Test Results

Its been past time for me to post, but everything has been pretty status quo lately.  Nothing terribly exciting or notable happening.  I guess that's a good thing.  I've kind of thought of it as the calm before the storm.  I'll do a little more describing of a typical day in a different post.

Today I got a phone call from my LLMD.  Not just from her office, from *her*.  I thought that was pretty cool!  And she didn't just give me the test results and go, she asked how I was feeling and if I had anything that I needed to talk about etc.  It was really nice to not be rushed off the phone.

I had a urine test for Borrelia, and it came back negative.  They were not able to find any evidence that the lyme buggers were in my bladder and urine from the samples I gave them.  I don't know what exactly this means for my treatment and case.  Of course, I didn't think to ask while I was on the phone with the doctor. I'll be seeing her in a week, so I'm sure we'll go over all the possibilities of what it could mean for me. 

This brings up all kinds of doubts for me.  Is it really lyme?  Am I doing the right thing?  Long term, high dose antibiotics is not something to enter lightly.  There are a lot of negative consequences that can happen.  Yeast infections, creating drug resistant strains of bacteria, and side effects from the drugs themselves are just a few.

But, I keep reminding myself of the huge laundry list of symptoms I have, hardly any of which that can be explained by positive lab tests and diagnoses of other diseases.  Asthma is the only thing I actually tested positive for.  Fibromyalgia is another diagnosis of exclusion.  Meaning, I'm not positive for anything else, so that must be it.  Except, my symptoms and disease timeline don't really match up with fibro.  It DOES however really seem to fit with lyme, which is another diagnosis of exclusion.  It is also a clinical diagnosis, which means that clinical symptoms carry more weight in diagnosis than test results.  I guess I need to remember that according to test results, I'm healthy!  Yet, clearly I am not.  So my case is probably one where it doesn't really matter.

Another thing that suggests I put more faith in the lyme diagnosis is that when I took the antibiotics, I had a reaction right away.  Not just side effects from the drugs, but signs that my body was dealing with dead critters of some sort.  I can't imagine painful lymph nodes could be psychosomatic, nor a fever and chills! 

But, I'll leave most of this up to the doctor.  Its her expertise.

I also had a full panel of co-infections tested for.  They all came back negative too.  But, this doesn't really surprise me because they only test for a few strains, and there are dozens of different strains.  If I have any, they're just different than the ones that were tested for.  The doctor mentioned quinine when she talked to Jared about it (I was gone when she called that time), so I imagine she's still planning on treating for them. 

All of this uncertainty is really frustrating.  Maybe things will be more clear in a week.