My name is Mary and I live in Kansas. I am a registered nurse and have one son left living, with both us us going thru Lyme still at this time. My son is worse, esp. because he has had Lyme since being in my womb.
Anyway, I wish to learn more about Lyme as well as help others who are fighting Lyme disease. I have amassed much knowledge in regards to Lyme and wish to share with others and help to maybe make a difference in all of our lives.
I will do my best to help answer questions on this board and/or supply references for others and I am sure that I will learn more as we al go along in this battle against this epidemic disease that we all share.
[ 28. January 2008, 09:38 AM: Message edited by: Mary_From_Kansas ]
Posted by CatCCC (Member # 14262) on :
Mary, let me be the first person to welcome you to LymeNet!
You are only the second LLRN I have ever met, the first being my home nurse (no offense if we already have one around here I haven't met yet )
I am so sorry to hear you and your child are ill, but thank you for offering to contribute your knowledge to our community.
This is a very loving family, and I know everyone here will join me in welcoming you and inviting you to seek comfort here.
Take care and thank you for your kindness!
CatCCC
Posted by Mary_From_Kansas (Member # 14478) on :
Hi Hun,
I am happy to be here and thank you for the nice warm welcome. I am sure I will feel at home here esp. with the unfortunate bonds that we all have...
I hope your say is going well as well as all the other members... Posted by justwondering (Member # 12813) on :
Hi Mary,
I have just viewed your page to your little Angel and my heart aches for you and your family.
What a precious little boy and how blessed to have a mother who loves him so!
You must be a very strong person and I am confident you and your son will beat this illness.
It is nice to know I have a nurse I can come to on the board now with any questions!
Take care Jackie:)
Posted by disturbedme (Member # 12346) on :
Hi Mary.
Welcome.
I'm curious as to where you live in KS? I was born and raised in KS and believe that is where I picked up my lyme disease as I was bit by a tick (or probably more -- but just saw one on me) there around 10 years ago. I lived a little bit north of Wichita.
I'm sorry to hear about your son. I went to your website and the story made me cry.
Again, welcome. Posted by DakotasMom01 (Member # 14141) on :
Hi Mary,
I am sorry abt the loss of your son.
Welcome to the group.
Posted by feelfit (Member # 12770) on :
Hi Mary,
Welcome! And, thank you for your generous nature.
Rhonda
Posted by CaliforniaLyme (Member # 7136) on :
We need more Lyme education in Kansas- there is one support group but if it is too far from you you can start one yourself*)!!! Here's their info & WELCOME*)!*)!
Lyme Association of Greater Kansas City, Inc. Contact Person Telephone: 913-438-LYME Contact Person E-Mail: [email protected] City: Overland Park State or Province: Kansas
Sincerely, Sarah
Posted by Mary_From_Kansas (Member # 14478) on :
Hello To All Of You!
TY all for the nice warm welcome. I tryly appreciate it very much.
I hope to be of help to anyone who needs nursing help and all that jazz...
I am also happy that many of you have been to my sons' webpage because that just makes that many more people be able to get to know him and it helps keep his memory alive. TY..
So, one of you was originally from Kansas? And north of Wichita at that? Well, so am I and I know all that area very well. And yes, we have many Lyme carrying ticks throughout Kansas... my son and I both bit in Kansas and having Lyme as well as my hubby having this horrible disease .... I even narrowed my sons' Lyme down to the Lone Star tick after his first Western Blot was done... before our LLMD saw the test results... So, Lyme is in Kansas... and all over the US and the entire world.
The one from Kansas... PM me for more info here...
Soon, the world will know that Lyme is a true epidemic!
Hugs, Mary LLRN
Posted by grapekoolaid (Member # 14371) on :
hi, mary---your sons are beautiful and i love your angel's web page---i m sorry about your loss! Posted by just don (Member # 1129) on :
A BIG howdy from the state right above yours.
In another lifetime I remeber,as a small boy, I visited my aunt and uncle who lived in Salina then(and later moved all over,military). Forgot why but the town of Hutchison sure sounds familiar TOO!!
I live CLOSE to hiway 81 but almost to South Dakota tho!! The Pan AM highway!! NOBODY knows THAT here!!
DUMB question,,,where down there is the President Eisenhauer library??? I used to have one of those peek thru picture things of THAT!!I was THERE once upon a time.
We have lone star ticks here too. Just told a visiting friend from Texas we dont have MANY ticks, with a laugh,,,he swooped down his hand in the tall grass and said "like THIS lone star tick"?? And he really found one THAT quick,,,unreal!!
I responded to your other thread over on general,very moving tribute to your son, Sam!!!be well wishes--just don--
Posted by bettyg (Member # 6147) on :
Mary, welcome and thanks for offering to help folks immediately on medical questions, etc.
I too just read Sam's page; my heartfelt sympathies to you; it was so touching, and set up so cute with all the wonderful ANGEL SAM photos and wings!
I'll send you my NEWBIE package anyway; you can learn more and have available to help others too.
Mary, I'd like to suggest you edit subject line to something like this:
Willing to answer medical questions on lyme! email me!
to edit, click PAPER/PENCIL ICON to right of your name which opens up subject line and body text. click edit send when done.
again, so glad you joined us and your willingness to help out.
BE SURE TO VISIT "ACTIVISM"; you'd be great in that area !!! Posted by merrygirl (Member # 12041) on :
Hi Mary! Welcome to Lymenet. You will find a great bunch of folks here!
I visited Sam's site and ut was beautiful. I was looking at the pictures and one really sent shivers down my spine. It was the one where sam is an angel with wings up in heaven.
What beautiful boys.
God bless! Melissa
p.s. we have a chat everyday at 8pm if you are interested, jut enter a nickname, no password needed
Welcome, Mary. I looked at your son's site - so moving. I was caught by a nurse. All the best to you here!
Posted by lymeladyinNY (Member # 10235) on :
Hi Mary - I went to your website about your angel boy. I was very moved by it (to tears).
I am glad you're here and I pray for you and yours.
A fellow Lymie, Julie
Posted by Mary_From_Kansas (Member # 14478) on :
Hello All,
TY you all for seeing my sons' web page... I am happy that even more people have had a chance to know him via the internet... It so keeps his memory alive...
I hope to be able to help out as much as possible here......... No one is untouched by Lyme in some in their families, they just don't know that yet...
Your welcomes to me have warmed my soul..
~hugs, Mary
Posted by grapekoolaid (Member # 14371) on :
hi, mary---thanks for your willingness to answer questions. i was dx w/ ms in march 1987---symptoms started appearing summer 1986.
in june 2007, holistic doc did lyme test----positive then and positive again dec. 2007. now, i'm not sure i have/had ms. is this important to know?
i have finally accepted that i have ld---no longer sure about ms. i started the cowden (herbal) protocol mid july 2007 and am still following it. thanks for your thoughts!
Posted by CaliforniaLyme (Member # 7136) on :
p.s. Both of your children are beautiful, what a lovely page that is-
Posted by tailz (Member # 10014) on :
Welcome to Lymenet. I test positive for Lyme and babesia, and something very Cipro is going on with me, too. My symptoms increase whenever I'm exposed to electromagnetic and microwave fields (cell phones, fluorescent lights, etc...) Are they teaching this to today's nurses? Please tell me they are (even if they aren't).
'Cross Currents' by Robert O. Becker M.D. - page 72.
"In 1975, Professor Richard Blakemore, also of Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, became intrigued by the strange behavior of some bacteria he was studying. Blakemore noticed that the bacteria always clustered at the north side of their culture dish. Even if he turned the dish so that they were at the south end and left it overnight, the next morning the bacteria were back at the north side.
While such ``magnetotrophic'' bacteria had been described before, no one had ever done what Blakemore did next: he looked at them under the electron microscope. What he found was astonishing. Each bacterium contained a chain of tiny magnets! The magnets were actually crystals of the naturally magnetic mineral magnetite, the original lodestone of preliterate peoples. Somehow, the bacteria absorbed the soluble components from the water and put them together in their bodies as the insoluble crystalline chain.
Later studies showed that this arrangement was of value to these bacteria, which lived in the mud on the bottom of shallow bays and marshes. If they were moved by the tide or by storm waves, their magnetic chains were large enough (in comparison to their body size) to physically turn their bodies so that they pointed down at an angle corresponding to the direction of magnetic north. All the bacteria had to do was swim in that direction, and sooner or later they would be back in the mud.
This was an interesting mechanism, but it did not contain any sophisticated information transfer. The bacteria did not ``know'' that north was the way to swim; they just did so. However, these observations opened up a much more interesting series of investigations."
'The Body Electric' by Robert O. Becker, M.D. - (pages 276-278)
Subliminal Stress
"After Howard Friedman, Charlie Bachman, and I had found evidence that "abnormal natural" fields from solar magnetic storms were effecting the human mind as reflected in psychiatric hospital admissions, we decided the time had come for direct experiments with people. We exposed volunteers to magnetic fields placed so the lines of force passed through the brain from ear to ear, cutting across the brainstem-frontal current.
The fields were 5 to 11 gauss, not much compared with the 3,000 gauss needed to put a salamander to sleep, but ten to twenty times earth's background and well above the level of most magnetic storms. We measured their influence on a standard test of reaction time - having subjects press a button as fast as possible in response to a red light.
Steady fields produced no effect, but when we modulated the field with a slow pulse of a cycle every 5 seconds (one of the delta wave frequencies we'd observed in salamander brains during a change from one level of consciousness to another), people's reactions slowed down. We found no changes in the EEG or the front-to-back voltage from fields up to 100 gauss, but these indicators reflect major alterations in awareness, so we didn't expect them to shift.
We were excited, eagerly planning experiments that would tell us more, when we came upon a frightening Russian report. Yuri Kholodov had administered steady magnetic fields of 100 and 200 gauss to rabbits and found areas of cell death in their brains during autopsy. Although his fields were ten times as strong as ours, we stopped all human experiments immediately.
Friedman decided to duplicate Kholodov's experiment with a more detailed analysis of the brain tissue. He made the slides and sent them to an expert on rabbit brain diseases, but coded them so no one knew which were which until later.
The report showed that all the animals had been infected with a brain parasite that was peculiar to rabbits and common throughout the world. However, in half the animals the protozoa had been under control by the immune system, whereas the other half they'd routed the defenders and destroyed parts of their brain.
The expert suggested that we must have done something to undermine resistance of the rabbits in the experimental group. The code confirmed that most of the brain damage had occurred in animals subjected to the magnetic fields. Later, Friedman did biochemical tests on another series of rabbits and found that the fields were causing a generalized stress reactions marked by large amounts of cortisone in the bloodstream.
This is the response called forth by a prolonged stress, like a disease, that isn't an immediate threat to life, as opposed to the fight-or-flight response generated by adrenaline.
Soon thereafter, Friedman measured cortisone levels in monkeys exposed to 200-gauss magnetic fields for four hours a day. They showed the stress response for six days, but it then subsided, suggesting adaptation to the field. Such seeming tolerance of continued stress is illusory, however.
In his pioneering lifework on stress, Dr. Hans Selye has clearly drawn the invariable pattern: Initially, the stress activates the hormonal and/or immune systems to a higher-than-normal level, enabling the animal to escape danger or combat disease. If the stress continues, hormone levels and immune activity gradually decline to normal.
If you stop your experiment at this point, you're apparently justified in saying, "The animal has adapted; the stress is doing it no harm." Nevertheless, if the stressful condition persists, hormone and immune levels decline further, well below normal. In medical terms, stress decompensation has set in, and the animal is now more susceptible to other stressors, including malignant growth and infectious disease.
In the mid-1970's, two Russian groups found stress hormones released in rats exposed to microwaves, even if they were irradiated only briefly by minute amounts of energy. Other Eastern European work found the same reaction to 50-hertz electric fields.
Several Russian and Polish groups have since established that after prolonged exposure the activation of the stress system changes to a depression of it in the familiar pattern, indicating exhaustion of the adrenal cortex. There has even been one report of hemorrhage and cell damage in the adrenal cortex from a month's exposure to a 50-hertz, 130-gauss magnetic field.
Soviet biophysicist N. A. Udintsev has systematically studied the effects of one ELF magnetic field (200 gauss at 50hz) on the endocrine system. In addition to the "slow" stress response we've been discussing, he found activation of the "fast" fight-or-flight hormones centering on adrenaline from the adrenal medulla.
This response was triggered in rats by just one day in Udinstev's field, and hormone levels didn't return to normal for one or two weeks. Udinstev also documented an insulin insufficiency and rise in blood sugar from the same field.
One aspect of the syndrome was very puzzling. When undergoing these hormonal changes, an animal would normally be aware that its body was under attack, yet, as far as we could tell, the rabbits were not. They showed no outward signs of fear, agitation, or illness.
Most humans certainly wouldn't be able to detect a 100-gauss magnetic field, at least not consciously. Only several years after Friedman's work did anyone find out how this was happening.
In 1976 a group under J. J. Noval at the Naval Aerospace Medical Research Laboratory at Pensacola, Florida, found the slow stress response in rats from very weak electric fields, as low as five thousandths of a volt per centimeter.
They discovered that when such fields vibrated in the ELF range, they increased levels of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine in the brainstem, apparently in a way that activated a distress signal subliminally, without the animal's becoming aware of it. The scariest part was that the fields Noval used were well within the background levels of a typical office, with its overhead lighting, typewriters, computers, and other equipment.
Workers in such an environment are exposed to electric fields between a hundredth and a tenth of a volt per centimeter and magnetic fields between a hundredth and a tenth of a gauss."
Posted by Lymetoo (Member # 743) on :
Hi Mary! Welcome! We have quite a few nurses here with Lyme. At least they have come and go...I'm not sure who "stayed!"
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