889: There’s Something About Hail Mary
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A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbearped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. Desperate times, my friends, got for desperate measures, or I was in college when something mysterious happened, she was at her computer editing. And I was editing, editing, looking at this computer, and my eyesight started to go blurry. And I just couldn't really see the computer that well, and I was like, "I need to stop. I can't really see anymore," and I was walking home, and everything's just blurry. The night doctor examined her, said, "There's nothing wrong with her eyes to cause the bluriness." And then, "Oh, I remember I had weird heart palpitations. So I went to the doctor to get an EKG, and they were like, "You seem fine, maybe you're just in love." Pause on that. That was really a thing that happened to you. You showed up with medical symptoms, and they said, "Maybe you're in love." Yeah. She was actually falling in love, but she did not think that explained the heart palpitations. She was starting to get the feeling that people were not taking her seriously, and things were getting worse. It just feels like everything my body is breaking in a weird way, terrible fatigue, horrible brain fog, and this feeling in the left side of my brain, just like, the best way to describe it is I feel like an ice cream scoop has been taken out of my head. Symptoms like that come and go for two years, blurry vision, her legs are weak and tremble, her throat swells up, and it feels like she's being strangled. And then some stuff is constant, she's exhausted but can't sleep, pressure headaches, it's hard to think. This de-rails her life. She's always taking time off from work or showing up late in the day. You can't be on the computer for too long, which limits what jobs she can get. She's going to the doctor all the time, she's too tired to go out with friends at night, remember she's in her 20s, tip on Reddit, of course, Reddit, leads her to believe that she may have Lyme disease, even though she'd already been tested for Lyme disease and it came up negative, no Lyme. A different doctor, not test her again, and this time she tests positive for Lyme. So the doctor prescribes the standard treatment for Lyme, doxycycline, the same antibiotic, doesn't work for her. And she spends two years on other antibiotics and other drugs. Those fail too. Maybe it's possible this is because she didn't really have Lyme disease. The second test she took for Lyme was not an FDA approved test. This is the nightmarish world of Lyme, this whole debate of who really has it and who just has symptoms. From Laura's point of view, the question was moot. She had the symptoms, she wanted them gone. Yoga doctors weren't doing it, so she started looking at all the other treatments that people try for these symptoms and there were a lot of them. She had a sessions in a hyperbaric chamber, gets inside an infrared sauna. I tried this like elimination diet where all I could eat was like grapefruit and goat cheese and oatmeal. I tried like a very intense regimen of Chinese herbs that a doctor in New York City invented
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