CURE UNKNOWN 2009 UPDATE:
THE EPILOGUE 1.1
by Pamela Weintraub
I write this note from the stoop of my walk-up in downtown Brooklyn. We live one flight up in a cramped, pricey warren of rooms, surrounded by brownstones and bistros as far as the eye can see. There are cobblestones underfoot. The local park is concrete. I can walk to the water's edge and touch the Brooklyn Bridge. The big city, Manhattan, beckons just ten minutes and a few short subway stops away. Castaways from a careless move to the suburbs that derailed our lives for a decade, we have washed up here in this urban oasis, dazed but still breathing, safe from the deer and the ticks, from new exposure to the disease.
Lyme still touches our lives. It was the summer of 2008 when, suffering from an ear infection, I received antibiotics. In a few days the ear was better, but that familiar malaise --the buzzing and numbness, the headache and nausea, the stilted speech and stupor-- all returned in force. Something had roused the monster, sending my immune system into overdrive and stirring the vortex of Lyme. Never really gone, I thought at the time. As in years past, I stayed on antibiotics until my head cleared, the numbness receded, and the immune storm washed back to sea.
Not long after, Mark had reached a low. His memory was so poor that he lost the train of conversation and he had trouble staying on track just watching TV. He needed the big gun --Rocephin-- to reach his brain and push his infection away. Over three months of treatment his improvement was marked, but one night his fever soared and he started shaking with chills. We rushed him to the ER to find his IV line infected. It was removed and Mark, decidedly less symptomatic, flew antibiotic-free, like me.
Our children were not as fortunate. Sicker than we were from the start, they were sicker still. We took our older son, Jason, to Richard Horowitz, a Lyme doctor in the graceful Hudson Valley hamlet of Hyde Park, New York, famous for its hiking trails, its river views, and the Roosevelt and Vanderbilt estates. Horowitz was one of the few Lyme doctors pushing pedal to the metal, wielding antibiotics, treating the coinfections, boosting the immune system, addressing sleep issues, detoxing metals ---using the whole armamentarium at once.A meeting with Richard Horowitz is not for the faint of heart. A rapid-fire talker with laser-focused thoughts, he parses every detail of your medical history, reviews past treatment, then critiques, dissects, moves on.........
CURE UNKNOWN 2009 UPDATE:
I write this note from the stoop of my walk-up in downtown Brooklyn. We live one flight up in a cramped, pricey warren of rooms, surrounded by brownstones and bistros as far as the eye can see. There are cobblestones underfoot. The local park is concrete. I can walk to the water's edge and touch the Brooklyn Bridge. The big city, Manhattan, beckons just ten minutes and a few short subway stops away. Castaways from a careless move to the suburbs that derailed our lives for a decade, we have washed up here in this urban oasis, dazed but still breathing, safe from the deer and the ticks, from new exposure to the disease.