Co- Infections: The Possible Disease Behind the Mask of Lyme

When people often ask what I'm sick with, I'm very quick to rebut with  Lyme Disease. But in my head, I know I'm lying. At one time I truly did believe that Lyme Disease was the invader that was cruelly robbing me of everything that made me who I am, but now I know better. Lyme was merely a mask, a facade, it was a name that was hiding the real monster beneath everything, running rampant throughout my body. I could treat Lyme Disease all I want, but it wasn't until I dug in and went after the real enemies that my improvement occurred. I may say that I'm sick with Lyme Disease, but the truth is I'm sick with Babesiosis and Bartonellosis and there were times I felt like these two would kill me.

I'm not a doctor, so if you're looking for a scholarly argument on the effects from Co-Infections you should look elsewhere. All I can really do at this point is relate my experiences with my illness to hopefully help those who are reading this. If I would've had this information earlier it would've likely expedited my recovery process a lot. That's what this is about, sharing our stories to give others a better starting point, a leg up so to speak. To be fair, there's a reasonable chance that it really is Lyme Disease causing your symptoms, but you must also at least look into the possibilities of co-infections. I'm not an LLMD, but thats what's been relayed to me from more than a couple Lyme Literate Doctors. 

A huge issue within the Lyme Community is the constant battle with the IDSA. Among many of their arguments is one that people thirty years ago recovered from Lyme remarkably well with just a few weeks from antibiotics, so why would it be different now. And they're right, sort of. Lyme patients did recover at a more successful rate when this illness was first discovered, so it shouldn't be different now, but unfortunately it is. That's because we're not just dealing with a single entity now with this illness, its a multi-faceted monster. There's no official statistics, but it is believed the rise in co-infections since the discovery of borrelia is exponential. As Richard Horowitz has stated, with this illness you now have multiple nails lodged in your foot. If you treat solely Lyme, you're only removing one of those nails, is the patient really going to be in that much better shape with all the other nails still stuck in their foot? If you haven't picked up on it, the co-infections are those other nails.

There were two reasons why I was able to improve and that's treating biofilm and treating my co-infections. The biofilm will be covered in another piece later on, but for now we'll focus on my history with these bad boys. When I was first diagnosed by a naturopath she mentioned that with my symptoms I probably had Babesia and Bartonella, but I ignored it. My test results were positive for Lyme, I didn't care about these supposed other infections. I remember hearing everyone say they had these, so I blew it off entirely. She tried treating me for them, while still mainly focusing on Lyme for three months but due to my stomach not absorbing medications at any point, nothing happened. 

My next treatment would be Envita, which was comprised of mostly IV medications. The doctor there didn't even test for co-infections nor seemed to really care. He kept saying that the treatments covered all infections so I shouldn't worry much. I did get better originally, but the symptoms that really plagued me didn't seem to necessarily fully go away. I crashed not that long after, and looking back I shouldn't be surprised as the real issues were never addressed.

My next treatments would take me to doctors on the east coast who had a much better grasp on my case. The first thing one of them did was test me for co-infections right off the bat. Though the tests are notoriously known for being extremely inaccurate I was lucky in an odd sense and tested CDC positive for babesiosis. I told him that I thought I had Lyme, and he said I probably did but what was causing my symptoms was the babesia. It's rather embarrassing to admit but one of my worse symptoms was the drenching sweats that never seemed to dissipate over the course of my illness. Every day, even if I remained inactive my body was sweating and I couldn't understand why. He relayed this was tied into the babesiosis, a malarial-like organism. I tried mepron for awhile but didn't tolerate it very well so I was moved over to a mixture of Coartem, Artemisinin, Malarone and Bacterium all being switched in and out of one another week by week. These were all malaria drugs and they seemed to actually be working. They provoked huge herxheimer reactions but I started to see my energy slowly come back and the sweating that had plagued me for years finally started to disappear. 

I was elated, I felt like I was finally on the track to wellness, but I wasn't prepared for what was next. Throughout those three years of being bed-ridden and sick, outside of my fatigue, nothing inflicted more suffering than the abdominal pain I went through on a daily basis. But after two years it seemed like I took care of it by having my gall bladder removed. After treating the babesia the abdominal pain suddenly returned with a vengeance. It was terrible, but also distinctly different than the original pain. It felt like my stomach was in tons of knots and just not functioning properly. My weight started to plummet again and I was never hungry. "Oh, not again!" was the thought that routinely came back into my mind. I was distraught at the thought I may be crashing again. Luckily, I was with a doctor that actually knew how to treat the illness properly.

I met with him and he kept trying to figure out how these symptoms came about. He asked me if I had any stretch marks, and I responded yes but I couldn't see how it was related. I had worked out while I was in college and had put on forty pounds of muscle in the span of two years so stretch marks are inevitable under those circumstances. However, he insisted upon seeing them. I lifted up my shirt and he was relatively shocked at what he saw, but now at ease with where to go next. He relayed that these were in fact Bartonella marks as they were extremely deep and purple, a color normal stretch marks would never be. He told me abdominal pain was very common with Bartonella and he was almost certain it was the cause behind my sudden abdominal discomfort. He prescribed me on rifampin and within two weeks my stomach pain disappeared. The infection will still return once I go off antibiotics but it should eventually be taken care of, and we at least know what exact direction to go in with my treatment now.

My advice to other patients would be to make sure your LLMD is trying to figure out if you have co-infections before anything else. The tests are very unreliable, so the diagnosis will likely have to be made by your symptoms and reactions to meds. If you have a herx to medications that are specifically for a certain co-infection than you are likely dealing with that exact co-infection within your body and it must be addressed. This illness is like an onion, and the co-infections are the outer layer that must be peeled back or you will never get better. I hope this helps, and is a piece of insight to help speed your recovery!