Looking for answers, Lyme disease or ME/CFS?

Posted , 19 users are following.

 I am a 31yr old female. Me and my family are looking for help, we are getting desperate for answers and hoping you can point us in the right direction. My main questions are as follows but any advise is more than welcome!! 

1. Where can we find a lyme specialist in the UK? (we are in surrey)

2. and how can we be referred for testing? (We are willing to go private if needed)

3. Also I have read a lot about the unreliability of western blot tests especially those done in the uk (I believe they are processed at Southampton) and would like to know about how to get the test sent abroad to be processed? 

The reason we are asking is I have been increasing unwell since Easter 2013, and since May this year it has completely affected my life. I will try to be brief and chronological but it is a long story sorry.

 I have always been a very active person and have travelled to many weird and interesting places around the world and worked very hard along the way. I have been living in Norway since October 2010 doing a mixture of waitressing whilst I learnt the language and arty/photography stuff. Easter last year I was between jobs and ending up living in the mountains in a cabin outside of voss for about six weeks to work at a hotel. I got sick with something like a very bad cold and swollen tonsils so I jacked myself up on flu meds and struggled through it. I returned to Betgen to start my new job opening a brand new restaurant and hotel but was still unwell with a bad cold symptoms, and very stiff sore neck (at the time I just put it down to job related) and a cough that was awful and wouldn't go away. 

After some weeks I go so fed up that I went to the doctors (I wanted to be well for the demands of my new job) I ended up being sent to hospital and was admitted for 4 days as my blood pressure was very low but was discharged with no answers and told it was probably a virus (I think I had steroids or antibiotics IV but can't remember). I carried on working but was getting tired very easily and now had headaches along side the persistent neck pain. In October I lost my job as I wasn't performing well enough according to some of my colleagues. (I am a bit of a perfectionist and a high achiever - I have 2 first class degrees - so this was a first for me a came as quite a shock!) I was often very tired but plodded with life on anyway, I am not the type to give up. I spent Christmas with my boyfriends family and kept getting embarrassed by how tired I was (I'd fall deep asleep after dinner for at least two hours every evening) I carried on with part time work but it always seemed much more straining than I was used and would have to take pain killers to manage. By April I had had enough as I was so tired all the time. I hat to reduced my hours and was starting to struggle finically. The doctor took some blood tests and sent me straight to hospital as he explained I was anemic and my Hb was only 8. I have been too unwell to work ever since.

I was in hospital overnight, had an iron transfusion as my iron was very low too and then sent home. I went the GP to be followed up 3 weeks later but still felt crazy tired with headaches and neck pain and now lower back flank pain. I was told my b12 was very low and this was why I was not improving and that injections would help. They made NO difference. Now in June I was getting distraught my GP was planning to look into why I became anemic and b12 def in the first place (my boyfriend is a chef, I eat very well, am not a vegetarian and my periods had actually been getting very light) unfortunately the GP quit his job and I was fobed off by the clinics receptionist. I managed to see another doctor as I was still cornered about my back pain was getting worse and my period was being weird. He gave me a strong course of antibiotics for 10 days as thought maybe I had a kidney infection. He also did some hormone tests which showed very low progesterone. At this point my family intervened and made me come back to the UK as I was no longer able to properly look after myself. The antibiotics helped a bit but it didn't last. This was mid July.

Since my return to the UK I went straight to my GP (I am very lucky and she has been amazing I must say). She was quite concerned and wanted to get to the bottom of my seemingly unrelated symptoms and as my breathing had become shallow, and was now more like an old lady than my normal energetic 30 something self. she sent me to have a chest x-Ray and some bloods. My x-Ray was clear but my d-dimmer was slightly raised and my blood gas showed low CO2 so the doctor sent me for a VQ scan to rule out an embolism. This was clear. She then arranged for me to see a gastroendocronologist to see if this was to do with malabsorption. And a urologist as I had had a bout of renal colic that sent me to a &e and often had cloudy or oily urine. I have since had a endoscopy, colonoscopy with biopsies, more bloods and contrast CAT scan. I have even had a ultrasound on my womb and ovaries as my progesterone levels were tested again and came back very low. EVERYTHING else has come back clear... As I was getting bouts of very low blood pressure and postural hypotension and my b12 has dropped dramatically again after just 5 weeks of the injections. So she also organised for me to have a synancten test to rule out Addisons.  I meet with an endocrinologist on Monday and he said this was negative. He is organising more blood tests (all though I now believe I have had most of them already) and a brain MRI, if these come back normal (which I believe they will) I am looking at a diagnosis of ME/CFS and the life I have built in Norway which is majorly on hold will be thrown out the window. As you can imagine, my family, norwegian boyfriend and myself are getting quite despirate! 

I have been doing lots of research and come across people misdiagnosed with ME when they in fact had Lyme disease. Thinking back to when I first had problems I am wondering if this is a possibility. I want to be able to rule out everything as ME is a diagnosis of exclusion and wont be able to move on until I know I have looked at everything. 

Any help or advise will be greatly appreciated.

1 like, 46 replies

46 Replies

Next
  • Posted

    Let me start out by saying that ME/CFS isn't really a disease. It's a SYMPTOM.  My advise to anyone given the CFS/me label is to search out the CAUSE of the me/cfs.  My doctor who specialises in treating CFS/ME says it has lots of causes, but once you know THE CAUSE OF YOUR CFS/ME you can't start using the real name to describe your disease and you can treat it.  So when I went to him with my 19 year long CFS problem he explained he has made many CFS patients better sometimes it's a quick fix, sometimes it's much harder but here is what he looks for - 1) iron deficiency (patient should be in the top third of the "range" not at the lower end of scale) 2) gut parasites or bacteria like blastocystitis or helocobactor 3)allergies like to wheat or other stuff 4)heavy metal poisoning (like a build up of pollution in your system your body just can't process it out) 5)active viruses -  EBV,CMV and others 6)gut bacteria levels (good and bad bacteria is balanced) 6)bacterial or parasite infection like Lyme disease, Babesia.   For those lucky to have number 1 or 2 it's an EASY FIX, the others can be more complicated.  You'll have to get a good fatigue doctor to work through it with you.  I had just about ALL of them, including LYME disease. It's a very complicated disease and is very common and more doctors need to look for it and the other causes of CFS/ME then people like me wouldn't suffer for 19 years.  I wish you luck finding the cause and I hope it's one of the easy ones. 
    • Posted

      Great post Liz, how do you get a good fatigue doc on the NHS ?

      Did you test positive for lyme? I have the test kit at home.

       

    • Posted

      I'm in Australia and I imagine good fatigue doctors are as rare in England as they are here!  That's why I listed a summary of what you should be ruling out/checking for, so you can ask/beg your nhs doctor to offer you those tests.  I did not test LYME positive, this is because nowhere in the world do they have a perfect test but I did test positive at a lab in Australia.  Lyme is a clinically diagnosis and many patients I met have not got a positive but a good LYME doctor can work it out and clinically diagnose you. However lab did pick up the co-infection Babesia which was a very important piece of the jigsaw. (It was transmitted by the same tick bite) Incdecently seeing as liz got sick in Norway she might like to know the german clinic was full of Norwegians because they can't get treatment in Norway and a very famous Norwegian explorer dude who got Lyme went to the German clinic and got better so all the publicity around him has made the clinic get this long waiting list.  Good fatigue doctors aren't cheap (they spend an hour with you at your appointment not ten minutes) so I hope you can talk your garden variety NHS doctor into doing the tests I mentioned. 
    • Posted

      Thanks for the info Rebecca, very interesting about Norway, just read an article online about a protest and conference held in Oslo in 2012 and it seems Sweden is way ahead of them in awareness I guess! I'm definitely going to ask my GP to refer me to a good fatigue doctor and the more I look into my sore stiff neck the more I see it is more common in lyme than cfs/me. I do also agree that ME/CFS is an umbrella term for the unknown but at least we are further on than 20 years ago when people were fighting just to have it the syndrome recognised as real!! Interesting to hear about babesia too seeing as it has such strong links to anaemia and mine is currently unexplained. Never heard about that before today... Trying to get a comprehensive list to walk in with so I know what to ask/beg for to be tested. So appreciate all the suggestions!
    • Posted

      3 months post my treatment commencing in Germany and the chiropractor says my neck is feeling normal for the first time in the 8 years he has known me.  He is amazed at what treating Lyme disease can do to change things for patients
  • Posted

    By the way when I went to Germany for treatment there were many english people there, getting better too! Sadly the clinic has a 6 month waiting list but they've just opened a sister clinic in the Czech republic.  All the English people I spoke to said England was pretty useless about it and they were so glad to get expert care in Germany even if they have to keep flying over every three months for their check up and to fill their prescriptions.  The clinic has patients from all over the world.
    • Posted

      Which clinic was it again so I can look them up? Or did I just miss that? Sorry.
    • Posted

      i can't say - the moderator says you can't mention it. I got told off for mentioning the lab because saying the name is advertising apparently according to the rules here. Try searching Borellia and Augsburg to see if that gets you any results or ask your Lyme charity for the name. 
  • Posted

    Your breathing and heart rate could be symptoms of Babesia.  Please check it out. I have this from the same tick bite that gave me LYME. The overseas labs can test you for it the same time as your LYME test
  • Posted

    Thank you so much for the fast responses and help, my mother used to be a nurse and my GP has been amazing so far (I am very lucky in this respect to have suport so many don't) so I will go informed to my next appointment!
  • Posted

    As far as negative test results go - a negative doesn't mean you don't have it. (Lyme,bart,Babesia, anplasma,enrichlicia, Rikketsia etc) A good doctor can clinically diagnose using tools like "Buruscanno questionairre" or "Horowitz 16 point differential diagnosis" by ruling other things out and taking note of your symptoms they can work out if you've got Lyme,Bart,babs etc.   good doctors do not rely on tests alone.  Despite never having a positive bartonella test I've had three Lyme doctors diagnose me with it independently by looking at my symptoms.   I think you can even get both questionairres online if you want to try it.  A really great book that is simple to understand, is "Lyme in Australia" by dr Nicola McFazdean.  Don't let the Australia bit put you off - the info can apply to anyone and she lists treatment, symptoms, success stories, protocols, explains about testing, herxing, other tests that can help pinpoint it etc. I highly recommend this book for a great overall explanation. 
    • Posted

      Thanks. It's a nightmare though in terms of having a definitive diagnosis.
  • Posted

    Just to let you guys know my GP got me tested for lyme today. She's been great and is more willing to send me on to the tropical disease centre than a fatigue specialist as the dots aren't added up. so I've got some hope I'm not being given up on! Anyone know how long the results take?
    • Posted

      Was it a western blot lyme test ? These are preferred rather than ELISA.

      I'm sure my test took 2 weeks to come back with the NHS.

      Good luck !

    • Posted

      I asked her and she tried to look for me but couldn't see, I think it might be the ELISA but she is probably going to refer me to the TDC even if it's negative so I think if anyone is clued up about these things it will be them. I've also been getting weird stomach cramps now but my blood pressure seems to have settled. Starting getting a nasty cold now too and my dreams are getting more and more vivid - anyone else had crazy weird detailed dreams?
    • Posted

      My lyme serum test was negative 0.6 it's only counted positive if more than 1.0. If you get results like this there is a lab in USA and a lab in Germany. There is a lyme doctor who apparently treats chronic lyme in Winchester NHS and private. Don't expect your tests to come out positive as they rarely do. The only one that really can show lyme is Western Blot.

    • Posted

      I think alot of these private labs are making a fortune misdiagnosing people with lyme in all honesty.

      People looking to strenghten their immunity might want to try Transfer Factor.

    • Posted

      Ive ordered a test kit from Germany and asking to be refered to the doctor in winchester instead of the TDC in london. 
    • Posted

      Hi Lizz,

      I have the same kit. I have been told by the LDA that no UK doctor will believe the results and you will be reliant on the lab for treatment. I'm not sure where i stand with it all. I just recently found out that two journalists (healthy) sent their bloods to the U.S and they both tested positive for lyme when the UK immunoblots tested negative. Remember these people were healthy and not symptomatic of any disease. If there was a foolproof test for lyme great but for me, the costs involved in private testing are not justifiable.

      Spirostat labs in the U.S have an amazing looking ks3 lyme panel, which not only tests for lyme but numerous other diseases for under $200 but it's not available yet.

    • Posted

      Thanks david, yeah not sure what to do yet, waiting for nhs results first and a refferal.but did chat today with a friends husband who is crazy fit and ending up in hospital due to menigitis and is still have major problems 3 months later!
    • Posted

      Why would they want everyone to test positive? It is of no benefit to them. My serum test was done in France and came up 0.6 so even though that's negative for new infection it still showed 0.6 lyme antibodies. I believe if I hadn't been exposed to lyme the result should be 0. I probably go lyme years and years ago and my immune system was keeping it under wraps. I didn't get sick until a doctor injected me with corticosteroid that lowered my immune system allowing the lyme to florist.  Scientists know tiki spread the is ease but think it may be spread by sand flies, mosquitos and fleas too. Maybe it's dormant in most of us but is triggered by shock, trauma, illness and steroids or anything that lowers the immune system.

      I'm a classic example. A steroid started my illness. I was a normal healthy person until 15 minutes after the steroid injection. My body went into anaphylactoid shock and never recoverred. Doctors are baffled. Unless they got it wrong last year and i really do have hereditary coproporphyria. The test for this was positive with symptoms but negative when symptoms stopped. So far I've had one positive porphyria test, positive lyme test, positive vasculitis test, positive hyperthyroid tests, positive adrenal malfunction test. Low vitamin D and iron. All this from a steroid injection. Only porphyria or a parasite can do this.

      Doctors don't care enough to find out what's wrong whilst I am in agony feeling like my bones are being crushed.

      I worry if this isn't lyme then it's something a lot more sinister as docs can't rule out malignancy of my thyroid any more

    • Posted

      Certainly CFS needs far more attention that it receives, the more i talk to people the more i find out it is an epidemic, various levels of it. I'm in this for the long haul i'm sure.
    • Posted

      Could you cite the journalists that took these tests?  An australian doctor had the same theory and so he sent some of his healthy family's blood off and it came back negative, so he put his theory to bed. A whole bunch of sick people also tested negative so I don't know how they can say everybody is testing positive. I want to see if the journalists are aware of Dr Klinghatds research and his belief that we all probably have it, in either a dormant or active form, and if that's true then healthy people should be testing positive. A good immune system can keep it in check until they get the cortisteriod injection liz had for example or any other stress to their body.  I'd also like to look at their results to see which bands came back positive because it's not as simple as a positive and a negative, the detests are quite complicated and need to be interpreted by people who know how to read them.  While there are certainly issues with testing, the issue lies in the high number of false negative results because false postive are pretty much unheard of. 

Report or request deletion

Thanks for your help!

We want the community to be a useful resource for our users but it is important to remember that the community are not moderated or reviewed by doctors and so you should not rely on opinions or advice given by other users in respect of any healthcare matters. Always speak to your doctor before acting and in cases of emergency seek appropriate medical assistance immediately. Use of the community is subject to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy and steps will be taken to remove posts identified as being in breach of those terms.