Women’s stories

“Don’t cheap out on your health. This is your life!”

Althea was diagnosed with Lyme disease before the birth of her daughter, and thought she had been treated successfully with antibiotics. She enjoyed an uncomplicated pregnancy and normal delivery, and everything seemed fine until about half a year postpartum, when her knees suddenly collapsed beneath her one day, and the symptoms of Lyme disease flared with a vengeance. Following course after course of oral antibiotics, her doctors said there was nothing more they could do but offer her IV antibiotics and chronic painkillers. As the stay-at-home mom of a healthy active toddler, that was not an option. Luckily, another mom with a similar problem pointed her in our direction….

“I was diagnosed with Lyme disease 5½ — 6 years ago, before I had my daughter. After being treated initially with antibiotics, everything seemed fine. My pregnancy went fine, and my daughter had a normal birth. One day about five months afterward, it seemed like a lot of the Lyme disease symptoms suddenly came back, and I pretty much collapsed when my knees gave out from under me. The symptoms persisted, and I took course after course of antibiotics. Each time I was on them I would begin to feel better, but then I’d get worse as soon as I would try to go off them. I kept going back for help, and it got to the point where the doctor was offering me IV antibiotics and painkillers full-time, and said, ‘This is all we can do for you.’

“I was going on the internet, reading a lot, looking for an alternative way to feel better. As any mom with a young child knows, you can’t be on painkillers all day! I’m in a local mom’s club, and someone there had similar problems and was diagnosed with Lyme disease, too. She had stumbled across the Women to Women website and said I should check it out. So I did, and instead of reading just the one article she’d told me to read, I read almost the entire website! Your articles made me realize that most of the symptoms I was experiencing were the same as symptoms of perimenopause, except worse — I had gotten to the point where some days, I couldn’t walk. I had swelling in my knee joints and hip joints, and lost ability in both hands, they were so swollen.

“That’s when the light went on, and I thought, What if it’s not just the Lyme disease... What if maybe the Lyme sparked some kind of hormonal imbalance in my body? I noticed it came back right after I had my daughter, and everyone knows hormones are all over the place after having a baby. I thought Wow, wait a minute, maybe we’re approaching this from the wrong direction.

“My doctors couldn’t do anything but treat me with antibiotics and painkillers by then, so I figured, I don’t have anything to lose by trying. I ordered the Personal Program, and within a couple weeks I started to notice my symptoms were less severe. After one month my symptoms were nearly gone — they’d become more of an annoyance instead of keeping me from being able to walk. By the time I’d finished the three months, I was fine. Every once in a while I’d feel a twinge in my hips, or feel a little bad — the thumb joint in my hands was where it was always the worst. The joint pain might act up a little bit now and again, but not to extent it was before.

“At the time I started the Personal Program, I was pretty deep-down depressed. I was going to doctor after doctor, and nobody could help me. I kept thinking, What am I going to do? Then I found this program, and to me it’s a miracle. Today I can walk and run and play with my four-year-old daughter. I don’t have to tell her, ‘Mommy can’t run today,’ thinking Mommy can barely walk today. When they’re that young, they don’t understand that well. I don’t have to see that disappointment in her face anymore. That alone is amazing.

“If you give me a bullhorn, I’ll go out and shout it out to people. This is what is so important for everyone to know: ‘You might have a chronic condition, but that might not be the whole source of what is making your symptoms so bad.’ Now I’m no doctor, but in my experience, when I realized that a lot of my symptoms were exactly the same — Lyme and hormonal imbalance — I was floored. I was just floored. I couldn’t have imagined that would be the case. I thought, My gosh, what if we’re trying to treat it with the wrong approach? What if by treating the hormonal imbalance, we can help the fatigue and joint pain? And that’s what seems to have happened in my case.

“Like I said, I was really depressed, because I thought nothing was going to help me. I kept wondering, How am I going to keep on living this way? Will I be able to walk tomorrow? Will I be able to write or not? And I’ll tell you, it’s hard to make an old-lady limp look cool when you’re 36. I thought I was going to get stuck with that for the rest of my life, and now I’m not, now that I’m on the Program.

“I also want to say that it’s important for people to keep up with it. Since I’m a stay-at-home mom, I’m always looking for ways to save money. And women are programmed to think of everyone else first. I had kept up with the Program for about four months, when I thought, Oh, I’m so much better now; maybe now I can go off them now and take a regular multivitamin. MISTAKE! After being off of them for about three weeks or a month, it had the opposite effect: I started noticing symptoms come back! So I called in and said, ‘I made mistake — that was foolish of me — can I get back on the Program?! I’m prepared to pinch pennies if need be to make sure I stay on them!’

“Now I know that if I’m going to cheap out on something, it shouldn’t be my health. As an adult I should have known better. But as a woman and mother, you think of everyone and everything else. But not only do you need to take your first three months of the supplements, you need to stay on the supplements! If I could offer women any advice, it would be: ‘Don’t cheap out on your health. This is your life!’

“You people at Women to Women made my story possible. I wish I could do something to thank you all, because it changed my whole life. I think it’s important to get the word out. There might be somebody else out there that doesn’t get lucky enough to have a friend stumble across your website and tell her to go there now. Maybe I can be that friend for somebody. ‘Hey, why don’t you check this out, and get your life back on track?’

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The Personal Program promotes healthy hormonal balance with nutritional supplements, gentle endocrine support, dietary guidance, and optional phone consultations with our Nurse–Educators. It is a convenient, at-home version of what we suggest to our patients at the clinic.

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Last Modified: 07/18/2008