Pathtoremission

From gym-rat to bed-bound

I have had some small oddities for most of my adult life. Shoulder and knee pain, clicking and popping (solely on the right side) developed from the age of 18 to 22 with no known injury to cause it. Physical therapy never yielded much results either. It was not before I developed severe back pain that would leave me bed-ridden once a month, for one week at a time at the age of 24, that my health seriously (and rapidly) started declining.

By the start of 2023, the bouts of back pain which were always followed by a flu, went from happening 3 times the previous year to every month and a half or so. By October 2023 I had become fully bed-ridden with numerous excruciatingly painful symptoms…

By March 2024 I finally broke the loop of insanity “repeating the same action and expecting a different outcome.” I could no longer accept the explanation that IgG antibodies had to mean a past infection; it was the only clue that made sense, my symptoms were like reading out loud from the government’s own webpage.

Through the sheer grace of absolute dumb luck, my long-distance girlfriend happened to live near one of Poland’s biggest Lyme clinics. Had it not been for this, I would have no idea how to start treatment at the time. I could not even make it to a buss-stop myself, let alone make it to, or from, an airport. I could barely sit in a car. When my brother came to pick me up from my apartment, when we moved me to my mother’s place, I was crying and shaking in pain throughout the 3_1/2 ride. Pulling over to “stretch the legs” made no difference; standing up was no longer a feature my body liberally allowed.

At the absolute peak of my symptoms, I would not have been able to write this. Even with voice-controlling my laptop, it would have been too painful. I had so much inflammation in my neck, I would move my torso instead of turning my head, and even that hurt like hell.

Before treatment, I was laying in bed all hours of the day with bloodshot eyes; I struggled to eat because the infection had disseminated to my jaw. I was too ill to make any food myself; nerve pain, joint pain, muscle pain, each one would have been incapacitating on its own. I could hardly walk to the bathroom (100-200 steps a day) and had to use a chair to make it through a shower. At that point, I made the decision to go to Poland for treatment of what I suspected to be chronic Lyme disease. I even informed my mother that I would not be here much longer if antibiotics did not help my symptoms, and I meant it.

My goal

As you can probably guess by reading this, the treatment has elevated a great amount of pain for me. I truly mean it when I say, I was near death by the time I started treatment. The rate of which the infection was taking hold, I do not think my body could have lasted more than a few years. Not that I would want to live in that state at anyway.

As I unravel the layers of getting well, I intend to document and share my experience. I wish to become an informational and motivational source for anyone going through the trails of these neglected areas of health care. I am very far from my old self. I am disabled by any definition of the word, but I am much better than where I was.

I am not the type of person to settle for a life like this. I want it all back with interest. I hope what I do here will change someone else´s path for the better