What is Lyme Disease?

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This is not meant to be a comprehensive overview, as Lyme Disease can take on many different forms, but rather some basic facts about it, and how Lyme’s affects me.

Contracting Lyme Disease

Most people contract Lyme’s from the bite of a nymphal tick.  Nymphs can be as tiny as a poppyseed, and most people do not realize that they have been bitten.  The longer a tick stays attached to a person, the more likely they are to pass Lyme disease and other infections onto the person.  The bacteria entering your bloodstream then can start causing many other problems in your body.  This e-book looks like it would have helpful information on this topic if you are interested in learning more.

Symptoms

For me,  one of my biggest symptoms is joint pain.  For about a week out of every month, I physically feel as if I am 80 years old.  Every joint in my body hurts.  And when I say all of them, I mean it.  My hips, knees, ankles, wrists, fingers, so on and so forth.  When I am in this much pain my body gets very bogged down from how much work it is doing, and sometimes refuses to do anything except for sleep.  At school I make myself function, even when it means that I slowly drag through the day.  However, over Christmas break, I found out during one of these painful weeks that my body was capable of sleeping 15 hours.

That being said, fatigue is another big symptom for me.  I feel exhausted already- what, it’s only 8 in the morning??

Sometimes my joints are stiff and my knees prefer not to bend.

My body cannot handle gluten.  Since October I have been eating gluten free and it has helped some.

Lyme disease attacks your immune system, so especially when I’m not taking care of myself I am at risk for getting sick.

My memory has issues.  And by that, I mean that sometimes I look at people that I know and panic because I can’t remember their names and I have to wrack my brain for five minutes.  Other times I cannot recall commonly used words like socioeconomic (stop judging me, I use it often, okay?).

I’m sure some of these other ones apply as well, but you understand the big picture.  Different people are affected in unique ways, but that hopefully helps you understand some of how it works better.

Curing Lyme’s?

This, my friends, is another post, for another day.

Thanks for joining in and reading the second post in my series about Lyme Disease.  If you missed the first post, check it out here.

Many of the facts, as well as the graphic, came from lymedisease.org.