What if it’s all Parasites – Post 2

If you are just starting here, my Senior in High School daughter ended up with declining health – to the point she couldn’t walk.  Her Blood Pressure is frequently in the 70’s/40’s and about twice a month she is bedridden for at least 2 days. She developed clinical anorexia, anxiety and SERIOUS depression almost to the point of being suicidal in the space of about 5 months, she would start crying uncontrollably for no reason. Headaches are awful! Her lab tests were are all normal and so the doctor’s told me she was fine.  “There is NOTHING wrong with her”, they said.  AND since she was 17, all the local Infectious Disease doctors refused to even see her!  The Pediatric doctors said she is 17 and will be 18 in 8 months, the Adult doctors said she isn’t 18 yet.

By January, she can’t go to school 3 days in a row.  If it isn’t the physical, it is the emotional.  We are doing ok, not great on Celexa and the puppy is helping.  I have Lyme. At the beginning of February, I take her to my Lyme dr.  I want her tested! So we start with his method for test prep-10 days of Doxycycline to give the body some relief to be able to generate enough antibodies to test positive on a test that only works by measuring antibodies.

And the results come back-Borellia Burgdorphia is negative, but there are 6 different strains of Borellia that are specifically endemic to California and a whole host of others that this test didn’t cover, but are still Lyme.  Babesia, Erlichia, Anaplasma and Ricketsia are all positive.  She has Lyme and the positive babesia test is pretty much a reverse golden ticket. That one hardly ever is positive! She has EVERY mild symptom and at least half of the moderate symptoms of Babesios that is listed on the NIH website and a positive lab test. Oh and BTW, is Babesia Microti.  We live in California and it looks like that is where she got bitten, but according to her PCP that is impossible because Microti is on the east coast and not past Michigan.  The test MUST be wrong! 

Unfortunately, to go on the antibiotics, she has to go off the Celexa which is another 2 weeks of not leaving her alone and completely out of school.  We will try to ride it out until the end of her senior year.  The ER doctor says that it is impossible to have Erlichia, Anaplasma, Ricketsia and Babesia at the same time, even though we now have the lab report.  “The lab is a fraud!”, according to her.

 We didn’t make it.  By April, she can barely walk and the Celexa isn’t working at all anymore.  So she goes out of school, takes a nose dive off the Celexa and start Mepron and Biaxin.

The stuff is physically tough on her, BUT 48 hours after she starts taking it she smiles.  We haven’t seen a smile in months!  36 hours after she starts on the medication she comes down and asks for a bit more food after dinner.  We’ve been dealing with Anorexia for months.  On the 5th day, she calls a friend and on the 7th day, she goes back and joins her gaming friends and we can hear her laughing and joking with them.  We basically have our daughter back on day 9. 

We finish out the course of Mepron, but my doctor is worried because how bad her symptoms were.  He wants to send her to a different Lyme doctor that has a huge reputation.  We go, but looking back on it, it is a mistake.  This doctor wants to treat things in order, he doesn’t care that she has had moderate/severe Babesiosis-he will get to that in 9 months to a year.  Instead we start with the Erlichia, Anaplasma and Ricketsia.  But we really think the Babesiosis is the issue!  Nope, can’t treat that for at least 9 months, even though it is potentially fatal.

We lasted 6 months before everything came crashing down again.  I brought her back to my original doctor. We restarted another course of Mepron 7 days ago and it is eerie to see that once again the time line is exact.  48 hours, a smile, day 5 more food, day 7 reach out to friends….

According to the US NIH website the disease is RARE!  Clinical manifestations (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3998201/) that:

“Most cases of babesiosis consist of a mild to moderate illness characterized by the gradual onset of malaise and fatigue followed by intermittent fever and one or more of the following: chills, sweats, headache, arthralgia, myalgia, anorexia, and cough (Table 1).[214749] Less commonly noted are sore throat, abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, weight loss, conjunctival injection, photophobia, pallor, emotional lability (this is crying or laughing without reason), depression, and hyperesthesia.[5051] The findings on physical examination generally are minimal, often consisting only of fever.[2148] Mild splenomegaly, hepatomegaly, or both are noted occasionally.[4852] Slight pharyngeal erythema, jaundice, and retinopathy with splinter hemorrhages and retinal infarcts also have been reported.[5354] Rash seldom is noted, although ecchymoses and petechiae have been described in severe cases.”

But WHAT IF!  WHAT IF Babesiosis isn’t rare?  What if doctors just don’t know to look for it?  What if the test for it (which measures antibodies and NOT the organism BTW), is such a crappy test that if you are to the point of suffering from it, you don’t generate enough antibodies to get a positive result on the test because your system is exhausted? What if all of those anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medications are just to counteract chemicals that the parasites give off?

Anorexia which was exploding when I was young, was supposed to be caused by poor body image. We’ve basically thrown any type of food control for children out the window for fear of causing anorexia and now have a whole generation of obese children. Yet the incidence of anorexia is still increasing.  AND you can’t look on Social Media anymore without seeing something about the exploding incidence of Depression and Suicide. 

And according to the NIH website, ALL of that can be caused by Babesia (and a few other parasites like Bartonella which is also tick-born.)  And periodic?  Check!  Babesia is like a tick born malaria.  And the other parasites?  If they are in conjunction with Lyme, they also hide inside a biofilm.

Let’s see? Could Babesia or a similar organism live in biofilm inside the body, burst out of red blood cells and cause anemia, then secrete chemicals when they die off that cause depression and then all of the dead organisms clog capillaries in the brain to create migraines that follow on the heels of depression?  Uh, yes, yes it could!

And so I have reached the end.  What if it’s ALL Parasites?  What if the explosion in mental health issues, from anxiety to depression to anorexia or worse is all undiagnosed parasitic infection?

If you want to read what happened before this here it is!

What if it’s ALL Parasites?

I am reading a book by Joe Abercrombie and one of the first lines in the book is that it is always better to start at the end.  So I’m doing it!  What if it’s all parasites?

And now back up to give you a bit of context or you can cut to the chase and go directly to the point-Take me to post 2! My daughter Amy was a happy kid.  Loved to be around people, made friends easily and she was always on her phone talking or texting to at least one of them.  And then right before her senior year of high school, things started to change.  She didn’t have any friends, (she still had lots), she hated school (was getting straight A’s), she wouldn’t eat, she wouldn’t get into college (see the straight A’s.). And then she started crying at school all the time.  She was under no pressure from us to do anything.  As long as she did her best she was good with us, but still there were tears and tons of self inflicted pressure.  I talked to counselors, we sent her to a reputable therapist and things got worse.

She started falling into full clinical depression, she stopped talking to people, stopped her nightly gaming for a bit to unwind with friends.  She thought that maybe donating blood for Zika research would make her feel better about herself, she would be doing something good for society.  She would start doing service work, that would help.  But the end of that week, she was in the ER for a blood pressure of 80/44.  Her labs were normal except that she was anemic.  They advised me to have her rest and maybe get some drugs for the depression.  She went back to school on Monday, but that was the start.  Within a week the depression had gotten really bad, so we thought maybe fostering animals.  But the next day she collapsed; was unable to walk.  Back to the ER with a bp of 72/40 this time.  Again normal labs with the exception of still being anemic.  This was in November.

Turns out I’m allergic to cats, so we got a dog at Thanksgiving as an emotional support animal.  that helped a bit, but not enough.  The mental/emotional was getting worse and worse.  In December we started on Celexa for depression.  So because she is so bad, the risk of suicide is high in the first two weeks of Celexa.  We take off work, take her out of school, and can’t leave her alone for a minute those two weeks.  She had gotten to the point where things were just short of suicidal.  And her health had continued to decline, but besides being anemic (which a lot of girls are) her labs were all normal.  At this point, I’m trying to get her to a specialist.

And this story is continued in Part 2