Posted 11/3/2015 10:53 PM (GMT 0)
Came across this site (excerpted some below):
"Help Wanted: Lyme – AIDS 2.0
The Beginning and the End
Remember when you were a kid, and you had your favorite “sick food?” Mine was toast with butter and honey, but the butter had to be completely melted so the honey could fully penetrate the toasty crevices. Do you have someone to make honey toast for you when you get sick now, as a grown-up?
If you got sick, would someone be there to watch TV with you and tell you, “Nah, you don’t stink at all”? If you stayed sick, would someone be there to take you to doctors’ appointments, pick up your meds from the pharmacy, tidy up your house? If you got really sick, would someone be there to make sure you’re eating, offer to take care of your kids and pets?
What if you were so sick you could no longer work or take care of yourself? Would someone be there to provide support—emotional, financial, or otherwise?
It is said that most deaths from Lyme disease occur as a result of suicide. Of course, we have no real statistics, because, if you can’t get diagnosed in the first place, how can your suicide be attributed to Lyme?
Did you know that the CDC now acknowledges that there are about 300,000 new cases of Lyme disease every year in the United States? Did you know this figure is six times higher than HIV/AIDS, yet only about 10% of the Lyme cases are allowed diagnosis and treatment?
The other 90%? They’re written off as crazy or lazy and abandoned by their family and friends—those who should be first in line to show them compassion and love.
Why? I’m at a loss. Trying to make sense of what motivates people to be abandon others in their time of greatest need—when their health has completely failed them—is like trying to understand how 2+2 can equal 5. Yet, this is reality for many with whom I come into contact every day. It’s a reality that has devastating consequences.
No Diagnosis, No Dice
People who can’t get a diagnosis (and I mean ANY diagnosis, LET ALONE Lyme) and who live in excruciating pain and sickness every day, are treated like frauds by most doctors. Where does that leave a person? You can’t get pain meds—they’ve pretty much outlawed them at this point. (They’d love to give you psych meds, though.) Family, friends, employers, complete strangers…nobody seems to understand that yes, it is possible to be impossibly sick, and no, we would not choose to be sick if the option existed.
The truth is that most Lymies are walking around with an AIDS-like disease, pretending with all their heart to be functional, while fully knowing that on the inside, everything is disintegrating into a puddle of useless sludge. They are barely hanging on, working to support a family, pay the mortgage, cover medical bills that are denied by insurance, put on a show of everything’s-rainbows-and-unicorns, all while harboring this AIDS-like disease that is killing them from the top down, from the inside out.
And at some point—maybe when the bills become too much to take, maybe when a sentence can no longer be strung together, maybe when the agony of getting out of bed and facing another stressful day of working while disabled—people crack. Suicide does become the only option. AIDS patients, in the beginning, had the luxury of death. Lyme victims are subjected to an inhumane and never-ending torture of body, mind and spirit.
Those are the ones who are still standing. Countless others are homebound, bed bound, and quite frankly don’t have the strength or means to commit the unthinkable. Still, they find a way..."
Go here to read the rest:
http://badlymeattitude.com/2015/08/26/help-wanted-lyme-aids-2-0/