By the time my son and I found Dr. Letellier Smith, we had tried everything. You know the story! Of course it started with the mystery symptoms and the casual- even cruel-dismissals from doctors and specialists. Of course it took years to get diagnosed, of course it was too late for both of us by the time we finally did. There was damage; to our hearts, our joints, our brains.
Our family was broken, our support system was fractured, we were out of money and resources. We had given up on Lyme treatment altogether and had decided to live with our symptoms; treating ourselves as best we could with sunlight, supplements, and an anti-inflammatory diet. We were limping along, functional enough to be miserable.
When a close friend’s young son was infected with Lyme, she found her way to Be Well Family Medicine, and Dr. Letellier Smith. I have known this little guy since he was a baby. I know what a child with Lyme looks like, too: the pale face, zombie eyes, dark circles. That’s how he looked after the bite, but when he came back from Colorado, miraculously, after just a week, he looked like himself again!
Even more astonishing was how little it had cost their family of three to fly to Durango, stay in a hotel, and be cured of Lyme disease. Let me repeat that: to be cured of Lyme disease.
It was a fraction of what it had cost me to have any number of treatments that had not worked. I had been on powerful- and ultimately destructive- antibiotics for four years. I had had IVs of every shape and description-sometimes daily. I had lain in various beds-getting various forms of light therapy-for hundreds upon hundreds of dollars per session. I had had my blood taken out, ozonated, and put back in. I had injected myself with a cornucopia of hormones. I was just beginning to consider stinging myself with bees. (Ok, not really, I was actually looking into suicide instead).
The most painful irony is that I had been prescribed these things mentioned above by the doctors who I considered lyme literate; those who believed I was sick, those who understood that I was suffering from a serious, chronic, complex disease, and they could only help me so much. They took more and more of our money, and perhaps inadvertently, caused irreperable damage to our vulnerable bodies.
I felt we had nothing to lose by consulting with Dr. Letellier Smith. Her treatment promised to be so inexpensive, we could still find a way to afford it. She and I established an immediate rapport. In our first session, she intuited with complete accuracy the results of all of the labwork I had just had done with my family doctor. She told me with absolute certainty, not that I might be free of Lyme someday, but that I would; that it was just a matter of time.
A year later, I’m almost amused by Dr. Letellier Smith’s gentle warnings that the road to recovery would have its ups and downs; that not everyone would feel better overnight. (I also heard this from the folks who gave me enough heartworm medication to kill a moose, and those die-off events were hell on earth, to be sure.) Imagine my surprise when my Herxheimer reactions to the magnet therapy were as easy to navigate as Be Well’s website. I might feel horrible for fifteen minutes and then go on about my business. I might have a day where I felt like any other woman in her late forties who didn’t sleep all that well.
Since my treatment, so many of those things I had come to believe were part of my forever are just gone now. I still consider myself in recovery: emotionally, financially, and mentally, but my physical symptoms are the least of it.
After what we now believe was approximately 25 years of undiagnosed Lyme disease, I feel like I am inhabiting a whole new body! The pain is gone. I may never put this anger behind me at what the medical community continues to allow Lyme patients to suffer, knowing what I know now about how this disease can be cured, but I feel so fortunate to have been one of the lucky ones.
My life and my son’s have been saved. – LG
