Americanlymie said...
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.
dark field is not quackery, wikipedia is an unreliable source for info. Dark field is used to detect organisms like lyme and other organism. Some cells you see online are colored, because they are stained. Different stains are required for different organisms.