#which eventually drove him to become severely depressed and suicidal but he can’t die because he’s (formerly) an angel and immortal

[little-red-fool]

D and J are a great duo because D seems like the typical class clown and a suave womaniser but he’s extremely depressed and suicidal whereas J seems very moody and reserved but she’s actually having the time of her life and usually in a good mood.

[suchawonderfullife]

3. Why Hansa?

I believe in divine intervention, karma, the universe giving you what you need at the right time etc. So I’d done over a year on antibiotic (abx) therapy, and seen maybe a 5% improvement (and by that I mean, I went from being unable to sit up for longer than 10 minutes at a time, to maybe on a REALLY good day I could sit up for just 20 minutes and not end up with seriously exacerbated symptoms). Abx is your mainstream treatment for Lyme. But let me make this clear, if you’re past stage one (longer than 6 months), your chances of this method of treatment actually working long-term and eradicating the Lyme are slim to none. No medical journal or LLMD (lyme literate medical doctor) or the CDC or any other organisation will admit this though. For patients who have felt better on this treatment, they often relapse once they stop or their symptoms return. So they haven’t fixed the problem and taking abx long-term is very damaging to the body. 

At the time we didn’t know any better and my Dr. as brilliant as he is, is not a lyme literate doctor, so he was learning too. There was a Dr in my city who was treating Lyme with IV antibiotics and I could have potentially got a PICC line put in. I told my Dr I would go and see him instead. He begged me not to go. He said “you are so so ill and complex, he will not understand this and it will make you worse, please don’t see him.” I’m so glad I listened to his advice. When I did oral abx with my CFS Dr, he was shocked that I couldn’t even cope with minute doses compounded especially for me. If the lowest dose of something like Doxycycline is 200mg, I would have it compounded to 25mg and I would take 1/2-1 tablet (depending in if I could cut it) every 3-4 days. When you start abx for lyme you are looking at 400mg once a day as a MINIMUM and then you steadily increase to 1000+mg per day. You then add in other abx so you’re taking a cocktail. 

You then get what’s called a herxheimer reaction. We call it herxing. This is where the bacteria that are dying, release toxins into the bloodstream at a rate too high for the body to cope and try to flush them out. So we experience exacerbated symptoms, feeling FAR FAR worse (I cannot stress enough how beyond torturous herxing is when you are already so sick). Herxing can also cause death if the die off is too great, so it is dangerous. My herxing was a living hell. Where the lyme is in your body is where you will feel it most. I have so much Lyme in my brain that I was more often than not severely depressed and suicidal, I had no control over my thoughts and my reality was often distorted. I had severe Lyme rage (it’s a real thing) and if I was a physically violent person, there would have been many holes in the walls, smashed furniture, broken mirrors, smashed phones and I probably would have hurt myself in the process. Rage at that level is all consuming and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. The soles of my feet burned so bad I couldn’t walk on them, my bones felt like they were constantly being drilled into or sawn off, I developed tremors like I had parkinson’s, vocal ticks where I would make random uncontrollable noises, I constantly felt like I was suffocating and unable to breathe, my nausea never went away, pounding headaches for days, night terrors so real I was terrified to try and fall asleep, but insomnia helped with that, night sweats where I would wake up soaked in sweat and freezing cold, my body feeling so hot like I’m living in an oven, whilst my feet are purple and stone cold and so much more. Remember I put up with this for over a year so far (2 years total). But I pushed through it, because I’ll do anything to get better. 

However it wasn’t working. At the rate I was able to cope with increasing my dose (because my herxing was so severe), it was going to take me 10 years to reach even a “normal” dose of abx and I wasn’t getting better. That’s when fate stepped in. My mum’s work colleague’s husband, worked with a man who treated himself for Lyme Disease and was now an Osteopath. Someone who CURED themselves of Lyme, holy shit!!!! I had to talk to this guy. He ended up calling me one night free of charge to give me advice. I remember being so ill I wasn’t well enough to hold the phone, comprehend what he was saying and physically speak, but I had to push myself because I wouldn’t get this opportunity again. He gave me the most incredible advice that made so much sense, I don’t remember all of it, but it was like a lightbulb moment and he had given me hope. His approach was different to anything I’d come across (because I’d done everything mainstream from the medical world). 

He’s an osteo, a holistic doctor, so their approach to healing the body is not to just pop man-made pills to “fix” the problem. It’s about healing the body so that the body can fight for itself. It’s not about the diagnosis either, it’s about working out what went wrong in the first place to allow the disease to thrive and working to fix that. The disease is the symptom, not the cause. The advice I remember over the phone was: to never use a microwave ever again. A microwave changes the molecules in food so your body no longer recognises it as food. I now heat everything up on the stove. To turn my WIFI off at night. EMF’s (electromagnetic fields) feed Lyme bacteria, it aggravates them and Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt (a highly regarded Lyme Dr in Germany) has studies to prove this. I sleep far better with the WIFI turned off and mine and my partner’s phone MUST be on airplane mode before we sleep, or they’re not allowed to stay in the room. If your mobile is in your room when you sleep and not switched off or on airplane mode, it must be at least 5metres from your bed. I don’t have an alarm clock next to my bed anymore as that’s more unnecessary EMF’s. My parents even sleep better with the WIFI off, if they accidentally leave it one, they have a terrible night’s sleep and they’re not even sick. I also have orgonites, salt lamps and selenite towers around my house to help absorb EMF’s. He also said I must drink bone broth every day to repair my gut. 90% of your immune system lies in your gut. I already knew I had IBS, leaky gut syndrome, gut dysbiosis, multiple food intolerances and more, so repairing that damage made sense. 

I started seeing him for a treatment called bioresonance. I’m not good at explaining this treatment. But basically everything has a frequency and say a healthy human has a frequency of 103. When your body is in dis-ease, it will have a frequency far lower. Bioresonance resets your frequency to what it should be. As the Lyme has written itself in my DNA, it’s in all my cells and has programmed itself into my bodies way of functioning, it would be in my bodies frequency. I know this sounds like airy-fairy crap but honestly if you disagree I couldn’t care less. It’s the ONLY treatment that I dramatically improved with and I have at least a dozen friends who have had the same experience.

You lie on a bed and get hooked up to this machine and you just lie there for 45-60 minutes. My new Dr commented on how sick I was. He would massage my organs whilst I was hooked up to the machine and he would say my stomach was like cement. My organs were struggling to badly, the massaging would leave me in tears from the pain. Bioresonance would also make me incredibly ill afterwards. It’s what I imagined chemo to be like. I would go home so toxic, nauseaous, my head pounding and beyond exhausted. But these were a different kind of symptoms to what I had experienced with Lyme, I can’t even describe it properly, I just felt so so ill. I would go to bed and sleep for 3 hours, wake up still feeling like death, eat very simple foods, take zofran wafers and panadeine forte and just be a vegetable on the couch. It would take me days to over a week to recover from this treatment. But every time my body finally recovered, I was actually better than before. It was working. After my 3rd session I drove for the first time in 2 years. I didn’t have the cognitive ability, energy or strength to do this previously. I drove 5 minutes down the road and WALKED around our local shopping centre on my own for an entire hour. I wasn’t even able to walk from the car to the door previously, if I ever went down the shops it was in a wheelchair and even sitting up for that long was incredibly difficult. 2 months into this treatment and I was able to drive myself 20 minutes to a friends house, spend time with them for a few hours and drive home. My health continued to improve with every session and eventually the treatment didn’t make me that sick anymore. 

He also weaned me off my abx as they were proving of no benefit to my body. I found out about essential oils. Did my own research and started using them. Shortly after signing up to a company, my Dr. told me he had heard good things about oils too and joined the same company. I can’t say much about essential oils as legally they have this red tape where they cannot promote any sort of healing. This is why mainstream medicine LOOKS like the best option, because holistic and natural options are not allowed to promote any kind of healing or benefits they provide. I will say they are phenomenal and I couldn’t recommend them enough, they are the second biggest contributor to helping me on this journey. 

I changed my diet to eating organic, drinking bone broth and having fresh cold-pressed juice daily. Cutting out all my food intolerance foods and eliminating refined sugar also helped significantly. My Dr. also makes his own fermented probiotic which I would have a shot of every morning. It tastes disgusting. Doing all of this to help repair my gut made a huge difference. When I eat something I shouldn’t I feel far worse and when I eat sugar it affects my brain and I become very moody and angry. Caffeine makes my adrenals crash so I drink decaf as a treat sometimes. If you can’t afford an entirely organic diet, you get organic meat before fruit and veg. Saving for my treatment I haven’t been able to afford organic food for over 9 months now and I’m really looking forward to being able to buy it again. 

My Dr. informed me of how stress is toxic to my body. Stress emits chemicals in the body that weakens us, and for a chronically ill person, we simply cannot handle this change in bad chemistry. So I’ve learnt to cut people out of my life, set firmer boundaries and avoid drama as much as possible, because it is simply not worth my health. It’s no one’s responsibility but yours to understand this either. I have broken up with partners, ended friendships and even cut off extended family members because of their behaviour, treatment of me or choices. They need no explanation from me either, because more often than not they won’t “get it” and it’s very hard to change people. Moreover, as I’m an empath, I absorb other people’s emotions and stress. I’m a great target for people dumping their problems on me. Don’t get me wrong, I care about people and want to help, but I had a few relationships that were one-sided, where the person would vent or dump their problems on me, talk about themselves and that’s where the conversation would cease. To me that’s not OK. I was honest with these people and either asked for space or set new boundaries for our relationship. Many chronically ill people are empathic, so knowing this is important. 

1 year of bioresonance and I was heading towards 70% health. Life was looking great. But I had a few stressors in my life, a few relapses in health and I seemed to settle around 50% health. Some days I might only be at 20% and other days I might be lucky to hit 70%. So at this point you would call me a “high functioning Lymie.” I’m still quite sick, but I no longer look sick. I can’t work or study, but I can complete basic tasks for myself most days. I can maybe leave my house once or twice a week for a social catch-up or to run some errands, but I will feel worse the next day and have to spend it lying on the couch. Majority of my energy goes towards simply caring for myself, showering, preparing food, cooking, house work, grocery shopping, sorting out medications, completing errands and then on a good day I might have a little energy spare to go out for a few hours, play the piano for 30 minutes, walk my dogs for 15 minutes or chat to a friend on the phone. 

Some days I can’t even get dressed, have a shower or speak (which sucks because I LOVE to talk). My health is incredibly unreliable and inconsistent. This is what frustrates me. I just can’t get above 50% health. I’ve had seriously scary relapses in the last few years too, where I’ve spent weeks bedridden, unable to care for myself and thinking “is this it? Is this where I go downhill and don’t get better?” I’m terrified of that. I can’t travel, contribute to society in all the ways I so deeply desire, have children, exercise or do anything relatively “normal” without it causing significant payback. I have to calculate how much energy every activity would cost me and I often have to for-go important gatherings or events because I’m not well enough. If I have 2 friends’ celebrating their birthdays on the same weekend, one on a Friday night and one on a Saturday night, I have to pick one. I couldn’t do both. And even then, I don’t know until the last minute if I can actually attend. Often I pick my event and then can’t even go to that. If friend’s and family want to make plans ahead of time, this makes me incredibly anxious, because I worry my health won’t be good enough and I’ll have to cancel last minute. This creates a lot of stress and guilt. I’m very grateful for the people in my life that tell me it’s OK if I cancel last minute, but I still feel guilty and disappointed to miss out on spending time with them. It’s not a CHOICE for us to isolate ourselves and be stuck in our beds or couches alone, feeling like crap. 

Even the other night I wanted to go out for dinner with my parter, but I woke up so sick and had a terrible day. I rested, ate healthy food and put oils on that usually help my symptoms of fatigue and nausea. But I felt no better. I was stressed and trying to “find” the energy to go out. I changed my clothes, decided against trying to put makeup on and just tied my hair up. Walked into the lounge room and just felt 10x worse from those activities. It was a battle in my mind for 10 minutes on deciding whether to push through or admit to my partner I wasn’t well enough. He’s very flexible and supportive so he was fine to stay home, but I felt so disappointed and annoyed at my body for not being able to cope. All I needed it to be ok with was driving 20 minutes down the road, sitting in a restaurant for 90 minutes and driving home. I just wanted a nice meal with my partner, holding hands, looking at each other, talking, and I couldn’t do that. This kind of disappointment is something I deal with often. 

So 1 year ago I decided that this inconsistency was just doing my head in. I’m fed up. I want a life. I remember at 5% health I begged the universe (or god, whatever your beliefs are) to get me to just 50% health, so that I could function a little and have some sort of a “life” and I would be so grateful. I got there. But this is not living, I still feel like I’m merely existing, with a little bit of joy or distraction from time to time. That’s when I started to look into more “extreme” treatment options. Australia and what is has to offer is not working for me. I will never get better if I keep trialling the limiting options is has to offer for a disease it deems does not exist and it therefore cannot comprehend the complexities of.