Love, Hope, Lyme: What Family Members, Partners, and Friends Who Love a Chronic Lyme Survivor Need to Know: What Family Members, Partners, and Friends Who Love a Chronic Lyme Disease Survivor Need to Know: What Family Members, Partners, and Friends Who Love a Chronic Lyme Survivor Need to Know

By Fred Diamond

If you love someone with Chronic Lyme or any chronic disease, buy this book now!

If you have Lyme disease and want your family, partner, and friends to understand this mysterious disease, make them buy this book!

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Fred Diamond
• Release date: Dec 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9798986207728

Book preview

Introduction

By Dr. Richard Horowitz

When I was first asked to write the introduction for Fred Diamond’s new book Love, Hope, Lyme, I thought it was going to be another self-healing book on the topic. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the tone and message of the book was an essential topic, considering the depth and breadth of the Lyme epidemic, with a message that was not adequately covered by other books on the subject.

Many of us live with loved ones who are chronic disease survivors. That has also been the story of my life. Before I met my beloved wife, Lee, who suffered with Lyme-Multiple Systemic Infectious Disease Syndrome (MSIDS), one of my prior relationships was destroyed by Lyme disease. No matter how well-intentioned I was, even as a Lyme-literate provider, I could not find a healing path in that relationship. The challenges of loving someone and caring for them on a regular basis, putting someone else’s needs above your own, can easily destroy a relationship if you and/or your partner have not been adequately trained in the art of loving and caring for yourself and others, and/or if the foundation of that relationship is not rock solid.

This book provides a guidepost for those living with loved ones with a chronic illness and explains how we can approach our loved ones with sensitivity, care, compassion, and understanding. This also happens to be a common-sense and wise approach as to how we can best live our own lives too. Love is wanting others to be happy, and compassion is wanting other people to be free from suffering. We all want that for ourselves and for those we deeply care about. The stories of suffering and healing in this book are stories we all experience, will experience, or have experienced during our lifetime. Learning how to be sensitive to our own and others’ needs are essential tools we must have in our relationship toolbox if we expect to have happy and fulfilling lives.

I am fortunate to have now married a woman with a big heart and joyful disposition, even when she was ill. Not everyone has that gift handed to them. I’ve learned a lot from my wife, Lee. I had to learn to never give up in the name of love, and to keep pressing onward, making sure I was always doing my best. Love would have me do no less. My wife is now well after diagnosing and treating all of the abnormalities on the sixteen-point MSIDS map, described in my last book, How Can I Get Better? An Action Plan for Treating Resistant Lyme and Chronic Disease. It was not an easy journey, yet it was a worthwhile one. Our relationship is stronger because of it.

These sixteen MSIDS variables, which I have found to be present in the majority of the 13,000 chronic Lyme disease patients I have treated over the past thirty-plus years, are from my perspective the medical solutions most people are looking for. Especially effective are the newer treatments with persister drugs, like dapsone combination therapy, which I have published information about in the medical literature during the past several years. I now have many patients going into long-term remission with only a few months of oral antibiotics. Yet, even with the best of treatments for properly addressing Lyme, Babesia, Bartonella, adrenal dysfunction, Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS), food allergies and sensitivities, mast cell activation, mold and heavy metals, sleep disorders, hormonal and mitochondrial dysfunction, and other abnormalities on the MSIDS map, one of the most difficult variables to transform is the psychological aspect of the illness, and how it affects afflicted individuals and those around them.

Healing in its greatest form must include healing of the body, mind, emotions, and spirit. Fred’s book puts front and center the big issues most Lyme patients will have to deal with, but more importantly, it discusses the ephemeral and transcendental virtue of love, and how that ultimately can bring some of the greatest healing. With love comes hope, and when love and hope are mixed with the right medical knowledge, healing can and does happen.

Whether you are living with a loved one compromised by a chronic illness, or whether you yourself suffer with Lyme and associated infections, the messages of this book will always stand the test of time. Because love is eternal and brings forth hope and healing. I wish you blessings on your healing journey. Let the messages in this book be an inspiration for you and your loved one to go forth and live your lives with love, hope, compassion, and a sense of purpose.

The difficult lessons that we learn in this life are often our greatest teachers, pushing us forward evolutionarily even when we go kicking and screaming. Let this book be a rudder for your ship during difficult times. If you persist and never give up in the name of love, hope will find a strong foundation, and your life, and the life of your loved one, will be all the more enriched because of it.

—Dr. Richard Horowitz, May 8, Mother’s Day, 2022

Prologue

The Dalai Lama once said, I love everything in the world . . . except for ticks.

This book was written as if your loved one is a woman. It is not my intent, however, to be gender-specific nor exclusive. As the Lyme disease epidemic grows, everyone and anyone can be inflicted with Lyme disease and other tick-borne illnesses.

Relationships evolve, morph, and shift. The status of a relationship, whether active or in the past, such as this one, isn’t important in the context of this book. Understanding the epidemic that is Lyme disease, and how to support someone you love who has it, is what matters.

ChAPTER ONE

My Journey to Understand Lyme Disease Begins

In the summer of 2021, I decided to learn more about my partner’s chronic Lyme disease.

I wondered if I really knew how it affected her.

That summer, I began a journey to understand what chronic Lyme survivors went through on a day-by-day basis.

When did their symptoms start?

How did their symptoms show up every day?

Are they the same symptoms every day or different?

What did the disease do to their bodies and minds?

What caused the disease to do what it did?

Was it curable?

I realized that my understanding of the disease was quite basic, so I took it upon myself to learn as much as possible to be more helpful. Along the way, I learned a lot about the community of Lyme survivors and how difficult it could be to get support from family, friends, and even the medical