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Saturday 19 May 2012

HELPFUL HINTS and how to cope

1. You may need help to get through this. You should not be left alone for long periods of time. Someone needs to be around to help encourage and reassure you along your rough road back to wellness. Your mind will not be working properly, and it's easy to become confused, terrified, and discouraged. Make sure you have someone to talk to when you need them. Just a phone call can help tremendously! Emotional release, if needed, can be good for you! Rare are the ones who can make the journey back to wellness without a few breakdowns along the way. Call around, ask around, find your local lyme disease support groups. Talk to them. That's why they're there. They want to help!

2. Eat! When you finally get through this, you'd certainly like to enjoy life again as soon as possible, wouldn't you? Well you can't do that if you're a shriveled-up little mess. Solid food is best, but may prove difficult for a while.Liquid foods like "Ensure Plus" and "Instant Breakfast" can help keep your calorie intake up. Don't forget your basic "Multi-vitamin & Minerals" either. And eating does much more than just keep your weight up. It provides energy for: your own immune system so it can fight too, for all the healing that has to take place, and energy to help your body process the toxins out.
Eat, and you'll be healthy and happy again that much sooner.

3. Move and Stretch. The worst ting you can do is just sit or lie around all day. Lyme Disease is a deep tissue bug as well as not-so- deep tissue. It likes to hide and live in places that are hard to reach, both for your body and the antibiotics. Stretching and moving around does a number of things: such as providing circulation going and flushing toxins out, you help prevent toxic bulid-up and subsequent possible permanent damage. So if it hurts, stretch it
(gently), move it around, get some circulation in there! You should be gently stretching everything from your nose to your toes at least once an hour while you're awake. Go for a short walk... Even just up and down the driveway, or around the living room a few times will do a world of good. This is extremely important during the first few weeks or so when the toxin levels will sky-rocket!

4. Sleeping aids. Do not use sleeping aids during the first couple weeks or so. As long as you have extreme pain or numbness somewhere that needs to be moved around occasionally you're probably better off rolling around and tossing and turning all night. Once you feel like you can go the night without accumulating severe pain somewhere, then sleeping aids are OK. Naturally, use as little as possible. You do need sleep but you also don't want
permanent toxin damage.

5. Take your medication on time, every time, religiously. Some bacteria takes days to kill. A missed dose may let them recover and restart the clock all over again. Unless, of course, you like suffering......

6. Don't stop once you feel good. Lyme Disease is very slow growing, but the longer you've had it, the deeper into your system it gets. Deep enough such that even the "instant kill" family of cephalosporins antibiotics take time to kill it. Thus it is generally good practice for Lyme patients to continue effect antibiotics for a number of months after symptoms have (seeminglydisappeared. Taking medication when you feel good can be an annoyance, but when you consider what you're going through now, do you really want to do it again?

7. Lyme Disease doesn't just grow in the bloodstream. It tends to enter inside your cells and grow there too. Not all antibiotics can penetrate cell walls to effectively kill the bacteria there. Fortunately, there are a number that can: Suprax, Flagyl, and Biaxin for example. One might consider some time spent on these to help kill any bacteria which might have crossed inside the cell wall barrier.

8. Know the signs of a drug reaction for those drugs you haven't had before. Sometimes it can be difficult to distinguish between a drug reaction and standard Lyme symptoms. Discuss any concerns or unusual symptoms with your doctor.

9. Avoid any anti-inflammatory and anti-pain medication. Mostly at the start of treatment. Inflammation is your body's way of increasing circulation to affected areas. Circulation is what brings the antibiotics in to where they need to go and takes the toxins away. Pain is your body's way of saying "Hey stupid! Move this part around a bit!" You might actually find that anti-inflammatories, though, during the first month or so of treatment, will tend to make joint pains worse. Once past the hard part though, a bit of anti- inflammatory and anti-pain medication is OK.

10. Antibiotic Soap. For shower or bath. Not proven to actually do
anything, but may help to kill the bacteria hiding in the pores of your skin.

11. Contact Lenses. Take them out! Never nap or sleep with your contacts in! It is just as likely that the bacteria is in your eyes, as well as everywhere else. A die-off in your eyes can raise the local toxin levels, but with your contacts in your body, is hindered from flushing it away. The result build-up may cause damage to your eyes. Better safe than sorry! Dig up that dusty old pair of glasses!

12. Depression. Nobody likes feeling depressed. Problem is, that a fair number of people just get that way after fighting the disease for a seeming eternity and still not feeling a whole lot better. Try to find things you can do to occupy yourself and keep your mind off it. Do whatever you can, naturally, to lift your spirits and keep them up. Failing that, it is not out of the question to ask you doctor for a little help. Make sure to avoid anti-depressants that
can add to your insomnia!

13. B-Complex Vitamins. Thse have been shown to significantly help psychological symptoms. They also help the brain repair and protect itself from toxin damage.

14. Injuries. Try to avoid them. The Lyme bacteria thrive on injured body parts. Bruises, sprains, etc., are a feast with an open all-you- can-eat invitation. You might, to amuse yourself once you know the exact length of your cycle, try mapping back specific short-lived pains to the event which caused them!

15. Exercise. Gentle stretching and low-level workouts are OK. But remember that strenuous exercise and hard workouts are actually controlled injury...and injury feeds the bacteria.

16. Yeast Infections - in throat and/or digestive tract. Some antibiotics are more prone than others to causing yeast infections by killing off all your good bacteria. Your doctor should question you about sore throats and intestinal problems each time you visit. These infections can be cured with yet more drugs, or avoided all together by simply asking your pharmacist for "good tummy bacteria", the live ones". Lactobacillus Acidophilus (they're non-prescription) Live Culture yogurt does essentially the same thing, as it contains the very same live bacteria. In either case, make sure to rinse your mouth and throat with water immediately after you eat or drink anything, then swish a bit of your live good bacteria around in your mouth and swallow.

17. Antihistamines. No. No. No. No. No. And most especially not whenon one of the 'Cyclene family of antibiotics. Your immune system is one of the biggest factors in your recovery, one of the big superpowers in the war against disease. The antibiotics will kill some percentage of the bacteria each cycle while your immune system kills off the ones that were weakened. Together, the antibiotics and your body create a team to defeat the bacteria. Antihistamines, like Benadryl, turn off your immune system! All they do is make sure that you suffer longer! Further, the cyclene family of antibiotics doesn't actually kill the bacteria, but rather just stops them from growing and relies on your immune system to kill them.

18. Natural herbs and such. A stroll through your local herbal and natural foods shop will provide you with an amazing array of itmes which claim to do all sorts of good things. Anything that says "boosts your immune system" might be a good idea. Purely optional, although a number of herbal concoctions have actually been shown to do as they claim.

19.Caffeine. Suppresses the immune system, which is very bad. Give up that morning coffee and that afternoon coke.

20. Alcohol. Worse for you than caffeine. Unless you just want to be sick longer, no alcohol!

21. Smoking. Haven't you been lectured about this enough yet? Now
would be a really good time to quit.

22. Rest. You're going to need a lot of it. Even after you begin to feel better, remember your body is still fighting off a rather nasty infection. Don't overdo it. Without sufficient rest, recovery just takes longer.

23.Hot drinks. Let them cool off to luke-warm first. Hot fluids tend to make the dead layers of cells on your tongue rather thick to protect them from the scalding heat. This means more stuff for yeast infections to grow in. 
 

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