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A 28-year-old woman named Vanessa Boyd has been plagued with medical issues since the time she was 16 years old.
Over a 12-year period of time, she says that she saw at least 30 different medical professionals after experiences continuous, bizarre symptoms such as vertigo, dizziness, seizures, palpitations, numbness, fatigue, insomnia, blurred vision and bleeding from her ear.
However, the treatment wasn’t working, so Boyd decided to take matters in her own hands and do what many of us do when we’re sick: She searched her symptoms on the internet.
That’s when she say that her symptoms matched with that of Lyme disease, an illness spread to humans by infected ticks.
Boyd then requested a private test for the illness and was officially diagnosed in July 2015.
Boyd suffered from a disabling headache early on in her disease, which she says now was probably Lyme meningitis, but at the time doctors sent her home with no treatment or medication.
Then, at the age of 21, five years into her illness, she starting having neurological symptoms including seizures, shortness of breath and palpitations. Then, just a year later, her ear went completely numb for three months and doctors did not know why it was happening.
“In 2015, I was seeing a neurologist, cardiologist, ENT specialist, ophthalmologists and I was deteriorating quickly,” Boyd said. “If they had put it all together, they might have realized what the problem was.”
Of all the doctors she visited, the only conclusion they came up with for her illness was that she had anxiety and depression.
She was given medication for antidepressants and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT).
Because she had gone so long without treatment, two months after her diagnosis, tests reveals that she was in the late stages of the disease and bacteria had spread to every part of her body.
For a month UK doctors tried to manage the illness and symptoms, but her health did not get better.
Doctors told Boyd that there was nothing they could do to help her, but this time she didn’t wait 12 years to question them.
Boyd decided to travel to the United States to see a Lyme disease specialist, paying about 65,000 U.S. dollars for a nine-month treatment.
She traveled to the country by boat because her brain is too inflamed for the pressure of an airplane.
“One of the worse parts of this whole process is that Lyme disease is entirely treatable if caught early,” Boyd said. “I went to my GP with a rash all over my legs and under one arm when I was 16. This was misdiagnosed as impetigo and there followed 12 long years of serious symptoms being misdiagnosed and overlooked.”
Boyd raises funds for her treatment and shares her story to raise awareness. Read more here.
