Hello. Good question. I'm living this as we speak. I believe I contracted Lyme in childhood, but my body suppressed it until I sustained two severe TBIs about
20 years ago. Both were undiagnosed and went untreated for over a decade. Over the last six years, my head injury has healed anywhere from 60-80% and I just started Lyme treatment about
a year and a half ago. TBI, toxic mold and Lyme disease are a ven diagram kinda situation as all have similar symptoms with huge amounts of overlap. Each condition amplifies the other. I'm only now able to distinguish one from the other, but there's still a lot of gray areas. All these conditions cause a lot of brain inflammation, which amplifies all symptoms. To understand how to tell these conditions apart, I base it on my injury and healing timeline and what I know to be true to each condition.
TBI wise, I had damage to the temporal lobe, brain stem, and possibly the pituitary gland. As I've moved through the healing process, I've learned to identify my brain damage by the parts of me that I've regained. Facial blindness, inability to process spatial information (ambiance and awe loss), impaired long-term and factual memories, hearing loss on the side that my concussions were, vocabulary loss, difficulty learning and retaining information especially if heard verbally, emotional dysregulation and improper panic response were all parts of my temporal lobe damage that I felt heal. Loss of feeling throughout my body, vagus nerve issues, pain, balance issues, eating, swallowing, drinking, coughing, gagging, breathing, respiratory and heart rate problems were part of my brain stem damage. Pituitary wise, I have a lot of hormone issues, but I feel this might be a gray area. As I've progressed through treatment, I've needed lower dosages of hormones less frequently, but I feel like Lyme might be causing some of these issues. There are also my general TBI symptoms like insomnia, tunnel vision, executive dysfunction, impulsivity and many I forget as I'm foggy from Lyme treatment lol.
I believe I have neuro Lyme and a couple of co-infections, but I won't know for sure until I get in with my LLMD. Lyme causes a lot of inflammation throughout my brain and spinal cord, which causes a lot of severe pain for me because I have substantial damage to my spine. GI issues, emotional volatility, nervous system overload that amps up emotional dysregulation, tremors, severe bone pain, gross feeling skin, and histamine intolerance are Lyme related. I hate the term "brain fog" because it's such a vague, umbrella term, but Lyme causes its own kind of fog that differs from TBI fog in ways that I haven't quite learned to explain yet. The best I can do is to say that Lyme causes a true cloud like fog while TBI lacks pathways. So far, Lyme disease has presented as an illness instead of an injury, if that makes sense. However, it absolutely exacerbates TBI symptoms. Lyme and TBI are like a couple of old friends who only bring out the worst in each other. I'm still healing from Lyme, so I'm sure I'll have more to say in another year or right after I hit "submit" on this response lol. Having both is a kind of hell that few understand, especially when they are so severe that you can't explain what's wrong to your providers like mine. The differences between the two can be incredibly subtle and I know I'm not explaining everything fully as I'm still learning and quite sick. Sometimes, I know which is which by what drug or supplement alleviates symptoms. I can tell you without hesitation that while I was still severely brain-damaged, there was no chance I would be able to tell them apart. That's the insidious part of a head injury: the part of you that would tell you something is wrong is the part of you that's broken.
Post Edited (VioletTheViolent) : 5/5/2024 10:17:53 AM (GMT-8)