It has been a busy couple of weeks, in a good way. My family and I have been super busy. We took an overnight trip out of town, celebrated a birthday, and celebrated Thanksgiving at my house. It has been fun. The best part about it all is that for the most part I have been able to keep up. I have been careful not to overdo it, but the fact that I have kept up pretty much without incident is a huge milestone. My struggle right now is mental. I want to celebrate and be excited, but I have thought I had beaten this so many times before only to be sorely disappointed. It is hard to explain even to myself who is trying really hard to be excited with each passing day. I wonder at what point I will truly believe that this is winding down.
The test results are in. Part of the difficulty is that my last appointment with the Naturopath was a phone visit. It is just not the same. I was not able to look at the results with her as we were discussing them. I just had to take her word for it.
Here is what a very bad explanation of the test and the results. Your cells react to foreign matter, whether it is bacteria, virus, or any other foreign matter that enter your blood stream. They react by sending out a response cell.. What this blood test did was expose my blood to lots of different possibilities of what could be floating around in my body including viruses and bacteria to see what their response was. If it reacts to the item, that mean the cells already recognizes it and knew how to fight it. That is not a good thing. They also have a scale of how aggressively they attack the foreign matter. If it sends on a full out attack, that it a sign that your cells are actively battling that thing. If you get a small reaction it means you cells recognize as a foreign object, but are not familiar with it so they don’t panic. That is how a healthy person’s blood would react.
Now for the result, this is even more confusing. The test showed that when exposed to certain strains of bacteria it sent out a full on attack (The family that Lyme disease falls under was one of the bacteria’s tested). It also showed that when it was exposed to certain viruses it sent on a full on attack. When it was exposed to the control, or basically something benign, it sent a full on attack.
Here is what the results mean to me. My body is actively fighting a virus, and bacteria. The fact that it reacted when it should not have is an indication that my body has been fighting these for a long time. For lack of a better explanation my blood cells have been waging the war for so long they treat everything as a threat. (I am still wondering what a long time means. Months, years?)
That leads me to my next science lesson. Biofilms. That is what viruses and bacteria hid in to save themselves from destruction. They hide and every once in a while one will come out and if conditions are right for them they will send a little message to their friends inviting them to come out and party with them. If the conditions are not right then they die and never get to tell their friends to come out so they sit and wait. How does this all relate. Apparently with all the hard work we have done to get my body heathy, my body is no longer a good environment for them to thrive. YIPEE. The bad thing is that because the test results it proves that whatever made me ill in the first place is still in there. My body just kills them before they can tell their friends. Basically it is a set up for failure. If conditions are not kept perfect, I will become ill again. So what is the plan? This is the part I don’t like…
We have to expose them. EEEWWWW!
That our course of action. I am taking an enzyme that is going to eat away the biofilm and expose them (not my first choice!) The hope is that I have enough support with supplements and my immune system to take care of them. We are doing it very slowly so that I don’t feel the effects of this war. So far it is not too bad. I have had a few symptoms here are there but I try not to freak out and I just try to imaging that they bad guys that have been exposed and are now being destroyed. I really do have a picture in my head of the battle. It is quite comical. Good thing no one can see it.
So what about the diagnosis of Lyme? There is still a good chance that is the bacterial part of the fight, but it really does not matter. (Besides the lab test is well out of my price range) What matters is that we take care of everything that is hiding under a biofilm and annihilate them. I guess we are playing a game of shoot to kill not questions asked! How cool is that, I am now a walking war game;-)
No comments:
Post a Comment