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When the doctor gets sick, the journey is double-edged (Part I)
Keeping her forearm outstretched, Holland, Pennsylvania psychiatrist Virgina Sherr raced to the doctor. But once more, she was told she had a spider bite. The doctor lifted the black dot off and, though barely examining it, glibly told Sherr it wasn't a tick. His pronouncement could not be verified, for as he spoke, the tiny critter, no larger than a poppy seed, crawled off the gauze on which he had placed it, never to be seen again.
kam
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Bringing this to the top to remind to read it later when I am able and all the other posts I have missed.
Hopefully, it will catch others eye too.
Posts: 15927 | From Became too sick to work or do household chores in 2001. | Registered: Dec 2002
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Wow, when doctors themselves get a bad diagnoses of this horrible disease, espeically when they see the darn Tick attached and the typical Bulls Eye rash...
What else can one say ???
Sad very sad, and watching your own life fade away is even sadder while noone cares or understand is even worse.
I really hope Obama will do something about all this very soon, as he just may be our only hope.
Posts: 570 | From philadelphia, pa | Registered: Dec 2008
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kam
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speak with Holland, PA, psychiatrist Virgina Sherr one brilliant winter day on the Sun porch behind the office she maintains in her comfortable suburban home.
Her office, done up entirely in red, suggests the passion that Sherr, herself, puts into almost everything she does.
In the area out back, I note equipment for drawing blood.
"I have a nurse come in to help," she explains.
Testing psychiatric patients for tickborne disease, Sherr says, has become part of the differential diagnosis in her tick-infested neck of the woods.
Incredibly, on the bench beyond her window, I note a peacock, its full regalia of colored feathers spread wide.
"I have no idea where he came from, but he seems to live here now. I think he must have been a present from the Cosmos."
If Sherr possesses a special reverence for life, it might be because she, herself, has journeyed back from the depths of a once-inexplicable, truly terrifying, illness.
The illness, it would turn out, was a combination of Lyme and other tickborne diseases.
Sherr's experience, ultimately published in a medical journal, was so surreal it read like an anecdote right out of Oliver Sacks
(the pioneering neurologist and author of Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.)
In fact, Sherr's description of her patient experience was so compelling and precise that Sacks himself wrote an introductory note.
When physicians experience disease for themselves, Sacks said, a special level of understanding and "a unique double narrative" can result.
Ginny Sherr's Lyme odyssey began when, after gardening near the wooded area surrounding her home, she noticed "a strange red ring forming perfectly" on the skin of her left leg.
In the center of the ring, she observed "a glistening black spot," which soon fell away.
It was the mid-1980's and Sherr, a woman of robust health, wasn't particularly worried about Lyme disease in particular or personal illness, in general.
But when a local physician told her the rash had been caused by a spider bite, Sherr -the daughter in a family of biologists and entomologists-felt unease.
Perplexed because it just didn't seem like a spider bite, she put the whole thing out of her mind -for awhile.
It would be a couple of years before Sherr began to feel sick, at all.
First, in 1987, she experienced a severe head cold in the midst of planning a huge event.
Instead of passing, as colds are expected to do, the illness continued on in different forms.
In the beginning Sherr noticed she was especially tired, but within months she was so fatigued she would find herself literally falling asleep while talking to patients in her office.
Then she broke out in another rash -this one widespread across her body.
She suffered relapsing remitting sinus problems and sore throats.
Eventually Sherr recovered and wondered whether she had -temporarily-suffered from the newly-described chronic fatigue syndrome.
But the recovery was not to last.
In 1990. she says, she noticed another red ring on the skin of her forearm.
"Again," she reports, "there was a tiny, glistening black dot in the center of the bull's eye."
By now having educated herself a bit on the topic of Lyme disease, Sherr understood how tiny the nymphal deer ticks could be.
Keeping her forearm outstretched, she raced to the doctor.
But again, she was told she had a spider bite.
The doctor lifted the black dot off and, though barely examining it, glibly told Sherr it wasn't a tick.
His pronouncement could not be verified, for as he spoke, the tiny critter, no larger than a poppy seed, crawled off the gauze on which he had placed it, never to be seen again.
Finally, in 1992, Sherr developed yet another another bull's eye rash -with another tiny black "pearl" at the center.
A few months later the same symptoms returned, but this time she had arthritis, too.
So Sherr consulted a rheumatologist.
Yet he, too, felt Lyme was not a probable diagnosis -not even after learning of Sherr's gardening, and her history of bull's eye rashes centered by tiny black "dots."
And that's when Sherr really dived although, incredibly, despite her own credentials as a physician, the doctors she consulted viewed her as "a whiner:"
"I tried to explain that I was in serious difficulty to one physician after the next, as I gasped for breath on exertion, had painful muscle spasms in the thighs, face, and posterior shoulders, and experienced deep, aching, burning pain."
Her symptoms became so severe, in fact, that Sherr felt as if "the self I knew was dissolving."
She did not think she would be able to keep up her solo psychiatric practice for long.
One day Sherr realized she even lacked the strength to open the door of her refrigerator, and that "not only my future as a physician but my life was teetering at the brink."
It was then that Sherr went to see a new famility doctor, a young man, and, amazingly, he really listened as she went through her bizarre litany of complaints.
When she was done, the young doctor paused and said, "I think you have Lyme disease."
After all she had been through, Virginia Sherr was stunned.
The clinical diagnosis was prelude to treatment, and despite that fact that her blood test was negative, Sherr was placed on the IV antibiotic Rocephin for six weeks.
At first Sherr got sicker. "A sense of urgency, fear and uncertainty tinged everything," she says.
"Routine noises elicited startle reactions."
Gradually the treatment restored her vitality, but when the IV antibiotic was stopped at week six, Sherr relapsed.
, experiencing a relapsing-remitting malaise with sweats that was worse in the afternoon and better at night,
reminding her, somehow, of malaria.
Eventually, more detailed blood tests showed she was infected with two other tickborne infections
--the malarialike blood parasite, babesia, and the intracellular microbe ehrlichia
(Today called anaplasma in the northeast.)
With treatment for all three infections, concurrently, Sherr started to get better for real.
Look for Part II of Sherr's story next week.
Pamela Weintraub is senior editor at Discover Magazine and author of Cure Unknown: Inside the Lyme Epidemic, St. Martin's Press, 2008
Posts: 15927 | From Became too sick to work or do household chores in 2001. | Registered: Dec 2002
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bettyg
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kam, thank you for breaking this up; i copied YOURS and posted it on pam's REPLIES giving you credit for it, and why we are doing that there.
actually pam suggested this since the MORE FOLKS GOING THERE TO READ IT, the more her article will stay up in TOP 5, and more folks will be READING it helping to educate them about lyme!
so here's the link there where YOUR broken up version is, and pam asked that we just show the link there on HERE, so it counts on people VIEWING HER ARTICLES ok.
so kam, i just deleted my BROKEN UP VERSION ON LYMENET, and showed the direct link of broken up version there so people are counted going there. ok....thanks! ********************
here's my reply to pam's article on v. sherr....
Virginia, my heart goes out to you! It's despicable that drs. turn their backs on their own medical occupation members!!
It's bad enough for us all to be told; "it's ALL IN YOUR HEAD"! but to NOT take anyone serious when it's right there is ridiculous!
I'm ticked off too! I was bitten by an unseen tick that came off my folk's live christmas tree 1969; so I never saw it nor did I have a bulls-eye rash ... but that was the beginning of 35 years of hell of being MISDIAGNOSED BY 40-50 DRS!
It's time drs. check things out since lyme disease mimics 300 OTHER DISEASES! But start here with this little bitty tick/bug the size of the period at the end of this sentence.
It's time that ALL MEDICAL DRS. view the new 08 lyme documentary, UNDER OUR SKIN, by Andy Abrahamson Wilson, that is 144 minutes long showing the ENTIRE lyme story and lyme "war" controversy that only we, chronic lyme and/or co-infection patients, are suffering the consequences of!
Beginning in spring 09, UNDER OUR SKIN, will begin showing on the big screen in LARGE CITIES nationwide! I hope it gets to all 50 states and many large cities.
posted
i only wonder how many millions of people world-wide are truly infected and just dont know it yet...
either because of their idiot docs misdiagnoses or because their symptoms have not yet begun or they just dont know that being tired all the time and sleepy is not exactly normal.
one day this will be a hugely known epidemic, not just by us here, but will be admitted by our government and the medical community, just hope it will not be too late for us here...
Posts: 570 | From philadelphia, pa | Registered: Dec 2008
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bettyg
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eric,
did you go to pam's post and leave your comments there in FEEDBACK? IF NOT, PLEASE DO...thanks.
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kam
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I agree we need to be more active on the Pysch today web site.
Looking forward to when I can go through and catch up on the articles myself.
I am glad it is posted here also and on lyme friends to help remind us.
Posts: 15927 | From Became too sick to work or do household chores in 2001. | Registered: Dec 2002
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