had in years. I felt 90 PERCENT BETTER from Lyme, which for me is amazing, considering how long I have been living with it... Based on the results of the 40 day fast, I have to say that out of all the treatments I have done it was the most effective, and worked at killing the Lyme and other pathogens and healing my body the most quickly and efficiently. (Perhaps that’s why they call it a “fast” and not a “slow”! )I feel that I might be only one more long term fast away from becoming completely symptom free from Lyme! (Since this Fall, I feel as if I am about back to only 70 percent better because the oldest Lyme of all has been reactivated from its dormant cystic forms as we attack it with more treatments like Rife and herbal antimicrobials). Although my previous fast was a great success, I would like to undergo my next fast in an environment where I am supervised by professionals who are able to check my electrolyte levels, vital signs, vitamin levels and provide emergency backup should I need it. Additionally, at the clinic I am interested in, I don’t think there will be a very large likelihood of me getting bit by a tick in the middle of the fast this time either! It became very stressful and arguably dangerous towards the end of the fast this May, because I was doing this mostly alone with only intermittent contact with my doctor. Below is the link for Tanglewood Clinic where I hope to be able to do another long term fast.
https://tanglewoodwellnesscenter.com/
I thank you so much for you time. I hope you seek to share this campaign and/or my videos, not only as a fundraiser to help me, but also as a way to spread invaluable information about Lyme, Chronic Illness and alternative treatments. For me, the worst part was when I didn’t know what was wrong with me. Ultimately it was information such as this that was the answer to my prayers and rescued me when I thought all hope was lost. Knowledge is power and that power has the ability to save lives.
Extended video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zCAw43O1K8&t=2s
Most people have probably heard of Lyme Disease but perhaps most don’t understand the incredible severity of this illness, how difficult it is to treat, and how it completely ruins your brain, your body and your life. When I say “Lyme Disease” I am referring to any and all infectious diseases that can be contracted from the bite of a tick. You see to me, “Lyme” isn’t just Borrelia Burgdorferi, which was the original strain of bacteria identified in Lyme, Connecticut in 1975 (only 23 miles from my house), it is a whole sinister host of pathogens that gain access to your body through the bite of a tick, or oftentimes other insect bites such as those of mosquitoes and flies. Tick bites tend to be the worst however, because the tick spends a long amount of time embedded on the body, leaving you vulnerable to a far higher load of infectious disease during the lengthy transmission period. I have had doctors ask me “when did you get your tick bite?” which I always think is a funny question because I will simply laugh sardonically and reply “which 100 of my tick bites do you want to hear about?”
This may sound absolutely unreal to some people and I wish it was. You could say I live at Ground Zero for Lyme Disease- 23 miles from Lyme, Connecticut, 24 miles from Montauk (famous for “Montauk Knee- the agonizing joint pain of the knees that comes from Lyme) and 13 miles from Plum Island (for more information research Lyme and Plum Island.) If you look at the Center for Disease Control map of Lyme cases, you can see that where I live towards the eastern end of Long Island is basically the epicenter.
https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/resources/reportedcasesoflymedisease_2016.pdf
“100 tick bites” should sound absolutely outrageous because it is. This is not an exaggeration. The tick problem here has gotten exponentially worse over the past 50 years for whatever reason... It has gotten to the point where it’s impossible to spend any significant amount of time outside on eastern long island without contracting ticks and the diseases that come with them. Growing up, tick bites were just part of life. You took them out with tweezers, flushed them down the toilet and never thought twice about the fact that even a single tick bite can ruin your life, cause severe physical and psychiatric problems, kill you or all of the above. My first documented tick bite on my medical records is when I was 5 years old and after that they keep coming according to my pediatric file… although after a while, my mom stopped reporting all of our tick bites to the doctors because they would never do anything about them. We never received antibiotics after bites even after we would develop acute symptoms like fevers and then go on to develop more severe chronic symptoms... Most of the time we were never even given blood tests to test for the disease, although when we were, it was oftentimes a false negative since they were only testing for 1 disease (Borrelia) out of about at least 20 that you can get from a tick and they were only testing (and still are) for 1 out of 300 strains that exist of the Borrelia. This year alone, I got 3 tick bites and for someone who spends most of their time focusing on how to treat Lyme and avoid ticks, that really is obscene. One of those tick bites was 2 weeks into my 40 day fast, which you can imagine was extremely upsetting.
When I was very young, my symptoms began as very vague, but correlated with my family’s move into a heavily wooded area and a sharp and dramatic increase in the amount of tick bites I began to get. After acute symptoms such as fever, chills, insomnia and body aches after a bite, I began to develop other more chronic symptoms. I complained of stomach upset and didn’t want to go to school when normally I loved school. I all of a sudden began to feel more depressed, tired, irritable and sometimes unreasonably angry and I started getting acne as a 7 year old, which is highly unusual. It wasn’t until 8th grade in 2004 though that it began to become clear that something was very, very wrong. I started getting migraine headaches that can only be described as feeling like you’re getting slammed in the head with a sledgehammer repeatedly for six hours. Right before I would get one, I would start to lose my vision and then the next 5 plus hours I would be non-stop hysterically crying and vomiting over and over again from the pain. The Lyme had begun to hit my nervous system and was moving deeper into my brain. At the same time, before this started to happen I had been a straight A student and all of a sudden I completely could not concentrate at all. I felt like out of nowhere I just became stupid. I started to also develop severe insomnia, depression, anxiety and fatigue. I would stay up until 4am wired and then fall asleep in class. I had joint paint that would come and go in my knees and back. And I had 2 very strange episodes of experiencing something that felt like severe brain fog- a mixture between being the most tired you’ve ever felt and feeling like all of a sudden you had lost the ability to think- like the gears in your brain had just come to screeching halt… At the time I remember thinking it must be Lyme or mono, but when I got tested, both tests came back negative. This was in 2007. I was diagnosed with “asthma” at this time which was weird since it wasn’t really an issue where my throat was closing up, but a shortness of breath where it felt like I wasn’t getting enough oxygen occasionally.
Freshmen year of college was a catastrophic disaster. I was put on Yaz, a birth control pill that has spurred thousands of lawsuits because of its horrific side effects, and being already sick with multiple tick diseases, this toxic drug crashed my immune system and made the Lyme and Candida go insane. Two weeks after being put on Yaz I experienced my first panic attack, where all of a sudden out of nowhere I felt the urge to throw myself out a window. A couple months later I began to experience the “panic attacks” all the time, everyday, and they would last for hours… They weren’t so much panic attacks as episodes of psychosis. They would come out of nowhere- no outside stimulus would trigger them. The only way I am able to describe it is imagine the moment in your life when you have been the most scared and then imagine that moment not ending. It lasts for hours, and then you come down, get a couple hours of depression, and a rational anxiety based in real fear that you’re losing your mind, and then it starts all over again. Its like a bad drug trip that never ends and all you want to do is kill yourself so you don’t have to live in this reality of insane horror any longer. You’re hallucinating and you’re terrified and you know you’re crazy, but you have no idea why. In addition to the fact that I was losing my mind, I was so tired at this point that I was sleeping all over the ground anywhere I could. I couldn’t make it back from class without taking a nap on the grass or a bus stop bench. I was drinking 5 sixteen oz. coffees a day just to stay awake for an amount of time long enough to go to class and do my work and if I went out at night I would have to drink a 6th one and I would put 4 teabags in it. I also started getting that weird fog in my head again. It almost felt like my vision was blurry, but it wasn’t a problem with my vision… it felt more like my brain was incapable of focusing on more than one object at a time so it was blurring the other ones out, like a processing problem. I was put on Lexapro, an SSRI, and Strattera for “ADD” which were enough to stave off anxiety and early onset dementia symptoms through school, but only ended up making me even sicker in the end.
The month I graduated college- May 2012, I got very sick. I was throwing up for no reason, had horribly swollen glands, sore throat, thrush in my mouth, achy muscles and joints (more so than usual), congestion and I was just incredibly exhausted all the time. I was diagnosed with mono and “acute Lyme”… The doctor said I had just contracted the Lyme in the last month… According to him, I would be fine with 1 month of Doxycycline to get rid of it. The Doxy was actually enough to get rid of the acute Lyme symptoms (probably due to reinfection via insect bite) and so I moved from New York to California. Once again, in California, I experienced another radical and dramatic increase in my symptoms. No one had been able to tell me what the brain fog was, but all the while through college it was getting worse and worse. Finally in California, it was so bad that instead of being something that happened on and off, it became something I was in all the time. It felt like my brain had slowed to a fraction of its normal operating power. I was starting to forget things often, experience confusion frequently and feel a complete disassociation with reality. The panic, anxiety and psychosis worsened and my sleeping pattern became absolutely ridiculous. Oftentimes, I would have insomnia until about 5 am every night and then, regardless of how much sleep I had or when I went to bed, I would be so tired I would try to sleep until 4 or 5 pm in the afternoon. When I went home for the summer the brain fog was so bad I could barely drive because I felt like I was wasted all the time. I started losing feeling in my hands and my feet and I was getting facial swelling where my eyes would nearly swell shut and my lips would swell up and I was told this was caused by “anxiety.” Actually it turned out that my liver was so overloaded from the Lyme toxins plus the massive amounts of ibuprofen and Advil I was taking for the headaches, joint pain, back aches and severe period pain that it was no longer able to process NSAIDS with the exception of aspirin, which strangely enough, would make my anxiety and psychiatric symptoms improve when I took it. Turns out this was because all of the psychiatric symptoms were being caused by inflammation from the Lyme and aspirin is an anti-inflammatory. Other symptoms that worsened and appeared around this time included shaking, bouts of nausea, vertigo, light headedness, ringing in the ears, increased severe light sensitivity, decreased hearing and there were these constant dots that were always floating in front of my eyes.
Still no doctor could tell me what was wrong and continued to push drugs on me and blame it on anxiety. At this point I knew the psychiatric medication was just making me sicker. It was annihilating my thyroid function and I had a sneaking suspicion that it might be exacerbating a lot of my symptoms even if was tempering the “anxiety” to a degree… When I went off of the Lexapro I went through 9 months of excruciating withdrawals, which was basically waking up every day with a feeling that my brain was getting zapped- like it physically felt like it was “dropping” or getting “zapped” inside of my head, full on hallucinations, extreme panic and paranoia and recognizing why it was happening and saying “I’m not going to kill myself today.” When the withdrawals cleared finally after 9 months, I could no longer buy the doctor’s justification that all my physical symptoms were being caused by the psychiatric symptoms because even though the psychiatric symptoms were starting to clear with the end of the Lexapro withdrawals, my physical ones were getting worse… On my 24th birthday, I experienced a very high fever, with excruciating pain in every muscle and joint in my body. It felt like my entire body was on fire. My job fired me for calling in sick because they thought I just wanted my birthday off. I went to the hospital where once again they couldn’t find anything wrong with me… Serendipitously, I came across something about Chronic Lyme on Facebook. It sounded like exactly what was wrong with me and I read about how the testing for Lyme is wildly inaccurate. I went to an LLMD (Lyme Literate Doctor) and got a more accurate test by the lab IGENEX. It came back positive. Finally I knew what was wrong with me and that was half the battle. I went to 2 doctors who took insurance and claimed to treat Lyme. All they did was put me on oral Doxycycline which did nothing but actually make me sicker and worsen the already horrible candida infection in addition to the Lyme. By Spring 2015, my memory and cognitive skills were so terrible I was mixing up my words when I was speaking like a stroke victim and forgetting where I was and for split seconds who I was when I was driving. At the age of 24, I was told I would have full blown dementia by the time I was 35 and not remember anything. Yes, you read that correctly. And I knew it was happening. So this is what it felt like… That was what that sneaking slowly worsening brain fog all these years actually was… after the 6 months of Doxycycline, the only thing it managed to do for me was stain my teeth and give me horrible GI symptoms for a month, which eventually ended up in another ER visit after I puked up something that looked like blood.
I went to about 10 more doctors after this to try to find someone who would help me. Most told me they didn’t treat Lyme and tried to diagnose me with other things like MS or juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, even though I had the positive Lyme test and tests for all these other things had already come back negative… I realized that no doctor that took insurance would be able to treat me because of the massive political controversy over Lyme. Thankfully, however I was able to find an amazing doctor’s office that specializes in Lyme, chronic illness and integrative medicine and they saved my life. Unfortunately though, almost none of the treatment has been covered and I’m not out of the woods yet. I have done many treatments and it has been very difficult, but totally worth it.
Dr. Burruscano, a Lyme expert, created a symptom checklist which measures symptoms by their frequency and severity. When my symptoms were at their worst which was for about a 10 year period I had 34 severe symptoms. But after working extremely hard at treating myself for the past 4 years, now I only have 9! At my worst, I had 19 symptoms that were constant- now I only have one! This is incredibly promising for me and it makes me feel proud for how far I have come and shows how close to the finish line I actually am. The remaining severe symptoms include occasional severe joint and muscle pain, occasional severe brain fog/cognitive issues, occasional severe breathlessness/lack of oxygen and night sweats from the Babesia and often moderate and occasionally severe fatigue… The only symptom that remains severe and constant is excessive and constant peeing, which occurs as my body tries to rid itself of all the toxins created from killing off the Lyme and other organisms, which also creates the necessity for me to drink double the amount of water a normal person is required to every day (about 120 oz). I also still experience to a degree back pain, nausea, light headedness, vertigo, mood swings, lyme rage, anxiety, light and sound sensitivity, ringing in the ears, depression, headaches, eye floaters, sensitivity to cold, period pain, skin issues, neuropathy/numbness in hands, low blood pressure, low body temperature, insulin and blood sugar issues, insomnia, and heart arrhythmia but most of these symptoms are no longer severe… there are probably some that I am missing, but all in all, most symptoms have been greatly reduced and even completely eliminated after these past 4 years of treatment. I really want to be able to live a life where I don’t have to experience any of these symptoms though and daily functioning isn’t a battle. I am 28 years old and there are many things I want in my future including a car, a job and a family and unfortunately none of these things are in my grasp while I remain sick.
I have done the following treatments: Oral antibiotics, herbal supplements, 9 months on intravenous antibiotics through a piccline, The Rife Machine, The Biomat, Ketogenic Diet, Ozone therapy, UVLRx (Intravenous Light Therapy), heavy metal chelation for the lead and mercury toxicity, and most recently a 40 day water fast. I have experienced very strong Herxheimer reactions from all of these things which is what happens when you kill off a large amount of the pathogens at once and they release their endotoxins in large quantities as they are destroyed. Your detox pathways and organs become overloaded because they can’t process the large amount of toxicity all at one time. A large enough Herxheimer reaction can send you into sepsis, which is what happened to me in January earlier this year and lead to, a thankfully brief, stay in the ICU. The Herxheimer reaction was too big because I had been doing too many treatments at once, because I so much wanted to get better and to be able to have a life outside of being sick. I had also been drinking reverse osmosis water which didn’t give me the electrolytes I needed to detox and was very acidic, so I was also suffering from electrolyte imbalance and acidosis. For about a week my temperature was about 95 degrees as I was going into sepsis. It was pretty scary...
After the hospital disaster, I stopped all my treatments and decided to look into a very, very simple method of healing that has been utilized by animals and humans to treat illness for thousands of years: fasting. I attempted a 40 day fast, where I would drink nothing but water for 40 days. The premise of fasting is that your body goes into something called autophagy where it begins to consume everything within itself that it doesn’t need for fuel- including pathogens that make us sick like viruses, bacteria, fungi and parasites. It also consumes old, unhealthy cells and cell parts and regenerates completely new healthy cells and cell components. Additionally, the infections starve to death as you cut off their food supply. Thankfully though, the human body is much better equipped and even evolutionarily programmed to not only survive long periods of fasting, but benefit from them. For thousands of years fasting for humankind was a normal part of life, as it is in much of the animal world. Through natural cycles of feast and famine, our ancestors were able to sustain relatively low infectious burdens within their bodies. Below is a link to explain autophagy which is activated by fasting and how it induces a natural process of self-healing :
http://www.cavemandoctor.com/2012/04/06/autophagy-turning-stress-into-health/
On my 40 day fast I made it about 3 weeks on simply mineral water alone and then I became concerned about electrolytes . Even though the mineral water contains naturally occurring electrolytes, I decided to add electrolytes to my water because I wasn’t sure what my levels were and couldn’t test them at home. The fast definitely got pretty nerve racking towards the end and on day 36 I began to consume bone broth- about ¾ cup per day for the vitamins, minerals and electrolytes…. Long story short, I ended up making it to day 39 when I was forced to stop the fast because I tried adding lemon to my water and the citric acid on 39 days of an unbuffered stomach made me throw up, so I decided that 39 days was close enough to 40... All in all, the 40 day fast was wildly successful. In 2 weeks I was completely back to normal and felt even better than “normal” for me which was the whole point! This summer, After this fast, I felt the best I had in years. I felt 90 PERCENT BETTER from Lyme, which for me is amazing, considering how long I have been living with it... Based on the results of the 40 day fast, I have to say that out of all the treatments I have done it was the most effective, and worked at killing the Lyme and other pathogens and healing my body the most quickly and efficiently. (Perhaps that’s why they call it a “fast” and not a “slow”! )I feel that I might be only one more long term fast away from becoming completely symptom free from Lyme! (Since this Fall, I feel as if I am about back to only 70 percent better because the oldest Lyme of all has been reactivated from its dormant cystic forms as we attack it with more treatments like Rife and herbal antimicrobials). Although my previous fast was a great success, I would like to undergo my next fast in an environment where I am supervised by professionals who are able to check my electrolyte levels, vital signs, vitamin levels and provide emergency backup should I need it. Additionally, at the clinic I am interested in, I don’t think there will be a very large likelihood of me getting bit by a tick in the middle of the fast this time either! It became very stressful and arguably dangerous towards the end of the fast this May, because I was doing this mostly alone with only intermittent contact with my doctor. Below is the link for Tanglewood Clinic where I hope to be able to do another long term fast.
https://tanglewoodwellnesscenter.com/
I thank you so much for you time. I hope you seek to share this campaign and/or my videos, not only as a fundraiser to help me, but also as a way to spread invaluable information about Lyme, Chronic Illness and alternative treatments. For me, the worst part was when I didn’t know what was wrong with me. Ultimately it was information such as this that was the answer to my prayers and rescued me when I thought all hope was lost. Knowledge is power and that power has the ability to save lives.
Organiser
Blake Worthington
Organiser
Southold, NY
