Anyone else feeling this?

Happy holidays everyone!

I know there is an endless list of symptoms but it still makes me feel better if I hear that others are experiencing the same specific sensations. Here are a list of specific symptoms I have. Please tell me if any of you have felt the same:

Twitch here, twitch there, twitch everywhere - I get small twitches all over my body, one second it's my shoulder a minute later my butt, my eyelid and then my arms but there is a constant and consistent teitching in my right calf that looks like little ants under the skin, ripples of you may. They are only there when the muscle is at rest though and move around the calf/foot.

Hands feel tired and clumsy sometimes and when I am holding a glass for instance, it feels sometimes like my thumb is about to give out and the glass will drop. This sensation only lasts for a split second as though my thumb is shaking or just gives up for a split second.i have never actually dropped the glass though. My thumbs do get shaky (tremor) but it's a light tremor and my hands will have it too sometimes.

I have a consistent back pain. Both lower back and upper back and thighs + calves are extremely stiff. I have pain in my left upper back and neck that if I massage, shoots pain and numbness to my face.

Severe short bouts of vertigo that come and go but are definitely sparked by movement and especially head movement.

General muscle pain and fatigue throughout my body but particularly my hands. Feels like my arms and hands cramp lightly and my hands fall asleep quickly when I bend my elbows for too long.

Light headedness is a very consistent occupancies and it feels like I'm not getting enough air sometimes.

I've been on omnicef and Zithromax for a month and a week and in 1 week, I was instructed to replace Zithromax with rafampin and continue the omnicef for another 6 weeks. Haven't seen my LLMD in 5 weeks and seeing him in 3 weeks next.

Some of the symptoms have definitely seen relief but I feel like others are flared up. Looking to see if you guys have felt the above symptoms at all? Do they sound familiar? Any tips, tricks or help?

Just trying to push through all this!
Thank you for your help and support!

Yes, those are all fairly common symptoms, although we all have our own variances of them. I've never bothered to watch long enough to see if it looked like my skin was rippling though.

I also had the hand thing where it feels like you will drop whatever is in your hands - but I've dropped a lot of things too. I would be holding something one minute and the next I wasn't. I wasn't even aware that my hand had let go most of the time - it just did it, like it couldn't hold on any longer. I started using all unbreakable dishes after a while!

While some of this is just the varying degrees of symptoms that one will get while in treatment, much of it should decrease with effective detoxing. I would encourage you to increase your detoxing to help deal with more of the toxins.

For many of us, it seems that the tight muscles are holding toxins - and a massage will release those toxins and increase our symptoms, so you should increase your detoxing whenever you get a massage.

The not getting enough air feeling is usually due to Babesia, so if you haven't been diagnosed with that yet, it's something to look into. Often times the symptoms of the untreated infections will come out stronger as the infection(s) that are being treated begin to heal - and so symptoms of the untreated infection come on stronger and stronger.

I would greatly encourage you to increase your detoxing to help ease these symptoms, and be sure that you are writing them all down. There are some nice symptom journals out there if you wish to use them, or you can just write them down in a notebook or even on a calendar, as long as your doc sees your list.

Here are a couple of symptom journals just for those with Lyme and co-infections if you are interested:
/tbijournal.com/

www.facesoflyme.com/content/journal.php

Yes, that lovely twitching - I have had every single part of my body go through twitches. Disturbing at times, and other times no one can see the muscle twitching, yet I can surely feel it!! Every once in a while, it would give me the giggles to be honest!!

Honestly, my hands and fingers usually feel 'tight' - I'm not sure if they are or if it's the way I experience low level pain. The muscles in my neck and upper back stay tight and knotted up most of the time, and I have random muscle cramping and tightness.

So this is my understanding. There are no guarantees that I've got it right, and if anyone knows something that I've said to not be right, please correct me!!

I'm not sure what you may be doing to detox, so I'll just start at the beginning. We have a great post in the "New to Lyme?" thread that goes over a lot of different options for detoxing - you will want to use as many of them as possible, but always build slowly and never start more than one method of detoxing a week. Otherwise you can overwhelm your body with toxins that are being released and needing to find their avenue out.

As the bacteria die off, they leave behind toxins. If there are more toxins than our body can handle moving out of the different systems, those toxins get deposited into tissues - which is why a massage can set off a herx. These toxins can even be deposited in the brain and cause some symptoms. When someone does things to help their body detox, these toxins will move from the tissues into the blood stream, then the lymph system cleanses the blood - so the lymph nodes can get overly full and hurt - and then the toxins get dumped to the liver, kidney etc to get processed out of the body through sweat, urine and our bowels.

So all the methods described in the post in the "New to Lyme?" thread are helpful, you will have to see which ones work best for you.

Most everyone can use the Epsom Salt & peroxide soaks. Just be sure to start off slow - only warm water and no more than 10 minutes. Do your first soak when you won't have to do much the next day, as it could set off a herx depending on what your toxin load is.

Drink lemon water - this helps pull the body back over to the alkaline side. Bacteria and viruses like an acidic body better, and they can actually influence this, so by drinking lemon water you are making your body an "uncomfortable" place for them to be! And drink lots of lemon water!! You need to flush those toxins from your kidneys and liver too!

Oil pulling - this is a relatively new comer to the Lyme world, but seems to be pretty effective. it's as simple as putting a couple of teaspoons of coconut oil in your mouth and rinsing & "pulling" it through your teeth, like mouthwash. This will supposedly also help whiten your teeth.

Dry skin brushing is very important as well. The obvious is that it helps to remove the dead skin that likes to hand around, preventing the skin from 'breathing' well and pushing out more toxins, but it also helps to stimulate lymph fluid movement - and the more lymph fluid movement we have, the more blood that gets "cleaned" from toxins and dead bacteria!!

I also use a "binder". I prefer activated charcoal for this, but there are others. Binders bind toxins to them and then they are more easily removed from the body - but you have to be careful when you take these, as they will also bind to food, medicines, supplements or anything else they can, as they aren't picky about what they bind with! So you have to wait for 2 hours after eating or drinking something you need your body to absorb, take the binder and then wait another 2 hours before eating or drinking something you need your body to have or taking any meds or supplements. Essentially you will need a 4 hour block of time where you are not eating, or drinking anything other than your water or taking any meds or supplements.

If you have access to a FIR sauna, that is still one of the most effective ways to detox these toxins - just be sure that you aren't alone (just in case) and that you are very well hydrated when you go in and continue to drink plenty of water while you are in one.

You're welcome. I'm glad I was helpful!

Just keep working on it - don't give in to that doubt. Many of us deal with the doubt because of many different factors, one being no highly reliable tests exist and the other is because treatment is so different for each of us - but your symptoms and treatment history is common for these infections. Detoxing should lower the symptom severity.