A Bit of Chronic History

After all those posts on history via good books, this could be a let-down! In no way do I assume the history of my family's health struggles has the same level of interest to readers in general. 😄 

But for those who need "companionship" or encouragement on their own journeys through life with chronic illness, I occasionally mention how it affects our daily life. It helped Elsa and me in the early years to run across a couple others online who were "in the same boat" - letting us know we weren't alone or crazy and that others had faced similar disabling and confusing sets of symptoms.

But I am not sure if I have ever really summarized our diagnoses here. So for those who are interested, feel free to read on. (It will be very abridged and incomplete anyway.) 

For the rest of you, here a few, non-medical "fun facts" and old photos by way of introduction. 

I am a daughter (and daughter of the King!), sister, aunt, part time piano teacher and full time Chronic-Lyme warrior. I enjoy music making, audiobook narration [Storytime with HannahMary], being out in God's creation, travel/missions-trips & camping with my family, sailing, skiing, sending hand-written snail-mail, learning to watercolor... 

But most accessible these years are the joys of knitting for my sister's Etsy shop [TheNauticalNordic] while we listen to audio-books together.

I have 3/4 Norwegian blood in my veins, grew up with a large family of stuffed animals, have been roommates with my younger sister, Elsa, all but a few months since she was born, and pretended I had a Corvette in/after college!

My sister and I have been treating Chronic Lyme Disease (etc.) full-time for the past 7 years. Elsa has even more daily symptoms to battle with than I. [Find her at: http://reachingtotheskies.blogspot.com] She had to close her bakery and I drop most of my piano students in 2014 when the symptoms finally became disabling after wearing us down for years.

We did not then realize that the “worst flu of our lives” back in 2005 was actually a vector-borne disease. So we ended up with Lyme, Bartonella, and apparently other co-infections as well. This slowly but surely brought down our immune systems and clogged our detoxification pathways (already impaired due to genetics). This led to extreme levels of heavy metal and mycotoxin/mold toxicities, socially-isolating Multiple Chemical Sensitivities, many food sensitivities, and more.

Some of our symptoms have been: chronic muscle and myofascial pain, extreme fatigue and muscle weakness, brain fog, insomnia, sound and light sensitivity, night sweats, sudden onset of allergies and sensitivities, blood sugar issues, neurological damage, adrenal dysfunction and other hormone issues, whole-body “jitters,” dizziness, nausea, migraines, eyes not tracking... We are still digging our way out of years of damage but are overall seeing some clear progress, praise God!

Both of our parents have dealt with acute Lyme a couple times as well, and our mom seems to have more of the chronic symptoms building up along with a diagnosis of CIRS. Two years ago Lyme became a “whole-family tradition” when our older sister ended up with large and spreading bull's-eye rashes from a tick bite while pregnant with our nephew.

To avoid the baby ending up in NICU for months after birth - as happened with our doctor’s relative who did not treat her Lyme during pregnancy... or even worse results that we have heard of - our sister was on 2 antibiotics until her baby was three months old and then on strong herbal treatments for several more months. We are so thankful that mother and son are both doing very well more than a year after treatments. Our lively nephew is such a gift and quite the exercise/strengthening plan for his Aunties!

So, while our lives are still far from "normal" and every day in these bodies is more or less of a battle, God has been using these years to teach us more of His love and providence in ways we wouldn't have noticed back in our rushed, over-filled lives, when we "never had time to be bored!" and rarely had time to "Be Still."