Todays Oprah Winfrey Show

I was wondering how many of you saw the interview today on Oprah with the woman from Conn. who was brutally attacked by the chimpanzee. After watching her and seeing her wonderful spirit after all she has gone through, I am going to try hard to NEVER complain again... Dowa  

I agree that she has strength and a will to live that I never imagined. She is the essence of the human spirit. I was also struck by Oprah's compassion and love for those suffering.
But it is 2:27 in the morning and I cannot sleep. I am in despair, going through a totally unexpected relapse with new symptoms that don't seem to be responding to treatment and old ones that just won't go away. I can't get over the fact that the chimp was being treated for lyme, and probably had bartonella. It keeps haunting me that the chimp totally lost his mind. There is no way any animal could do such a vicious thing without being completely crazy, which I am sure he was. And bartonella can do that to you. There was a man mentioned in Schaller's book that was a minister. He became a rageful cursing abusive man from bartonella. He was put on psychiatric drugs before treatment which could not control him. Finally he was treated and became 90% better. The Oprah show deeply scared me and I cannot sleep thinking about it.

The fact that the chimp was being treated for lyme was not mentioned on Oprah's show. That was brought out when it first happened and was on national news. I know wild animals should not be kept in captivity and keeping one in a cage for years can also make it crazy but chimps have been part of the circus for years and I have never before heard of anything like this happening. He didn't just hurt her. He was eating her! It gives me nightmares. Recently a young woman was mauled to death by two coyotes in Canada. That has never happened before except by rabid wild coyotes or wolves. There has to be a reason for this change in behavior.
There have been cases when people have viciously murdered someone using the defence (which didn't work) of insanity due to having bartonella. Dr. OZ often warns his audience about the prevalence of resistant strains of bacteria - that a huge percentage of the population is now colonized with MRSA on their skin. But no one is alerting the public to tick born diseases.

That chimp story sounds really disturbing; a Jeffrey Dahmer kind of catastrophically disturbing. Terrible things happen in this world. For years I transcribed murder interrogation tapes, and the things I heard would chill most anybody's soul. My initial response to understanding the nuances of the awful things people were capable of, and how absolutely ordinary the people who were committing these acts looked, and that they often had jobs and families and lived unobtrusively in our communities was to become obsessively overcautious. By projecting disaster into our future, I was limiting my and my children's ability to fully live our lives. I had to learn to transform that caution borne of fear into a caution borne of wisdom. I learned how to keep myself and my family safe. We all exercised reasonable vigilance, we learned how to protect ourselves and how to respond to emergencies. That armed us as well as possible to minimize our risk; the small element of chance (wrong place, wrong time) is one we all live with whether we know it or not. Having done everything we could to keep ourselves safe, and accepting the unchangeable risk, we were then able to live normally. That's the approach I strive to apply with regard to Lyme.

I don't know anything about this chimp story, and I've never heard that bartonella can cause insanity, but having been diagnosed recently with Lyme, babesia, and two strains of bartonella, I am understandably concerned. I've just got to think that the vast majority of people with bartonella are cured, or at least respond to treatment well enough that they don't end up losing their minds. This aligns with other things I've read that many more people than the CDC has confirmed are victims of lyme and co-infections; that it is an epidemic. I haven't seen any articles about a marked upswing in insanity cases that would be a natural consequence of increased infection statistics if bartonella caused insanity with any regularity. I can tell you one thing, and this is just the way I'm choosing to process this - I am not going to expedite mental deterioration by projecting it into my future. Like others on this site, I'm full of bacteria, toxins, and medications (and probably a litany of viruses, parasites, protozoa, etc.) Like others on this site, my hormones and regulatory systems are out of whack. It's understandable that this would cause not only physical symptoms, but mental ones as well. So, I'm doing everything I can to fight this disease, I'm doing everything I can to make my life tolerable while fighting the disease, and I'm accepting the risk, however small, that success is not guaranteed. With all of this in mind, I'm doing my best to live normally and to achieve peace of mind.


Rose