Bought myself a microscope and...

So my birthday was this week and I bought myself a microscope as a present.

I had a theory : since I've seen photos in research articles of spirochetes hanging out with blood cells, maybe I could look at my own blood and see what I find. A quick search on YouTube turned up a number of dark field and normal microscope videos in which people point out spirochetes.

So I figured...$400 for a nice microscope or hundreds of dollars for more tests looking for pieces of my own body's antibodies to Lyme.

I set up the scope this morning. I pricked my finger. It took me about an hour to figure out how everything works...it's certainly a lot more complex than the microscopes I used in biology classes back in the late 1990s.

The views between "normal" light and dark field (in the case of my machine, dry dark field) are quite different. The normal light makes the blood cells appear more like outlines, whereas the dark field looks 3-D.

At first, I just saw tons of healthy, fat, round blood cells. After about an hour, they began to spread out and cluster a bit. After about two hours, the movement settled and only some of them were slowly moving around the fluid. I did see little particles orbiting around blood cells, but I'm certainly not an expert and can't identify one cellular bit from another.

After several hours, more blood cells began to die. Some collapsed into hollow-looking surved losenge-shapes that tend to stack on top of one another, and some get all spiky and sputnik-like.

Well, guess what? After a couple of hours I saw something that looked oddly wormy wiggling around. As the hours have passed and more cells have died, more "worms" have appeared. Scanning around the slide, I find an odd [spirochete?] here and there...but I've also found several "nests" or "medusas" in which a number of them are all clustered together, usually in between cells, and appear to be looking for somewhere to go. All of them seem to be poking around at the outside of blood cells as if they're "sniffing them out." The view is reminiscent of animations of sperm trying to access an egg. It's really strange and alienating in a way to look at this and know it's happening inside my body!

I also see quite a number of smaller wiggly things. I have zero idea whether they could be other blood cells or pathogens, such as borrellia in some of its other adaptive forms. Some of the weird structures look exactly like photos I've seen of Lyme biofilm communities, but again I'm far from any kind of expert so I won't make a definitive call.

My symptoms seem to be more bartonella-heavy than borrellia-heavy, but I can't figure out how to identify bartonella among blood cells, and I don't suppose I will be able to figure that out. I've seen plenty of photos with arrows pointing to spots on blood cells, but I can't make any clear sense of what specifies that as bartonella.

However, the "worms" are unmistakable. I wonder if there's anything "normal" in blood that could mimic spirochetes wiggling around in blood plasma? If not, then there's simply no question: I'm looking at spirochetes. Whether it's Lyme, syphilis, or ones that normally live in the mouth, I guess there's no way for me to tell. However, I've been on antibiotics for a while and as I understand it, syphilis would have been long dead by now.

Either way, this is fascinating...definitely the most interesting present I've bought myself in a LONG time. I'm going to order a digital camera attachment so that I can see the view on a computer monitor and record it.

Has anyone else here done this?

If what I am looking at is indeed Lyme, then, frankly, I'm really angry about it--not because it's in my blood. There's nothing I can do about that. But because that would mean that some guy with four hundred bucks and no experience since freshman-year biology class plugged in a microscope and is seeing spirochetes. Why can't a blood lab simply look under a microscope? I do understand that determining a specific species of spirochete by observation is not possible; however, seeing them seriously narrows down the options...right?

Before I wrote this, I searched for "dark field microscope" to figure out how to use my dark field attachment. The search results led me to a Wikipedia page about dark field microscopy being "quackery." It's 2015 and I have this *insane* idea that science must understand what standard-form blood cells look like...so how is it fraudulent medicine to observe that there are non-human critters running rampant in the blood--seeing is believing, right? Agh.

Anyway. I've already been diagnosed and I'm not doing this to self-diagnose, but I am a curious person and if there's a way to see, literally, inside my body, I'm going to do it.

http://www.medicaldaily.com/smartphone-microscope-detects-wiggling-worms-blood-samples-quickly-and-cheap-332382

Check this out....

Why would a microscope be illegal? That's so bizarre.

The only difference between a regular microscope and a dark-field microscope is that the light on the dark field has an opaque apparatus over the center of it, creating an effect similar to when the moon eclipses the sun. So the only light that is conveyed to the microscope lens is sort of a "corona" of light, entering from around the edges. So all that happens is that light enters at an angle instead of being shot directly through the slide. It's not like some kind of dark sorcery or something. It's a lighting effect. There's no reason that should be illegal.

Now, I've read that some people "practice" dark-field microscopy as a medical treatment, and theoretically those people could have no medical or biological training and really be fleecing people of money, I guess. That's a legitimate concern. But seriously, all we are talking about is complex lenses maginifying a blood sample so that cells, plasma, and any "junk" can be seen.

As far as I know, there are only three types of spirochete that can show up in blood...the oral kind, which could get into the blood stream via sores in the mouth, gums, etc.; syphilis, and borrellia. Unless my own blood cells broke apart into worm-shaped pieces and danced around for their lives after the remaining blood cells simply shriveled and died, there is some kind of spirochete-looking critter in my blood that outlived my own blood cells. I've watched it happen on two separate slides now, from two separate drops of blood. It's not really arguable.

And thanks for the happy birthday. ;) 37 now...going on 59.

That's really cool. I'd like to be able to do something like that as well. $400 though. Ha, if only..

Hopefully you start to learn a little more, enabling you to do some more extensive studying and get some more findings.

I share the confusion @ it being illegal, in certain states, dark field microscopy.

Jo, what I see in my microscope isn't a dark, clearly spiral "snake" like the one pictured on that site.

The wiggly "worms" look exactly like the ones in this video that the guy calls spirochetes and "strings of pearls"...more like clear filaments with outlines than the dark silhouettes that are in a lot of photos. http://youtu.be/Hbin5ZT6A5s

I think those photos use some kind of silver salt or some other stains and the bacteria absorb the colors, but I don't fully understand that process yet.

I looked up Protozoa and yeast.

The things I am seeing don't look unlike Trypanosoma Brucei, "African sleeping sickness," but I've never been to or near Africa.

Whatever they are, I suppose they must be some kind of flagellate. I watched one for a while hanging out in plasma between blood cells this morning. This was on a slide I made over 18 hours ago. All the blood cells are fixed, but this critter is still poking around. It's usually close to or possibly tethered to a blood cell but at one point it went into the plasma area and bent into an L shape and then completely doubled over on itself. I looked again a while later and there were three smaller bits dancing around in the same area and a shorter "worm." I don't know if it broke into pieces, got new visitors, or what. This is kind of fascinating either way. :)

There is a third scope made for a camera. I mistakenly thought that this microscope came with the actual camera. I think I am going to buy one, although I'm already realizing that this is probably a novelty for me. I do think I'll be checking my blood depending on symptoms, though. I seem to be improving over the past couple of weeks, so hopefully that will continue and I won't need to check again. ;)

Mister Mike said...
Wow. Very interested in this! I wonder if that spirochete went into cyst form before your very eyes?

More likely went into a bleb.

I yave been wanting yo try this since hearing the interview in Under My Skin. I would like to know what brand microscope you bought and where? Were you under treatment when you sampled your blood and saw the activity? What made you wait 2 hours? I also heard adding salt was somehow helpful. Did yoh add anything the the blood on the slide? Im looking for more documentation on this procedure. I am at the end of my rope with these pills and would like to see if the buggers are still swimming.

Roxie,

I literally opened the microscope box yesterday, so I haven't had any time to do anything but figure out how to use it and to experiment with basic blood slides.

The microscope is from a company called amscope. These are the specs of the model: 40X-1600X 3W LED Siedentopf Trinocular Bright / Darkfield Compound Microscope

It has the capacity for a mounted digital camera but does not come with it.

My procedure for creating the blood smear was:
1. Clean finger with alcohol
2. Prick finger with safety lancet.
3. Squeeze small drop of blood onto new glass slide.
4. Drag thin smear of blood across slide with edge of clean glass cover slip.
5. Cover carefully with cover slip.
6. Place under microscope, using lowest mag first for positioning and then moving up to 100x.
7. 100x requires the use of oil, which comes with the model of microscope I bought.
8. Freak out when I realize what I am looking at is my own insides. :)
9. Read articles, look at photos and videos to make sense of this amazing microscopic zoo.

I watched blood smear tutorials on YouTube to learn how to do it. When in doubt or wonderment, go to YouTube.

I have been on antibiotics for over six weeks now. I am pulsing them, three days a week, plus flagyl every third Saturday to "push out the cyst form." My symptoms this week have been better than they've been in months, so I am hoping that means it's working!

I have not seen many wormy-looking critters in fresh blood. A guy on YouTube said that more and more tend to show up every hour that the blood is outside of the body because the bacteria are escaping from dying red blood cells (meaning that they are living inside of the cells, and if that is the case, then it makes sense that those would be protected from antibiotics--if the immune system or drugs targeted our red blood cells, we would die).

So, speculatively (who knows for sure?), it appears my blood doesn't have a ton of spirochetes swimming around in the plasma--hopefully because of treatment? But after the cells have stopped moving, more and more wiggly worm-shaped things can be seen--yes, even a day later. Their movements appear to be more jerky than screw-driving, so I can't say positively that they are indeed spirochete bacteria. They do look like they're about the right size, compared with lab photos all over the internet.

As for the urine, it's much less cluttered than the blood. And there are many, many more easily observable free-floating filamentous/serpentine things in the urine than in the blood. Many appear to be at least partially spiral or else they are segmented; there's an undulating quality to the ends of them. I've seen photos of "packets" of proteins from blood and other cells in descriptions of urinalysis--which are normal--but even though some of those are strung along like sausages, none I have seen as a reference has been as long as the things in my urine.

Whatever is in the blood is clearly moving.

The similar-looking things in the urine, which look to me even more like typical spirochetes, are not moving. So if they are indeed spirochete bacteria, maybe they have been killed by the antibiotics and supplements and are being washed out of the body as waste.

I'm going to try to figure out how to use stains and try that. That should make it easier to identify various types of normal blood cells from one another, as well as foreign invaders.

Hmm actually the ones from the urine look very much like mycelial candida, too, except that all the candida pictures I see feature "branching" and little cells collecting around the margins and mine does not have that. I suppose it could be yeast since I am on so many antibiotics?

Thx @Americanlymie. Is there a protective stop to prevent breaking slides? I have not had microscope since I was a kid.

In case you want to try I did hear a Swedish? Researcher mention he added salt for some reason. Wonder if the salt kills the bkoodcells faster.

Im curious to hear if you feel 100x is adequate. That is the other tidbit the researcher failed to reveal, the power of the microscope he was using but the picture of it looked like something from the 50's.

sounds like you feel the dark field is more useful than the top light. Like that it has digital camera attachment

And... i forgot to ask if you are planning to try saliva also?

I wish that I could zoom in a little more closely, but it's certainly more than adequate to view blood cells in pretty high definition. I look forward to getting the camera so that presumably I will be able to zoom in even more, even if doing so is sure to lose some definition.

I will probably try various approaches to viewing with stains and maybe solutions...don't know anything about it yet. It's been 24 hours! :-p

And no, actually, I personally can make out much less with the dark field compressor on. It makes the actual cells appear more 3-D, but the plasma and everything in it just kind of fades to gray, whereas with the bright light a lot more detail is visible. I think that may be less true with a stain or something, but again I don't know much yet.

Basically, the dark field looks to me like I am looking at nasa photos of the surface of mars. It doesn't look like dark field images I've seen online where things seem to be highlighted in fluorescent colors. Maybe it's a different kind of dark field or maybe it's a stain?