Environment and Lyme Disease – a 1st Level Consideration
Environment and Lyme Disease – are they related?
If you are someone with Chronic Lyme Disease – aka, Long Term Lyme Disease – I believe the environment you live in is critically important to consider.
This is because those of us who have Lyme Disease live on system overload, all the time. Anything added to the load pushes us close to or even beyond our limits.
If you’re reading this today and you don’t have chronic Lyme disease, let me help you understand what we are going through…
Remember that we are all different. You could have a dozen people with long term Lyme disease in the same room and no two people would have exactly the same symptoms. As explained in other posts, the reason for this is twofold:
- Our bodies are all different.
- We don’t all have the same pathogens invading our bodies. The only common denominators is that we have all been invaded by Burrelia borrelia or one of its close relatives, and we all are hanging onto life the best we can.
I finally found a way to describe what I have to live with every day. Apart from the awful fatigue that just won’t leave me alone, I am in constant pain. I take a very strong combination on non-opioid prescriptions, but that just allows me to stay relatively sane. It never takes the pain away.
But people – often in disbelief – ask me what it feels like in my case. I have been put on Vitamin B3, the kind that causes flushing. I take a triple dose, twice a day. If you haven’t taken it, you won’t know exactly what that feels like, but I can tell you that it’s what Lyme disease feels like for me.
It’s kind of like having a very bad sunburn in a hot room and brushing yourself with a wire brush. Yeah, it feels that good!
But I discovered something about six months before this worldwide pandemic messed everything up. I was in northern Canada, north of the trade winds from Asia (and specifically China, which burns a vast amount of coal for electricity). I noticed that my fatigue and pain almost totally disappeared while I was there! But as soon as I went south, it returned.
I have been many places, with very different elevations and humidity levels, with absolutely no change to my fatigue and pain. So when my pain and fatigue almost completely went away, I went through a list in my head of possible reasons and finally came to the conclusion that the one thing really different at that latitude was the almost total lack of air pollution.
I haven’t read anything about environment and Lyme disease, but my Lyme doctor is intrigued. He thinks it might be a very good idea for me to move away from all the air pollution. It might just give my body a fighting chance. We planned to go north for a month this summer to see if it really did help.
Then COVID hit and we could not return to the area. We now own a small property there, but have not been able to return.
We tried to get there when there was a brief window at the end of summer this year, but our vehicle, which is brand new, decided to break down and leave us stranded in a small town for five days, not quite as far north as we were planning to go. That is a story in itself!
But we both noticed a change in the overall way we felt once we were about a half a day north of the Canada/US border. We felt considerably better (until I got an abscessed tooth – totally unrelated! That has actually gone away by itself and my dentist is satisfied it is ok for now). But when we got close to southern BC again, we both began to feel much less healthy.
So I thought I’d throw it out there for my fellow sufferers. Environment and Lyme disease do seem to have a connection. Perhaps a trip somewhere away from the air pollution of populated centers and away from placed that get fallout from major cities that the winds bring in will help you. It’s one thing we can try!