When I am killing off Lyme or when I have intestinal parasites dying, I end up having horrific nightmares.  I believe this is due to the toxins being released by these various invaders as they die.  The critters don’t go willingly, and they make me as miserable as they can in the process.  Compare it to a bee sting which kills the bee but also ends up hurting the person bitten immensely.  Even though I use natural binders to help my body with processing those toxins, the toxins still impact my systems.  It’s gotten to the point lately that I dread going to bed because I don’t want another night full of bad dreams. 

This past summer, my older two kids and I watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  We’re now watching Angel.  For those not familiar, these two series deal intensely with vampires, demons, and other fictional creatures of the night.  I enjoy the series immensely, but they are clearly working their way into my subconscious.

So the other day, my afternoon nap was filled with a nightmare about high school aged demon type people.  I was one of them.  It dredged up all sorts of painful incidents from my past plus it clearly was influenced by my television viewing choices.  When I woke up, I wrote down the following sentence:

"The monster within is what ends up shining through no matter how hard we try to keep it from manifesting externally."

Wow.  It’s a painfully true statement on some levels.  It’s also a little too much profundity for me for an afternoon nap.  Could I just get some decent sleep instead, please?

© 2014 Green Heart Guidance

(As always, I am not a medical doctor.  This information is based on my personal experiences and should not be substituted for medical diagnosis or treatment.  Please speak to your health care providers about your personal situation.)

Late disseminated Lyme disease (also known as chronic Lyme) is a highly contentious diagnosis at this point: The CDC still does not admit that it exists.  As someone who has it, I assure you it does.  It’s maddening to suffer greatly from a disease that authorities refuse to admit is even an issue.  Late disseminated Lyme disease is Lyme disease that was not caught early on and treated; as a result, the bacteria borrelia burgdorferi has spread extensively through the body creating an infection highly resistant to treatment.

My legal diagnoses are for fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), both of which I legitimately have.  However, for me, both the fibro and CFS are symptoms of the Lyme disease.  Treatment for me didn’t make significant progress until we began treating the true issue (a deeply engrained systemic bacterial infection) rather than just the symptoms (pain and fatigue).  A comparable analogy would be taking painkillers and a cough suppressant for tuberculosis.  They might treat the pain and coughing, but it won’t help you with fighting the infection causing the coughing.

In my experience, anyone I know who has been diagnosed with fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome or multiple chemical sensitivities (MCS) and has been tested for Lyme disease using the appropriate tests (see below) under the appropriate conditions has had results come back positive.  If you have any of these diagnoses, please consider speaking with a health care practitioner recommended by ILADS about Lyme disease testing.

Most people with these diagnoses mentioned above will not remember a tick bite which will keep them from being tested for Lyme.  However, only an estimated 30-40% of patients who have been diagnosed with Lyme disease remember a tick bite.*  Additionally, very few patients with Lyme had the classic bullseye Lyme rash.  In my case, my Lyme disease diagnosis was made fifteen years after a tick bite with a non-bullseye rash that had originally been misdiagnosed.  I had been suffering from fibro, CFS, and MCS for six years at that point.  Lyme is found extensively in ticks in Texas and across the nation.

So why are patients not diagnosed immediately with Lyme disease when symptoms appear and then later end up with other red herring health problems?  There are the issues of Western medicine missing the diagnosis initially.  But beyond that, in my personal theory, when bit by a tick transmitting the Lyme bacteria, most people have strong enough immune systems that their bodies can handle the insult with few side effects.  Their immune systems keep fighting the bacteria at a low and constant level with only a few side effects.  In my case, I initially had flu-like symptoms, but they resolved only leaving me with worsened allergies and frequent sinus infections for nine years.

So what causes the immune system to lose control over the Lyme and for it to become full-blown late disseminated Lyme disease? In most of the cases I’ve heard about, there is either a trauma or a hormonal event that disrupts the immune system’s control over the Lyme resulting in massive health issues.  In cases of trauma, it may be physical, emotional or sexual trauma including but not limited to an accident, a rape, abuse, surgery, toxic mold exposure, or a toxic insect bite. Moreover, the people whose immune systems are most likely to lose control after these traumas are usually (but not always) highly sensitive people as defined by Elaine Aron; others suffer from PTSD at some level.  In the case of a hormonal stressor causing the Lyme to flare, contributors include puberty, hormonal birth control, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, and menopause.

Once the Lyme has settled into the body, a host of problems may occur.  If you have a great number of these problems and have not been diagnosed with fibromylagia, CFS, or MCS, you may also want to talk to a Lyme literate doctor (LLMD) about Lyme testing.  Symptoms include but are not limited to: adrenal fatigue, allergies, anemia (often quite severe), arthritis, asthma, any autoimmune disease, bipolar and other mental disorders diagnosed at an abnormally late age,  “brain fog,” chronic or recurring candida (yeast, jock itch) issues, depression, eczema, EMF sensitivity, food sensitivities (especially gluten intolerance), gallbladder problems, Gulf War Syndrome, hormonal problems, hypothyroidism, infertility, insulin resistance or diabetes, irritable bowel syndrome, low blood pressure, low body temperatures, low vitamin B12 levels, low vitamin D levels, menstrual problems (often serious enough to lead to hysterectomy), migraines, parasitic infections, sleep issues, swollen lymph nodes, and unexplained weight gain/loss.  Please note that not all Lyme patients have all of these symptoms:  I personally have not dealt with eight of these.  Likewise, if you have only had a few of the issues but have never experienced any of the other symptoms, it’s not likely you have Lyme.

Additionally, if you are a mother and you have had biological children since the time of your tick bite and the onset of your health issues, your children also probably have issues related to the Lyme.  The children of mothers with Lyme are often on the Autism spectrum, have food sensitivities, were highly colicky babies with reflux, and have allergies, asthma or eczema.  These children are also likely highly sensitive people.  Again, not all of those symptoms are required, and if you gave birth to your children before your tick bite, your children may not show any of these symptoms at all.

If you’ve read through this post and have seen yourself in what I’ve written, consider finding a physician through ILADS who will test for Lyme disease.  If you go to your general practitioner, s/he will run a Lyme test that has a 50% false negative rate rendering it statistically useless yet still commonly administered as insurance will pay for it.  Most insurances unfortunately will not pay for the expensive test from IgeneX which has been the best test available for quite a while.  There is also a newer yet still very expensvie DNA-based test available from Advanced Laboratory Services; this test was developed in conjunction with Dr. Burrascano who is one of the leading LLMDs.  If you decide to pursue Lyme testing, be sure to ask your doctor about whether an antibiotic challenge may help increase the accuracy of the test you choose to run.

*All statistics regarding Lyme disease vary widely due to a lack of serious study of the disease, a lack of sophisticated record keeping, and an underreporting and underdiagnosing of the disease itself.

© 2014 Green Heart Guidance

How did I end up becoming a holistic life coach and intuitive energy healer?  It is a very long story.  It certainly is not what I had planned for life.  As I left high school, I planned to be a teacher, a wife, and a mother.  I earned my undergraduate degree in history and English with secondary teaching certification at The University of Texas at Austin.  I then went to Boston College and earned an M.A. in Theology with a focus on the History of Christianity.  After a short stint teaching, I returned to U.T. and academia to get my Ph.D. in American Studies writing my dissertation on Irish Catholic immigrant women in the U.S., 1845-1915.  I thought I was going to become an adjunct professor while my children were young.  It turns out that life had different plans for me.

In 2003, my health collapsed.  I was exhausted beyond belief, and I was having problems with synthetic chemicals such as perfume.  However, based on the fact that I had three children under the age of three, my well-meaning but erroneous family practice doctor decided that I was suffering from depression.  To get him to stop talking to me, I took the prescription for an anti-depressant and promptly tore it up as I left the office.

Eventually I was given a legal diagnosis for chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) and fibromyalgia (FM).  My health continued spiraling downward.  I was clearly suffering from multiple chemical sensitivities (MCS) as well.  By 2005, I was in bed for 22+ hours a day, hardly able to function.  I would leave the house for only a few hours every month to go see my new doctor, and despite the fact he keeps a green office, I would be sick for days after going.  My then husband had to drive me to the appointments because I wasn’t strong enough to drive myself.

I spent years in recovery.  I quickly exhausted my doctor’s bag of tricks even though he works with the CFS/FM/MCS population.  It then became a matter of me doing on the internet looking for new treatment options to try.  My Ph.D. served a new purpose as I spent my free time and very minimal energy researching health issues and reading medical studies.

Over the years I would be asked frequently by very well-meaning folks, “Have you tried…?”  The answer almost always was yes.  Usually it was something I tried to no avail early in my illness.  Other times people would insist I try some experimental procedure that I had already researched and decided was inappropriate for me.  They insisted that I couldn’t say it wouldn’t help me if I didn’t try.  However, I had learned over the years of illness to hone my intuition.  I have a 95% success rate for myself when it comes to predicting the outcomes of supplements and treatments.  When I ignored that intuition, I often ended up spending money on a useless treatment, or worse yet, harming myself from something I knew would not be good for me.  I learned how to listen to my body and know what it needs.  Listening to one’s body and one’s intuition is a very difficult concept for many people to understand.

Eventually in 2009, I decided to be tested for Lyme Disease using IgeneX testing, and not surprisingly, it was positive.  I had been bit in 1994 on a trip to Missouri, and at that time, I had suffered from extreme fatigue and flu like symptoms.  I had a rash, but it wasn’t a bull’s eye rash, so my doctor was skeptical it was Lyme.  The test she ran (which I now know has a 50% false negative rate) was negative.  Had I been treated with four weeks of antibiotics then, my life might have been very different.  However, that isn’t what happened.  Lyme is a very political disease, and the CDC does not believe that late disseminated Lyme Disease exists.  Based on my personal experience, I disagree violently.  I have many other strong opinions about Lyme and other tick related diseases as well (since I tested positive for Ehrlichia and we suspect I had/have Bartonella as well).

A few months later, I threw my back out while walking in a local park.  I had used chiropractic care before, but the office I had previously utilized had begun spraying down the rooms with a toxic cleaner that I cannot tolerate.  They refused to stop.  I was referred to another chiropractic office in town where I found my future waiting.  The chiropractors in this office worked different than any of the previous ones I had seen.  About six months into my time there, my primary chiropractor asked if he could take over directing my healthcare treatment.  Since none of my other doctors were really directing me in any way, I agreed, feeling an amazing relief that someone I truly trusted was interested in helping get me better. 

From there it was the beginning of another long road, but at least I was finally seeing significant albeit very slow progress.  My healing took another turn in October 2011 when a therapist told me, “You’re an intuitive empath.”  My response was, “I’m a what?”  I learned that I feel other people’s emotions in my own body (much like Counselor Deanna Troi on Star Trek:  The Next Generation), and I am very sensitive to messages from higher powers outside of humanity.  Over the next few months, my therapist and a new chiropractor in the same office helped me start to rebuild my grounding and shielding mechanisms.  I soon switched therapists to work with a woman who had even more ability to help me work with these skills and to become an emotionally healthier intuitive who could safely help herself and others.

In February 2013, I decided one day to listen to my body during my massage.  I was expecting to hear where pain was that I had been repressing.  Instead, I experienced a true shock.  I connected with my spirit guide.  As I received that first healing message, I was in awe at what I was seeing and hearing.  Since then, I discovered that I can use all five of my primary senses to connect with the other side of the astral plane.  What’s more, it’s not just me whom I can receive healing messages for:  It’s anyone.  With their permission, I can connect to others’ guides to receive messages for them to accelerate and accentuate their paths of healing.

By tapping into those healing messages, astronomical leaps forward in my healing have happened.  I am able to regularly socialize in public, something I had not done in nine years.  I can occasionally eat conventional food in restaurants without getting sick. I have many food sensitivities, but I can eat around them.  I still must nap daily, and I still cannot be around perfume, cologne, other heavily fragrant body products, or scented candles.  I can only function in public for a few hours at a time. However, after being bedbound at one point, I feel like I have won the lottery.  Each day that passes brings more healing.

As I began contemplating this new business, I felt it might be hypocritical that someone who is still working so hard on her own health issues could be helping others.  I am clearly not even 50% well yet.  However, I thought about it quite a bit.  Most of my health practitioners struggle with their own health issues and personal demons.  As a result of my pondering, I realized that no one is ever 100% healed.  We all continue working on our personal battles across our lifetimes.  The major difference is that unlike others who aren’t aware of their shortcomings, I am consciously working on improving myself, and I plan to keep walking down that road until I die. 

Ultimately, I decided that I have been given too great of a gift not to share it.  My ability to use all five of my primary senses to connect with the other side of the astral plane is a blessing that has the potential to help many others on their healing journey.  If I don’t share this gift with others, I would be horribly selfish.  In addition, I’ve discovered that helping others helps me heal as well.  I am so grateful for this opportunity that I have been blessed with, and I look forward to working with many others striving for physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health in the future.

© 2013 Green Heart Guidance