posted
Hello I have suffered with all the symptoms for over two and a half years now. The general practitioner I went to automatically went to the chronic fatigue diagnosis. She has tested me for various things and all she came up with was low vitamin d.
I have suffered so much and my quality of life and business have gone downhill hard and fast. I cannot even get a test done here to help me. My joints ache constantly and it keeps me from working at my business. The fatigue I feel is unbelievable to me.
I have never felt this bad but when symptoms come and go they look at me like I am crazy. Any and all help and recommendations are welcome. Thanks for being here and for reading.
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Welcome to Lymenet - folks should be along soon to help - am breaking up the text into a couple lines at a time for easier reading for many here -
posted
If you want to discuss your situation further on the board, you can post in Medical Questions or General Support.
Posts: 13117 | From San Francisco | Registered: May 2006
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TF
Frequent Contributor (5K+ posts)
Member # 14183
posted
I checked some old posts for Alabama for you. Here is one saying there are no lyme doctors there:
In general, there are few to no lyme doctors in the states south of D.C. except for a couple in Florida.
Plenty of old posts saying there are none in Georgia, South Carolina, Kentucky, no good ones in Tennessee, only maybe one in North Carolina, etc.
What states would you be able to travel to to get a reliable diagnosis? (It is not unusual at all for lyme patients to have to travel out of state for their care.)
Also, I suggest you look at the lyme symptom list in the Burrascano Lyme Treatment Guidelines found here:
See pages 9-10. The more symptoms you have, the more likely it is lyme.
For sure, one of the most common lyme symptoms is an extreme, unbelievable fatigue.
If you read through the document, you will see that lyme symptoms come and go or wax and wane monthly.
When I first got lyme, I would have episodes of extreme fatigue and muscle weakness that would come and go. It could last 7 months and be gone for 5. It was crazy seeming.
This went on for the first 5 years I had the disease. I have since met many who said their "fibromyalgia" was episodic at first. So, symptoms coming and going and other hard to believe things are common with this disease.
Also, the chronic fatigue diagnosis. That is a common first misdiagnosis along with fibromyalgia.
So, since no doctors can find anything wrong with you (another common occurrence in lyme patient history), it would be worth your while to be willing to travel to the D.C. area to get an appointment with a lyme doctor.
Your story of suffering for years with no cause found is all too familiar to those of us who have had lyme disease.
A lyme specialist will test you for lyme and the other infections that go along with it (babesiosis, bartonella, ehrlichia, etc.) plus do other tests that will indicate whether lyme is likely. These are tests a regular doctor will not do.
And, lyme doctors generally use Igenex in California for lyme and coinfection tests. They are a tick-borne disease specialty lab.
Let me know if you are interested. I can give you a name. Folks from all over the south do this. You can do telephone or skype appointments and then only have to travel to D.C. every few months to meet the doc in person.
To learn more about this common disease, read through the Guidelines. This will help you decide whether or not lyme is a likely cause of your problems. If it is, it will not go away on its own. It will only get worse.
I had undiagnosed lyme disease (and babesiosis and bartonella) for at least 10 years before a doctor finally thought to test me for lyme.
I went from doctor to doctor for 10 LONG years. Still, once I finally got to a good lyme doctor, I got well.
I completed my treatment 9 years ago and I am still symptom free. I have the same life I had before lyme disease.
So, things CAN get better once you find out that it is lyme disease.
Good for you for finding this site. We will help you here all we can.
Posts: 9931 | From Maryland | Registered: Dec 2007
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