1996 : Mom Has What?

“Wake up Megan, it’s time for school..” I hear my mom say.. Typical words of a typical day… But today’s words didn’t sound the same. Mom sounded run down. Exhausted. “Maybe she had a cold”, I thought to myself. But mom was tough, she could take it. Besides.. Mom NEVER gets sick, and when she does its never anything big.
I was ready to go downstairs and my favorite morning ritual was to hitch-hike a ride down the stairs like a monkey on moms back. I waited for her at the stairway and as she came out of her bedroom I jumped up waiting for her to give me the signal that she was ready to pick me up…. But she came and went and I got no piggy ride down the stairs… Maybe something really was wrong? “Why couldn’t I have a hitch-hike this morning mommy?” I asked sad and let down. “I don’t feel like myself today Megan, my body is sore and my joints hurt.. Maybe tomorrow. Sorry hunny”.

What the next morning brought was an even bigger surprise. I was still asleep when I heard my dad’s voice telling me to get up for school. What was my dad doing home from work? My dad was never home. He steps into the room and must’ve noticed the confusion as he said, “Mom’s not feeling well again today.. She’s going to see the doctor later, but for now, I’ll be taking you to school”. At this point I figured mom had actually come down with the flu, I had never seen mom so out of element.

As the weeks went by my brother and I continued seeing less and less of the mom that we knew. Her test results were to take a while to come back, but she told us that she thought she had Lyme Disease since she had a bulls eye rash a while back. Lyme Dih-what? Wait. Hold up. Mom thinks she has a disease? And what the heck is LYME disease? This was too weird of a reality to swallow, thinking that my mom would be any other than the one I knew, so I continued on as if she’d never mentioned those two words….. I had an amazing imagination but none too great to fool me for more than a week or two.. It was hard to get past the fact that she was now this completely different person, or so it seemed. She walked around so miserable and exhausted and looked like the walking dead. Her common complaints were joint aches, head aches, muscle aches, and just aches and pains everywhere. Fevers. Memory loss. Fatigue. You name it, she felt it. It was like an endless list of symptoms I thought I’d never understand.. Funny thing is, neither did her doctor.

The test results came back positive. She figured as much but her doctor was in shock. He’d hardly even ever heard of “Lyme Disease” and hadn’t the slightest clue of how to treat it.. But doing the best he could in studying into it, he read that within 3 weeks of antibiotics of doxycycline through a picc line IV would be a cure. YES! Mom was going to be back to herself within the month. Thank you LORD. Things were finally going to be back to normal.

1996 : Crist

Saturday mornings were no longer cartoon mornings in the family room. In fact, no mornings were cartoon mornings downstairs anymore. Every morning for those 3 weeks mom had to have a nurse come out to the house and hook her up to an IV. The nurses were always nice, though it seemed like it took a million years to pump a tiny bag of fluid into my mom’s veins. Ant and I were usually told to go outside or hangout in the playroom until she was done with her medicine for the morning, so that we wouldn’t interfere with anything. BORING. But that’s okay it was soon to be over with, right? The doctor said that mom would be COMPLETELY better at the end of these 3 weeks and that life would be back to the norm. Boy was he wrong……

3 weeks went by… 3 months went by…. Mom was still sick… except now that she’s exceeded her 3 weeks of treatments the doctor refused to treat her for Lyme Disease any longer. What the heck? Why was mom still sick? She was supposed to be better, but instead, the zombified mom that I’ve known for the past few months continued onward. It confused everyone. And not for my own selfish 6 year old needs, but I had stomach issues that, let’s just say needed lots of frequent attention. I was up crying through most of every night and every school day. Often times I was sent home from school being doubled over in ridiculous unexplainable pains. I had the “weirdest” case of acid reflux and IBS and ulcers and every other stomach problem under the planet. Now that’s one thing my mom and I had in common… Unexplainable, weird symptoms that didn’t make sense. Except the difference was, she knew what was causing hers. At the same time it was hard to see someone who was as strong as stone come crashing down into a pile of rubble. My mom HAD to get better. She HAD to.

It seems like just as quickly as mom became sick again she found some answers. She found the truth. They say sometimes the truth hurts but nobody said how badly. Mom’s 3 week disease turned into a disease with no cure. She caught up with a Lyme group in Nashville, TN who had all gone through the same or similar instances as my mom. They were finding doctors who followed Doctor Burrascano’s guidelines on how to treat Lyme Disease and even coming up with their own ideas through intensive research or study. Only a handful of doctors correctly knew how to treat this complicated disease and discovered that late Lyme or Chronic Lyme needed continued treatments. For how long? Sometimes forever. Forever was a scary word. To imagine MY MOM sick, forever? Noway. No how.

She was lucky to find a doctor within driving distance. Somewhere in the middle of bumblefuck nowhere Missouri. Doctor Charles Crist. Doctor Crist had become particularly interested in researching Lyme when his wife was diagnosed with it. There was no help for her, and without him furthering his studies, she could have died without proper treatment, just as the rest of those with Lyme.
Before I knew it, my grandparents were at our house for a visit and mom was on her way to Missouri. My brother and I always enjoyed time with them, and eagerly accepted staying under their care for a few days. The time that mom was gone flew by with them here.



With my parents return also came a mom with new faith. It was as if she was back to the same old mom I had known, even if she didn’t quite feel up to par. She was glowing, as if hope were lighting up her face. She was finally getting the help that she needed. There was a chance. There was hope.