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Can someone please try to diagnose me?

I am a 21 year old male from Scarsdale, NY

Past medical conditions- Severe allergies to dust, animals, ragweed, and mold. Took shots of gamma globulin for 6 hours a week when I was younger (5-6). When I was a baby I had surgery on my ears and needed tubes in them. In 7th grade I went through severe depression.

Note that before this occurred I was in the prime of my life, and the happiest i've ever been.

When I attended college at High Point University NC in 2010, I became extremely sick. I developed a horrible cough and assumed it was mono due to partying heavily on a weekly basis. When I got better a couple of weeks later i realized that my eyes looked tired and my head was not working to its full potential. Don't get me wrong, at this point I still had the ability to do and be anything I wanted to be with little holdback (maybe a 10% decrease in brain functionality due to fatigue). I thought nothing of this and believed like all of my prior sicknesses that time would heal it. Some days I was active, but I progressively had more and more “tired” days. About a month later, I was in Arizona because i transferred schools and was growing concerned about the fatigue that was worsening over time. At the time, I was into working out, I avoided alcohol and partying to help build muscle (organic protein and arginine were the only supplements i took). My muscles started becoming sore and weaker even when given a weeks rest. I assumed it was overtraining and gave lifting a week break.. this turned into a month because I was still sore. I then narrowed the fatigue down to a few possibilities, diabetes, poor sleep scheduling, and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I thought it was diabetes because food affected my mentality and I couldn't handle a lot of simple carbs. I took two blood tests at the school and even bought my own blood glucose monitor before I accepted that this wasn't the case. I thought it was due to my sleep schedule because I was going to bed at 4:30-5:00am each night and waking up around 2:00. I have fixed it and now wake up at 9:00am with a full 8 hours of sleep each night, no help. Finally, I thought it was CFS because I typed in my symptoms online and it was the most relevant search. I went to my doctor and he said although there is a slight possibility, a 19 year old male having CFS is extremely unlikely, especially a physically active one.
I came home from AZ and decided to not return to school the next year. I lost the ability to focus and became very sensitive to sickness, allergies, and looking at computer/TV screens. I worked in a dirty environment and noticed that my lower region was moist and thought I had hemorrhoids, went to the ER, tested negative, and left me once again clueless. Later that month (July) I was doing research and stumbled upon Lyme Disease, All the mental symptoms were there like the confusion and the memory issues, but I never had rings, never had neck stiffness, and my face wasn't numb. A week later the thought of Lyme came back up in the shower and I checked my body, there was a tick! It was old looking (grayish) and very small, unfortunately I was unaware that you are supposed to keep the tick and bring it to the doctor. I let it go and it went down the drain. I scheduled an emergency appointment and got a blood test, negative. Confused, I looked up how not all tests are accurate and Lyme tests are actually notorious for being inaccurate. I tried 3 more of them before giving up.
I was becoming depressed as time went by, my family thought it was all mental so I went to see a psychiatrist and was prescribed prozac. I certainly was happier, but even with a positive mind state I was still tired and my memory problems were getting worse. This carried on for about 8 months of me being content with my new self until I decided to fight it again and return to the real old me. I stopped taking prozac and was on the hunt again, tried eating only veggies, didn't work. Clearing our ducts for dust, didn't work. Acupuncture, nothing. Florida vacation, nope.
This carries on up until now, I am about to go to seattle to avoid ragweed and have clean air. I've recently talked with my doctor about the moist bottom region and he said that I probably have a bacterial infection, I bought medication (align) but I still get moist down there with little cottage cheese like specks when I eat sugar. I am currently on an extremely low simple carb diet with most of my food being organic. I still think that there is a chance of this being Lyme Disease, allergies, the infection, and that I might be allergic to EMF's because dealing with electricity and screens exhausts me fast and gives me a headache.


My current symptoms-

Fatigue
Memory Problems
Can not focus
Red eyes
Extreme allergies
EMF sensitivity
Weak muscles
Headaches

Thank you again for taking the time to read this, I hope to hear advice and appreciate your response.
Best Answer
Avatar universal
Welcome -- sorry you have reason to be here, but glad you are continuing to 'work the problem' -- meaning to figure it out and what to do to fix it.

No one here is medically trained, but we are glad to relate what we have learned personally from our own experiences.  One important thing to keep in mind is that Lyme is very tricky and shows up differently in each person, due to variability in immune system function from person to person and due to other infections that the same ticks often carry (maybe half the time) that have their own sets of symptoms -- so keep an open mind and don't try to line up your own symptoms exactly to anyone else's, but keep an eye on the bigger picture -- which it sounds like you already are.

First note -- the cottage cheese effect sounds like a yeast infection, meaning a fungal infection.  Some people are genetically susceptible to yeast, and also Lyme interferes with normal body 'settings' like pH, which can make it easier to get something like a yeast infection.  Did your doc give you anything like Diflucan/fluconazole or advise you on limiting sugar in your diet?  There are also some diet supplements supposed to be good for you that are yeast-based, and in some people these can take over and cause the symptoms you are having; Florastor/S.boulardii can have that effect in some people (happened to me, gave me brain fog, red eyes, bloating, just felt lousy all the time.)

Docs (and everybody else for that matter) tend to think of a fungal infection as being limited like athlete's foot, and seldom think of it as being able to take over the entire digestive system.  It can happen to babies (where it's called thrush) and also to children and adults, as mentioned above.  So you might want to run that one by your doc -- for some reason doc's just aren't tuned in to that and even they think only women get yeast infections and only v*ginally, but not so.  (Also, if you are susceptible to yeast, it's possible you could have gotten from intimate contact.)  Okay, enough on yeast, but do look into it, because a systemic yeast infection lines up pretty well with a lot of your symptoms.  And if you do have yeast AND something else, getting the yeast out of the picture will make it easier to treat whatever else is ailing you.

You definitely live in Lyme country ... woodsy areas like NC and Scarsdale are ground zero for Lyme, and even docs recognize that (those of us who live in other parts of the country [like Texas especially] are told 'we don't have Lyme here' and end of conversation.)  Don't worry about not keeping the tick ... the tiny ones are classic Lyme-carriers, but dog ticks also can bring infections.  Many (maybe half) of Lyme patients never see the tick that bit them and never get the classic round red 'bullseye' rash.  And many docs don't take ticks or symptoms seriously, so don't fret over losing the tick.  And, it could be that you were infected a long time ago (considering how long you've been sick) and that was a new tick that may or may not have re-infected you with Lyme and/or other co-infections.

Bottom line:  the facts are always murky when it comes to Lyme+ infection ("Lyme+" being my shorthand for Lyme and the other diseases [aka co-infections] that often come with Lyme).  I never saw a tick, never had a rash, and neither did a family member here, but we both had serious cases of Lyme and a co-infection.

The common co-infections are babesiosis (related to malaria), bartonella, ehrlichiosis, and a few others, all of which have slightly different symptoms and need separate testing from Lyme.  And ... the treatment for each may be different, because the bugs are not all susceptible to the same meds.  Yeah, I know:  why can't it be simpler?

The good news is that you are young and otherwise healthy, and that means your body is putting up a good fight.  The first thing I would do is find a Lyme specialist -- which is not as easy as it ought to be, because there is a huge split in the medical community about how serious Lyme+ is, how to diagnose it, and how to treat it.  The first docs to 'discover' Lyme about 30 years ago are still high up in the field and their initial impressions of Lyme as hard to get and easy to cure still hold sway in mainstream medicine.  There is however an equally serious faction of docs who have continued to research Lyme+ and to understand better its mysteries, but there is much venom directed at the these more progressive thinkers by the original discoverers.  These are the players:

IDSA is the Infectious Disease Society of America, and takes the narrow approach that Lyme is rare, hard to get, and easy to cure with a couple weeks of antibiotics.  This view claims that it is 'mainstream', and indeed the most usual docs who would treat Lyme+ (that is, the infectious disease [ID] docs and neurologists) usually adhere tightly to the 'hard to get/easy to cure' view, and after a couple weeks of antibiotics, their position is that you're cured, and any remaining symptoms are 'post-Lyme syndrome', meaning that your body is over-reacting to a now-vanquished infection.  These guys haven't progressed much at all in their thinking, and there is suspicion among some of us that the epidemic of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and similar murky diagnoses is really just untreated Lyme.

On the other side of the aisle is ILADS, the International Lyme and Associated Disease Society.  These are the progressive thinkers who are not locked into impressions from 30 years ago.  Lyme is caused by a spirochete, a spiral-shaped bacterium, in the same family as the bug that causes syphilis.  Lyme bacteria are adept at hiding in the body in places that the immune system can't locate them, meaning the bacteria can just hang on making mischief for a very long time.  ILADS docs understand this and treat with a variety of antibiotics for an extended period of time, to blast through the slimy shields the bacteria hide in and to keep the level of medication high for a sufficiently long time to attack the bacteria when they are reproducing, which when their cell wall is disrupted is when they are most susceptible to being killed...and Lyme bacteria reproduce VERY slowly, like tuberculosis bacteria do, and standard treatment time for TD is 18 months.  

Okay, running on too much here, but in your situation, I would find an LLMD and read up on Lyme:

-- Look for Burrascano's diagnostic and treatment guidelines at ILADS [dot] org, which will give you an LLMD's view of the approach

-- Read 'Under Our Skin' if you have the attention span; if not, watch the movie now available online (I think)

-- Find an LLMD.  In your area, there are lots of good LLMDs, and Columbia U medical center in Manhattan has a Lyme research center headed by Brian Fallon.  I don't know if they treat or just do research, but they may be able to refer you.

Let us know what you do and how you do, okay?  Your spirit is strong, and you've got determination -- and THAT will carry the day.  Take care --
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Avatar universal
The LymeMD blogger told a story of an internist he knows at a hospital who criticized the LymeMD's approach to treating Lyme, including the initial treatment for suspected Lyme. The internist insisted the standard 3 weeks of doxy was sufficient to kill an early infection and that he would simply refuse to prescribe a longer dose if a patient asked. (That is the official IDSA guideline.)

But sometime later, they bumped into each other and started talking, and the internist admitted that his young son had an engorged tick on him and he gave him 3 MONTHS of amoxicillin.

That was eye opening! Basically, this guy knew the horrors of chronic Lyme and wanted to make sure it didn't happen to HIS son. It also proved he didn't truly believe the official line.  I wonder how many other relatives of Lyme deniers have secretly been given a longer course than other patients get.

I will bet there are thousands of doctors who really don't believe the IDSA guidelines are good enough, but know the penalty of violating them is severe and so will pretend they agree with them. Either that, or they'll refuse to treat Lyme patients just to avoid the inner conflict and guilt they will feel when the patient is not cured and continues to ask for more abx that they are too afraid to prescribe.
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Avatar universal
Ha ha ha....love it Jackie.  Well if they are denying it.....I am sure it wouldn't be much of a problem for them.   Hey we could do the whole role reversal.  We'll step in for the medical Dr's and tell THEM that it is all in their heads, there isn't Lyme where they live and charge them tens of thousands of dollars for that privilege.  I reckon they would have their light bulb moment about the truth of Lyme very quickly. Snap!!!
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Avatar universal
Eeek!  ... and well said.  

It's a cruel thought, but I've sometimes wondered what an effect it would have on the medical community to have 100 'denier docs' volunteer to get bitten by a tick, to 'prove' it wouldn't be a problem.  

Now that would be a study worth reading.
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Avatar universal
I am not sure of the tick prevalence in the States but I know for a fact that where we lived on the South Coast of NSW in Australia they are in plague proportions.  Where we still go back to and spend every Christmas at my parents-in-laws house there is a local mob of kanagaroos that come onto their front lawn to eat their grass every afternoon (roos that are COVERED in tcks).  It would be nothing when the 4 kids were little when we would throw them in the bath together in the evening for the nightly tick parade to pick anything up to 30 ticks off them (all mostly nymphs).

My Dad was an environmental surveyor working for an ecological company who had to trap wildlife, record on list native fauna and fauna as part of the building approval process for different firms.  I remember one week him recording in his diary that he had removed over 100 ticks.  

My mother-in-law had the tiniest nymph fly into her eye one windy day and it attached itself under her upper eye lid and had to be removed by a Dr after it had swollen her eye shut.  

So just having a little problem at this point digesting the comment " it's interesting that Lyme is such a big concern given that it's spread by ticks and not very many people are bit by ticks in their lifetime".

The thing about ticks is that when they bite you not only does the saliva contain an anticoagulant to help stop your blood from clotting but also a local anaesthetic to try to hide the fact that they are there sucking your blood.  That was why we had to do a nightly tick parade with our kids because they just plum didn't know they were there.
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Avatar universal
The ticks that carry Lyme are tiny, not the size of big dog ticks.  Here is a photo of a Lyme tick (replace "[dot]" with a period and close up all the spaces):

dogbreedinfo [dot] com/images8/Lyme_Tick_2 [dot] JPG

Your statement that "not very many people are bit by ticks in their lifetime" is an assertion that you cannot prove.  
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2143641 tn?1396678143
I don't know how diffuse Lyme can be.

although I'm pretty sure that these new strains of avian flu especially the one that appeared in 2009 are causing a lot more trouble that is said.

I have read of many people in here with neurological symptoms that appeared subsequently to what looked like a cold a flu or sinusitis. even the location of the "patients" seem to be coincidental with a pattern of big cities or nearby large airports...

there was some awareness in 2009 and 2011 in alternative media that the vaccine (and consequentially the virus itself) could give neurological problems but the media is now silent on the topic.

well the new flu season has just started, bring it on.
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