I take 64 pills a day.
Sixty-four pills: That’s 25 before breakfast, another 20 after breakfast, another 10 before dinner, and another 9 before bed.
I take 64 pills a day, and I feel like it’s slowly killing me. Or if it’s not killing me, directly, then I at least know one thing for sure: It’s really bad for me. Longterm, taking that much medicine on that regular of a regimen is just straight-up bad for you. It’s literally an elaborate trick that you play on yourself — a lie that you tell your body so it keeps thinking everything is fine.
It’s a never-ending, exhausting, miserable cycle.
But I do it anyway.
I do it anyway because I have Lyme disease. (Since I’m not a doctor, I say I have “chronic Lyme.” It’s a shorter way for me to say that this disease is still affecting me after more than a decade — I prefer it to the alternative, which is “Post-Treatment Lyme Disease Syndrome with a current active infection with a different strain of borrelia and bartonella as well as other co-infections.”) Taking 64 pills a day is the only way to keep my condition under any sort of control. It’s the only way to keep myself healthy enough to play the game that I love — healthy enough to do my job and earn the paycheck that supports my family.
Healthy enough to live something approaching a normal life.
I regret not having done more in the past to speak up about Lyme disease. It’s a terrifying thing to live with, yet not many people know much about it — and I take my fair share of responsibility for that. I could have been using my platform to help raise awareness, and to help improve understanding. I could have been helping so much more.
I know that I need to help so much more.
I know that I need to help us get to a place with Lyme disease where what happened to me this past week never happens to anyone else.
Here’s the gist of what happened.
When news of COVID started spreading, I immediately took it seriously. That’s not me bragging; those are just the instincts I’ve developed after almost a decade of living with Lyme disease. I’ve been told time and time again over the years that my condition makes me immunocompromised — that part of what Lyme does is it debilitates my immune system. I’ve had a common cold that sent my immune system spiraling into a serious relapse. I’ve relapsed off of a simple flu shot. There’s just been so many instances where I’ve contracted something that shouldn’t have been that big of a deal, but it blew my immune system out and turned into something scary.
It’s a terrifying thing to live with, yet not many people know much about it — and I take my fair share of responsibility for that.
That’s just something I deal with. And so when I read that immunocompromised people are at a higher risk with COVID, I took every possible precaution….
Read More:An Open Letter About My Health | By Elena Delle Donne
