Bad weather, full moons, and pressure. Oh my!

(Warning: my brain is struggling right now. Words are tough. No promises for this post. Read at your own risk.)

For the most part, my Lyme cycles every four weeks. That's the norm. Every four weeks, Lyme can either change state or go into remission. So, what that means is that every four weeks, the Lyme gets bored and switches things up. It can either move itself into a cystic form (making it harder to treat it because the bacteria is enclosed in a bio-film that is really hard to penetrate with medicine) or it can just move to a different part of my body--into muscles, organs, wherever it wants to go. Or, it can go into remission. That, of course, is the ultimate goal. So far, though, that hasn't happened.

But that's not really what I was even meaning to write about here. I started writing this to talk about all of the things that affect my Lyme. 

So, we've established that the normal 4-week cycle changes things up. But, I also  am extremely affected by weather changes, full moons, and pressure changes. (Oh my!)

 

Right now, it is storming. My head hurts more than normal. It's hard to kick my brain into gear. My chest hurts. My fingers are swollen and look like ten little sausages sticking off of my hands. All because it's storming. 

Any pressure changes do the same thing. So, a few days before it's going to storm, I know it. I don't get new symptoms, but the ones I do have definitely intensify. When I go away somewhere with an altitude change, I feel it. Anywhere that your ears would pop, I feel it throughout my body. When I had my port, I thought it was just my port that was making me hurt with pressure changes, but it still happens even without the port. 

But, the full moon is by far the worst. For the week or so before a full moon, I feel like I'm repeatedly getting run over by a truck. An eighteen wheeler. 

So basically, the point of all of this is to explain a little more of how the Lyme bacteria works. I've talked a lot over the past month about how all of this makes me feel, and things that I have learned from it--a lot of the emotional aspect. But I haven't talked much about how Lyme actually works, biology wise. (Who ever would have thought that I, Leigh Burbank, would actually choose to write about anything biology related?!) 

And now that I've sat here and written literally ten different possible ways to end this post, and then deleted them, I'm just going to say goodbye. 

Thank you for making it through this post with me. I know it was a struggle. Whew.