Journey to a Lyme Diagnosis

It was October 2014 and my middle daughter was in third grade. She was a lovable neurotypical kid. She played soccer and loved imaginary play. She is the little sister to my daughter with autism and big sister to my son with severe, life threatening food allergies. She had overcome sensory processing disorder years ago with biomedical intervention.

However, my sweet girl started having chronic headaches and stomachaches around her umbilical area that just kept getting worse.
Other symptoms were:
Terrible night sweats, anxiety and fear about unreasonable things, problems with short-term memory, very little appetite, sensitivity to light, awful restless legs, terrible fatigue, temperature regulation problems and very low blood pressure. She would get dizzy upon waking. She also had horrible reflux. She could not eat anything before bed and we had to avoid all acidic foods.

I took her to the pediatrician who diagnosed her with sinus headaches based on symptoms alone and said the stomach aches were post-nasal drip. But no anti-histamine, either over-the-counter or prescription was helping.

Next stop: the pediatric gastroenterologist. She ran boatloads of tests for me including thyroid panel, iron panel, mitochondrial markers, metabolic panel, CBC and more. It all checked out fine. She ran a breath test for SIBO and stool tests for H Pylori. All negative.

We were referred to the pediatric neurologist who proclaimed her to have childhood migraines and abdominal migraines. But nothing was touching the pain. I knew there had to be more to the story than just migraines. WHY was she suddenly having them? The neurologist suggested it was because she was so smart as smart kids tend to get them more….. And I wondered how is that explanation scientific at all?

I tried chiropractic adjustments but they were of no help.

Meanwhile, people were starting to imply that she was doing this for attention. The school nurse wanted to help, but hinted to me that maybe it was a ploy to get attention since her sister has autism. My husband and I were even starting to question her symptoms. Regrettably, we even tried ignoring her constant complaining to see if it helped. But nothing did.

FINALLY, as a last ditch effort, I took her to my functional medicine doctor but even he didn’t find anything. I was at my wits end. It had been six months now and we still were not getting anywhere with her pain. She was crying herself to sleep nightly. She was in the nurse’s office at school daily. My child that loved school didn’t want to go.

I returned to the functional medicine doctor and insisted that she be tested for Lyme. My functional medicine doctor agreed to sign off on the Igenex test. Two weeks later the results were in. Positive for Lyme and two co-infections: Babesia and Bartonella.

NOTE: She had 4 positive bands. To be positive on a Western Blot (the more conventional Lyme test), you need 5 positive bands. However, she also had a positive IFA (over 80).

I had the answer that we had searched for.  She had Lyme Disease.
Now came the hard part.   How to treat it?

My functional medicine doctor was afraid that since it had been in her system for so long and gone untreated, that it wouldn’t respond to antibiotics. He feared the antibiotics would push it further into the biofilms. We used herbs to treat it and we muscle tested every few weeks for which herbs to use with applied kinesiology.

Amazingly, BFB2 which is an essential oil by Supreme nutrition used topically on the feet stopped the headaches dead in its tracks.   What an amazing relief.

We used a combination of herbs that changed every 2 weeks or so including Neem, Olive Leaf Extract, Berberine and Walnut Hull.

We also supported her methylation while healing her so her body could detoxify more efficiently. Vitamin D, Omega 3 fatty acids, magnesium, 5MTHF, B6 (p5p) and Methyl B12 were all important.

Treatment took time and patience but she got a little better every day.   After about four months of treatment, she was back to her sweet, healthy self again. I consider it a miracle in healing and I will never again underestimate the power of Lyme disease.