Fatigue

How are you dealing with the awful fatigue?

I think both. Started antimicrobials and need to slowly increase the number of drops. I had a giant herx a week ago that put me down for about 4 days.....from increasing the antimicrobials too fast.

Detoxing was a big deal for me to push through the fatigue. It sucked royally, no other way to describe it !
Sometimes it was better, other times it was worse.
2 major things that I was advised on, 1. infrared sauna to help push the toxins through the skin. 2. Relaxation therapy, even if its just 5 minutes of writing or setting dedicated time to do nothing but "just be" because our bodies do not handle any bit of stress well at all.
It did help me a lot

I am interested in the topic itself as I have the same issue. I have done some surfing for answers and found that some people have had luck with ATP and CoQ10. Have any of you found any of these to work for you?

I have found mild success with a green powder from Green Vibrance. It is expensive so I don't take it every day or often, which may account for my mild success with it.

There's a free Dr. Rawls webinar tonight about Lyme + fatigue:
https://rawlsmd.com/webinars/lyme-fatigue/?utm_campaign=webinar%20%2358%20Lyme%20%2B%20Fatigue%208.19.20%20-%20last%20chance%20%28YntpMT%29&utm_medium=email&utm_source=master%20rawlsmd%20segment%20-%20%5Blive%20-%202-26-17%5D&_ke=eyJrbF9lbWFpbCI6ICJzYXJhbWVyYW5kK3Jhd2xzQGdtYWlsLmNvbSIsICJrbF9jb21wYW55X2lkIjogImtBdkRyUCJ9

Thank you!!!!

Eluthero

I've never found a quick fix for fatigue, but I try to warn people against stimulants. If your body is fatigued, then it's best to find and address the underlying cause. If you use stimulants to perk yourself up or push yourself, then you can cause much more damage. No one is suggesting that you drink espresso or use 5-Hour Energy drinks or whatever, but I thought I'd mention this anyway.

What kind of fatigue are you dealing with? Are you sleepy all day? Or do you keep normal sleep-wake hours but just feel exhausted if you try to do anything?

Ah, so it's post-exertional malaise (PEM). I have dealt with that, too, often quite severely. It's awful to feel like you will "pay for" anything you do. There have been whole years of my illness that walking for two minutes or going to the store at all would be all I could do in a week! I don't say this to minimize your experience, just to commiserate. It's awful! A truly debilitating feature of this disease.

I think that reducing overall inflammation and neurological stress (like being stuck in fight-or-flight) is crucial to your cells being able to recover and function normally. For me, the limbic system retraining program DNRS was very helpful. Also curcumin, proper restorative sleep, and addressing stress.

You said that you are actively increasing dosages of antimicrobials right now, and PEM might just be part of an ongoing herx for you. Once those inflammation floodgates open, some of us who are sensitive have a very hard time functioning well for a long time. Do you move your bowels completely every day? Is your gut in good shape? Good diet? Any issues with MCAS (folks with MCAS can herx indefinitely...)?

This is obvious, but I tried to stay within my limits as much as possible, i.e. if you know that going to the store two days in a row is too much for you, then try to avoid doing it if you can. I resisted this for a long time because I felt indignant. It can really mess with you psychologically to feel okay and then find out the next day that what you did was too much! Sometimes I could handle more, so I would push myself to see if maybe I was getting a little better and could handle it, which usually went poorly. I learned to test out increased activity on a very minimal level, very gradually. Which of course was maddening because I'm not a patient person!

I'm using the past tense, but PEM isn't entirely gone for me. My overall level of functionality is much better than it has been, but I don't consider pushing myself to be an option most of the time these days, so I avoid PEM that way usually. It's a major sign for me to slow down!