Lyme disease and co-infections

Yep, I’ve got everything but the kitchen sink, so we might as well add in Lyme disease and co-infections, the more the merrier!

My first Lyme disease test was 10 years ago (Igenex) and one of my blog readers said it was possibly positive even though the MD who ordered it never mentioned that to me. So my current MD asked me to retest and she tells me that it shows a high degree of probability for Lyme disease (test results at bottom). Here’s her Lyme symptom questionnaire you can use to evaluate how likely you are to have Lyme.

I remembered that one of my blog readers mentioned he had done live blood analysis in Boulder where I live and highly recommended it. I remembered too that a friend of mine mentioned he had a microscope. So, I borrowed it and I have not been able to look away for days on end. Examining the blood in dark-field microscopy is astonishingly interesting — it’s like looking at a new planet with continents and oceans and strange creatures you’ve never seen before. Of course many of the creatures I wish  I never had the pleasure of seeing.

Why did I wait so long to look at my blood under a microscope? It doesn’t help that if you search “live blood analysis” on Google, you find  lots of trolls telling you not to fall for the scam. Well let me tell you my friends, it’s just science. If you’re one of those trolls, let’s inject a drop of my blood in you and you’ll change your tune.

It appears that my whole family is infected. It’s heartbreaking to look at your 14-year-old daughter’s blood and see massive infestation. But on the other hand, now we know why the past year or so have been such a struggle. To give you an idea, I’d guess she only attended school maybe halftime over the last year.

Here’s what her blood looks like under the microscope. Unfortunately the magnification is not as good through the camera as it is through the eyepieces:

What kills me is that you can see these bugs with a $600 microscope but no MD ever suggested it or did it. I spent a week at the Mayo Clinic which cost almost $20,000 and while they performed thousands and thousands of dollars worth of lab tests, probably using equipment worth millions of dollars, they were too smart to look at my blood under the microscope your kids use in high school.

Do you know how long it took me to discover my wife and daughter’s blood is infected? Well it takes about 30 seconds to prick the finger  and prepare the slide, and another 30 seconds to focus the microscope. One minute. One stinking minute. As it turns out, my MD was diagnosed with Lyme herself about a year ago and is studying under one of the best Lyme literate MDs in Colorado (who charges $400 an hour and doesn’t accept insurance), and I bet now she’s going to get a microscope if nothing else to see her own blood.

The fact that I have Lyme didn’t surprise me much — I’ve always assumed I probably did. But it really had not occurred to me that Lyme might explain why my whole family is ill. So this is a really momentous discovery.

Don’t get me wrong, I am still on board the nutritional balancing program and I believe Dr. Wilson when he says that most Lyme victims recover without special treatment when their minerals are balanced through the program. I’m intending to do a long post showing the progression of my hair tests which is starting to look miraculous after adding sauna…

BUT, knowing about the Lyme layer, is very very helpful, not just for my family but for me also. When I went to see my MD this week, it wasn’t just to talk about my diagnosis. I also wanted to talk about Strongyloides and Ivermectin, because I believed that my treatment was ended prematurely (after three months). This is kind of a long story and I’m not sure how to summarize it…

So here’s a copy of the note I sent my doctor last week:

I’ve been keeping a daily log for about four years and have been jotting down some key items from it on a calendar for that whole time. One of the things I keep track of is how long my first stretch of sleep is during the night. The longer my first stretch is, the better I feel the next day. If my first stretch of sleep is less than three hours, even though I go back to sleep,  I feel awful the next day. Three hours is what I need to keep me functional. If my first stretches five hours long I feel remarkably better. So I’ve tracked this metric very carefully always looking for something that would improve my sleep.

Those five hour stretches used to be very rare and only came after I got sleep deprived or push myself too far for several days in a row. It used to be that after sleeping well one night, I was guaranteed to sleep poorly the next night. So for example, if I got a five hour stretch one night, I would feel good the next day, but that following night, my first stretch would be three hours or less, throwing me back into the cycle of sleep deprivation.

Prior to taking Ivermectin, it’s possible that I never had two good nights in a row, and I’m absolutely certain that I never EVER had three good nights in a row. But after taking Ivermectin, I suddenly slept well for three nights in a row and the number of good nights in a month jumped from something like 3 to 12.

After stopping Ivermectin, my sleep slowly but steadily deteriorated and I’m back to feeling sleep deprived virtually all the time.

So I would like to discuss the idea of pursuing a longer Ivermectin treatment, maybe as long as a year. Below is some information on human toxicity from this book. I’ll bring my calendar with notes so you can see how much Ivermectin I took and when along with my sleep record…

Well, after getting my Lyme diagnosis, I did a Google search on Ivermectin Lyme Babesia and bingo, I discovered Ivermectin, is not just good for strongyloides, but also Lyme (borrelia burgdorferi) and babesia which I can see under the microscope.

If you’ve been following me, you know I don’t like pharmaceuticals at all but make some exceptions. Ivermectin is going to be one and I restarted today.

Here’s the treatment plan I intend to pursue:

• Ivermectin
• Doug coil
• Essential oils
• Sauna
• Nutritional balancing

There is so much more to say… and I will plan to expand this post over time.

I’ll leave you with some videos that have influenced my thinking:

And this one which I can’t embed.

My Igenex test results: