I've written elsewhere that my worst "break" -- my Y2K meltdown -- coincided with, was actually caused by I believe, a case of neuro-Lyme disease. Not only do I believe this, but so does my twin sister, one psychiatrist in my life as well as the "famous Dr O," the other psychiatrist in my life. (I should mention that there is also my brother, Chip, who is yet a third psychiatrist and there are others beyond those, but you get my point...). The reason we could link the two, the infection and the psychosis, was that I had an MRI during the psychosis, and an MRI nine months later and it turned out there was a noticeable difference between them. The later one showed multiple patches of scar tissue where none was seen in the MRI nine months earlier. This would indicate that something had been going on in January 2000 that, being fresh, might not show up in a scan but having consolidated into scar tissue nine months later finally did. Furthermore, according to my infectious disease doc, the pattern this scar tissue took, these patches, is often seen in Lyme disease in the brain (neuroborreliosis).

In addition, I thrice tested positive for the bacterial DNA in my blood and urine. This is really the gold standard for a positive test in this disease. Sometimes getting a positive blood test is often impossible, even when a person is floridly ill. According to what I've read, this is because the Lyme bacteria, the spirochaetes, do not "like" the blood but prefer to lodge in tissue, the muscle or fat of the body, and therefore they are not easily found during a routine blood draw. Hence the difficulty obtaining a positive test for infection, even when you are riddled with them! So when they were able to find, if not the bacterium itself, at least its DNA in my blood, we had undeniable evidence of its presence in my body.

I go to all that trouble of proving I had/have Lyme disease in my brain for a good reason: there is a huge controversy, largely concocted and for political reasons I will not go into, surrounding whether chronic Lyme disease exists or not. Some, the so-called Yale school ie the "establishment" asserts that no such thing can possibly be, yadayadayada and so they set up guidelines for treatment that virtually, no, absolutely ignored the possibility of a chronic form of the infection...In fact they gave no consideration to the question even when setting up the guidelines, did not even look into the research suggesting it might in fact exist. The other school, that is, everyone else, believes the opposite, that either a chronic form does exist, having seen it, or that something else is going on in Lyme, that 3 weeks of antibiotics does not in fact seem to cure it once and for all at all. If you do not believe that this is so, take a look at the charges of Richard Blumenthal Attorney General of CT, who is forcing the Infectious Diseases Society of America, through anti-trust law, to reassess and if necessary rewrite the guidleines, this time taking the chronic Lyme disease research and reaserchers into account.