brighter days

In the midst of it all, I picked up my camera again. I'd ignored it for a year- it was suddenly too complicated for my slow, foggy brain. Besides which, I wasn't entirely sure I wanted to remember this strange season, not in high definition anyway. 

Ever since David and I started dating I've meticulously documented our life together and created books of printed photos every six months. But the previous autumn, winter, and spring were nothing that I'd want glossily displayed on our living room table for friends to browse through. No wedding books or printed wedding photos either- I was terrified that if I kept getting sick, or if the medicine did not work as it does not work for so many people, I would have to leave Dave and go home to my parents house. I had to wait until I knew I would be okay enough to be a wife, till that time when everything wasn't so fragile; then the wedding would be real, then I could display photographic evidence of our marriage. 

By summer I was feeling better, better enough that not every one of our excursions was tinted with anxiety and fatigue. In the summer we would go days without mentioning Lyme disease; it began to feel like an afterthought. And so I created a beautiful book, filled mostly with swimming holes and waterfalls and rivers and lakes. When the book arrived in the mail, I declared summer officially over.

So I picked up my camera again, still rusty with the dials, but that will work itself out. I'm taking on work and marveling at how simple, even enjoyable, the articles feel as I type them out on my back porch. I still can't work from the coffee shops- noise is still very difficult, and I like sitting on our yoga bouncing balls instead of chairs. Chairs are too rigid, they make me squirm. One week I took on one article with Rootsrated, apprehensive to say the least. I remember earlier this year, sitting in front of the screen and crying, not understanding why my brain had forgotten how to write, how to form sentences, why my hands were shaking too hard to type. 

The one article took me a week instead of a day, but I got it done. The next week, somehow, I took on seven more. After that week, researching or writing from noon to ten pm I realized with a jolt- oh, hey, I'm back to work. How funny.  

When Rootsrated called and offered to send me to Nebraska to work with their Destination Marketing Organization, I was confident that I was well enough to travel. Believe it or not, it's rare to get to actually travel as a travel writer. I cover the Asheville area and the greater Southeast for the majority of my work, so I'm able to write from memory or imagination. But Nebraska? I know nothing about their outdoor scene, I'm excited to travel there on Tuesday and see a brand new landscape. 

I am looking forward to working again as a photographer. If you are local to Asheville and interested in a cheap session, send me an email : thewildercoast@gmail.com We can do a natural setting or someplace funky in town with all the crumbling stone, graffiti and railroad tracks. Because I'm just getting back into it, the rates are super cheap. 

I'm a strong proponent of photo shoots just for the hell of it. I don't think they need to be restricted to engagement, wedding and babies. I love shooting people just out with their friends or with their partner, no particular reason except they want to capture a nice day, a nice season of life. 

For New Englanders, I'll be home in Vermont from October 3-October 14th if you'd like to meet me there. 

I hope you enjoy these shots from a recent Saturday in the Blue Ridge Mountains with Erich and Melanie. It's so beautiful here. Autumn is off to a troubling start; this has been the warmest September on record and Asheville ran out of gasoline. My hope is that when I return from my three week trip to Nebraska and New England, the days will be crisp, the leaves on fire, and the blood they take every two weeks from my brachial artery will contain no more of this monster. 

If you're new, this blog is nearly 10 year old. You can read the whole story of my battle with Lyme Disease by clicking here.

Grasshopper

 As happy as I was to reach the point in my treatment where I could be off antibiotics for two weeks at a time, the addition of Rifabutin to the mix crushed me. Rifabutin is a bright orange diamond shaped pill most commonly prescribed to HIV patients, and it leaves you so nauseated that even water feels iffy going down.

During the first two weeks of this new protocol, I started losing weight rapidly. I’d already lost a little over fifteen pounds since starting treatment in January, a lot of it muscle mass, but I seemed to have leveled out around 125.  Now the pounds started melting away and new bones emerged in my shoulders, my pelvis.

I went to three doctors about my newly enlarged lymph nodes, until the last one told me they weren’t actually enlarged, I just didn’t have any fat to cover them anymore. The barista at the café wistfully asked me one morning what I did to stay in shape. “I try and eat healthy, I run- but I want to look like you.”

I didn’t know what to say. I’ve never been weaker or in worse physical shape in my life.  “A pulsed regiment of Cipro, Omnicef, Septra Double Strenght and Rifabutin” would have been an honest response, but a very unhealthy one, perhaps vaguely illegal. A beautiful young woman with a gorgeous figure longing after the shape of a girl who has been sick for a year felt like a dismal report on society.

One day I stepped on the scale at a practitioner’s office in South Carolina and saw the needle fall below 120. I’ve never seen sub 120 numbers since I passed them on my way up. 119, 117- I was now lighter than I was in middle school.  I started to panic. I pictured myself in an OB office, a doctor informing me that a sudden drop in weight could be responsible for my inability to have a baby.

My theoretical infertility and the inexistence of this theoretical baby was constantly looming in the shadows of my mind, the greatest punishment from a god I thoroughly do not believe in.

There’s something about weight loss, it makes people suspicious. My mother sounds angry on the phone, so does my sister. David remains tight-lipped, refusing to say anything that might endorse this new shrinking wife. Unless you’re sick from chemo, there seems to be this idea that you are secretly in on it, quietly crazy about all the pounds flying off.  If you really wanted to gain weight, how hard could it be? Just eat some ice cream. 

At first my doctors tell me to supplement my diet with even more ‘good fats’. That translates to avocado, coconut milk and almond butter. Unfortunately for me I can’t stomach those things any more, besides it would take an awful lot of avocados to really pork somebody up.

Anything I ate back in the winter and spring when I was severely ill and terrified all of the time taste like rancid medicine to me now. Same with all the powdered maca and random superfoods I ordered off the Internet and now keep in glass jars on exposed shelving in the kitchen. Those powders and infusions provided more than just nourishment over the past year. I became obsessed with them, stirred them into concoctions that I would stage, photograph and upload to an instagram account I’d created just for them. Their powdery promises of miracles soothed me to sleep at night. I perused the Moon Juice website for fun. They became my friends when I was too sick to have real friends. Now they repulse me, they taste sick and sad.  

On the two weeks off from medicine, I pitch my strict diet right out the window. My doctor looks at my charts and tells me to eat whatever I can whenever I can. That evening David and I walk to the ice cream store up the street from us, and I boldly order a kiddie cone. Salted Caramel. I lick it and then I throw it away. The sweetness burns in my mouth.

In the next few days, however, my body begins to steady itself. No more HIV meds, no more Cipro, for two whole weeks. One night, out to dinner with Erich and our friends Cliff and Kate, I order a grasshopper milkshake. It goes down easy. Thus begins a regiment of daily, light green grasshopper milkshakes.

But 2hat about the inflammation? You might be asking yourself, clutching your glass vials of camu-camu. The casein! The sugar, for chrissakes! Fuck it. When you can’t win you may as well enjoy the taste of losing.

I go deliberately off the rails. I seek out desserts around the city even when I don’t really want them. The only thing I avoid is gluten. Long-term antibiotics can make you gluten intolerant for the rest of your life, even if you had no problem with a slice of bread when you were healthy. In ten days I take down a boatload of sugar. It would have shocked the pants off of my new community of autoimmune paleo lyme and MSIDS patients. I would have been kicked out of the club.

 One afternoon I take Whitney to a swimming hole up on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Whitney has been extremely sick for about two weeks, but I know if we can just get her to the water, the cold shock of it will help relieve at least a portion of her pain. It works out, we both feel better. In fact as we are driving home I feel so normal, so vivacious even, that I suddenly find myself daydreaming about an Oatmeal Porter from Highlands Brewery. Emboldened by my moment of good health, I blurt out, “Whit, what do you think would happen if I drank a beer?”

I expect a sinkhole to open up and swallow us down for voicing something so ludicrous. I expect Whitney to shake her head and tell me what a grave, grave error it would be. I haven’t tried alcohol for well over a year. I have the MTHFR gene mutation that makes methylation difficult, meaning I have problems detoxing even the everyday, unavoidable toxins. I spent the past ten months in what felt like one long continuous magnesium-salt bath, trying to rid my body of poisons. Now I wanted to drink a whole bottle of it?

Instead, Whitney says something truly shocking. “Nothing. I think nothing would happen.”

Later that afternoon, I hike up to Haywood Ave and buy myself a six pack of Oatmeal Porter from the Brew Pump, a gas station/bar hybrid that’s become the place to be in West Asheville. I half expected the cashier to stop me – “Woah, not for you!” in the same way that I half expect god will prevent me from having my baby. “Not for you!” But she doesn’t even ask for my ID. I walk home with the sixpack in my hand, cutting through the Tuesday farmers market at the end of my street and ignoring the woman who normally sells me mason jars full of raw milk. I was going rogue.

Back home, I open one bottle and drink half of it. I wouldn’t say nothing happened- I become immediately intoxicated. While preparing my world-famous paleo pizza, I lose control of the knife and slice my finger so deeply that it would still be bleeding the next morning. I felt liberated and terrified. Then I poured a bath and sat in it, waiting for the world to end, or at least the hangover from hell. I had consumed half of a bottle a beer.

In the end, Whitney was right. Nothing came of it. I woke up the next morning and felt fine. Besides my new status as a mega-lightweight and a scar across my fingertip, it was entirely anticlimactic, which is exactly what I wanted. I didn’t want another beer, I just wanted to know that I could pose as a normal, healthy person for a few minutes and get away with it.

In fact, as the days fold forward, I do feel like a normal and healthy person, if perhaps a rambunctiously hungry one. I put on a few pounds and float through a string of miraculously easy days. Life seemed to be marching forward. Then Monday comes around again, with its twice daily handful of capsules. The nausea returns overnight.

“You would have been fine just losing a little weight,” says the stern god-doctor in my head. “But the yo-yoing, the up and down, that’s what’s costing you.”

Sometimes it all feels a little useless.

Click here to see all the posts relating to my Lyme Disease story. 

Rose Gold

This post is written with love to and solidarity with Heather Ann Brauer

We spent another weekend up at the farm, this time for Charli’s tenth birthday. Charli is one wild piece of moonlight, and Dave and I could barely keep up with the birthday party itinerary that Charles and Sarah had put together. There were presents and cake, a piñata, painting, a water balloon fight, slacklining and games of flashlight tag and Cherokee-Iroquois. After dark the forest was filled with flashing LED balloons and streamers, the kids covered us all in glow in the dark body paint, held spiting gold sparklers and roman candles, and long after I crawled into the tent, Charles let off a whole fireworks show. 

Do you think we’ll be able to pull something off like this for our kid? David asked me at one point, genuine concern in his voice. No flippin way- I told him. We’re hiring Sarah and Charles to throw our kid’s birthday parties. 

 Along with our Boone friends, Erich and Melanie camped out with us that night along with Rosie the dog, who has seizures. Erich suffered from acute Lyme disease this past summer but he’s getting much better. As for me, I’ve finally reached the two week on/ two week off portion of my treatment. I’m only one week in and I’m nervous about going a whole fourteen days without medicine, my immune system is very wobbly right now, like a fawn. But I can’t be on this regiment forever, I have to start weaning off the killers at some point.

This protocol is composed of extra heavy antibiotics. and after eight months of treatment my stomach has officially gone on strike. I’m on a diet of mush, just like a baby. I’m eating rice overcooked in bone broth and lentils overcooked in bone broth. Bone broth better be all it’s cracked up to be because I’m putting a lot of stock in it. (THAT PUN! YES! Yonton that was for you.)

From up at the farm, you can see a view of Roan Mountain and miles of rolling Appalachian on either side. On Saturday there were storms stretching across those mountains, with big silver showers of rain and strikes of hot, quiet lightning. Through big patches in the storms, the sunset glowed rose gold.

We burned old Christmas trees and Erich played the guitar. Erich is an incredible guitar player. This time he had babies crawling on him, and the babies were playing egg shakers and were so entranced by the music that they acted stoned out of their gourds. Maybe that’s what it's like to be a baby- you hear or see or feel something that pleases you and it makes you instantly stoned. Man. If only.

I was knocked flat with a migraine after the sun went down, but it was still a lovely evening. I just brought my pillow and blanket down to the fire and lay there, absorbing all of the nice things and people through my ears, and to be honest it was great to have an excuse not to play freeze tag. Those ten year olds swear that they’ll play by the rules but they never do.

 David later told me that it was hard for him to see me down for the count, again, but it wasn’t so bad for me. I’m not saying you get used to pain, the whole point of pain is that you don’t adapt to it, but once you can scrape clean a few layers of fear, guilt and disappointment and you’re left with straight physical discomfort, it’s not terrible. As long as the kids didn’t blow their whistles near my head I was totally content to lie by the fire with my friends all around me.

I anticipate perfect health sometime in the future, but right now I’m still recovering and I never expect to feel well. When I do feel well, and there are hours and days that go by when I do, it comes as such a welcome luxury. It’s like preparing for sleeping out under a damp and overcast sky and getting a meteor shower and a warm breeze instead.

I explained this to Dave and he explained that while he was relieved to hear it, he just couldn’t understand reaching that level of acceptance.

When you’re not given a choice, it’s incredible what you can learn to accept.

Huxley barked the whole night through and that big tent filled with girls never stopped shrieking with exhausted laughter, but I finally managed to coax myself to sleep with reading and trazadone, and another summer weekend up at the farm drew to a smoke and star-filled close.

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Catch up on the Lyme Disease Story by clicking here

Here is how you can help, and how I will say thank you 

Folly Beach

this post is written in gratitude to Teal Emyln, who has shown me such warmth, love, and art.

Over the course of the past year, I haven't given much thought as to whether or not the people in my life, from the readers of this blog to my closest friends, have believed -for lack of a better word-just how sick Lyme Disease has made me. The pain, fatigue and insomnia are so vicious and destructive when they swell that to even consider having to validate them to others is a ridiculous notion. 

I know people who have struggled intensely with this issue, their level of disability and despair are challenged by the very people who should be providing them with the warmest care and most tender support. 

I've managed to escape, for the most part, this particular callousness, but there will always be those whose judgement can never be avoided. If you post pictures of yourself from inside the deepest of gloom, hospital gowns, oxygen tubes, the rumpled self portrait of the third consecutive day in bed, pale skin, dark eye circles and sweat- then you're asking for pity, stuck in a self-perpetuating cycle of negativity and inactivity, driving yourself towards decay with full compliance. Just get out of the house, go for a walk, you'll feel better! 

But when you project instead the image of all the things you still can do, standing in the sunlight, happy and at ease, color in your face and your hair is wet, eating at a restaurant with a friend or sitting with your back against a tree in the middle of a forest, good heavens, even exercising- then you're not so sick, are you? We knew it. 

I won't go any further into it, because the last thing I want to do is set an example for other Lyme sufferers that they should ever have to feel the need to validate the new world that this illness has created for them, and all the outrage, pain and struggle that can exist inside of it. But I am becoming curious as to how my story, which has been stretching on now for over a year, is being perceived. 

More specifically, I wonder how I - the old me, pre-illness- would feel reading this story if it were about someone else. Every week I meet with one or two Lyme patients, and through hearing their experiences, as well as certain excruciating moments of my own, I have been exposed to a level of suffering that the old me simply could not have understood.

 I can see the old me growing frustrated with the character on this blog, the girl who keeps assuring everyone she's getting better and yet she's still not in remission, she still cannot work full time, still has no children, why isn't she working just a little harder? Her words are becoming monotonous, sometimes even inconsistent. What could she possibly be doing with her time? She must not truly want to be healthy. At this point, this has to be of her own making. 

Are these the type of thoughts that would be running through my mind if I were to have read this just two years ago? I think yes, although it's painful to admit that. I've had similar notions in the past towards others whose pain completely outside my realm of understanding, whose misfortunes seemed endless, although I would never have had the indecency to question, blame, or accuse them directly. 

I have a friend with a similar strain of Borrelia as I do. She is quick witted and funny, curious and smart and proactive. Recent photos show her laughing on a dock that stretches into a foggy lake in the early morning, cuddling a baby nephew at a birthday party with a look of dreamy contentment on her face. Yet she sleeps every night with a razor on her bedside table, the idea that she could choose to escape the pain and indignities of her illness being the most comforting thought to her, so soothing that it is what puts her to sleep. That is the maddening and nearly incomprehensible juxtaposition of invisible illness, and it makes sense to me if you do not understand. Two years ago, I certainly would not have understood.  

These photos are from a two day trip last week to Folly Beach outside of Charleston, South Carolina. Whitney had been spending some time on the ocean after a wedding, and was feeling so renewed and healthy being so close to the water that she invited me down for a mini Lyme retreat. The past week I've been on an antibiotic "holiday"as directed by my doctor, hoping that my immune system will kick into action and do some work on its own. These holidays are not holidays at all, it was a week of extreme fatigue and spasms and a pounding heart. You may have even seen me up on Haywood Avenue, sitting down on the sidewalk every few yards as I try and walk the dog. The five hour trip to Folly Beach sounded daunting, but I knew that water and sun and a change of scenery would be a real benefit to my health overall. 

We had a wonderful few days, but you probably would not have wanted to come along. Whitney's health began to crash when I arrived, and despite the slow improvement in my strength and energy that accompanied the joy of being on the ocean, I still couldn't venture more than a few minutes out of the beach house. We went swimming in the salty, sun warmed Atlantic, relishing the power of the waves crashing over our heads, and then laid down in the house with the shades drawn for an hour. Another excursion, this time to a local park on an estuary, but it was too hot and there was no shade- we paid the entrance fee but we had to leave. 

The trip was not without triumphs. On the advice of one of my readers, we found our way to the enormous, ancient "Angel Oak" on Johns Island. We found a farmers market with a cooling breeze and a Venezuelan food truck, we both slept well from the intense heat of the day, we ate Cuban Food outside in a rain storm and enjoyed one another's company immensely. I was able to return to the state park in the evening, when it was overcast. On the third day we had planned to venture into Charleston to explore a local homeware store I was interested in, and stroll down Broad Street, but instead we drove home. We were both crashing quickly, and what a luxury it was to not feel guilt about ending a trip early. 

I treasure these trips with Whitney, feeling such a close and almost cozy kinship with her. But the illness flared viciously for both of us upon returning home. This week, I gratefully began what should be my final, four month long protocol with the addition of Rifabutin, a brand new antibiotic for me. As soon as I was back on the killing drugs, I felt better, lighter and stronger. I am doing the work. I am doing all of the work. I want to be healthy again more than I've wanted anything else in my life- but then again, you understand that.  

Catch up on the Lyme Disease Story by clicking here
Thank you for helping me afford this treatment, which is not covered by insurance.