When you listen to a person tell their story about Lyme's there is one common thread that links them all together. See Lyme disease is different for every person because Lyme’s is usually accompanied by a combination of different bacteria in your body. These co-infections attack different people differently based on their individual immune system. But there is usually one thing that is the same in every story, “my medical doctor did not listen to me”.
I was naïve I know, I believed it would be different for us. The family doctor that I have, who had agreed to take Kevin on as a patient, has showed he does believe in natural medicine in the past. He has not shied away from it or said that it was bad. He has encouraged my Dad in taking vitamins and was the one that told my Dad that Vitamin D can help fight COVID and he should tell his customers to take extra Vitamin D *(2,000 units or as recommended by your doctor). I naïvely did not take the stories that I heard for face value, I believed truly in my heart that our story would be different.
I am not going to share the name of our doctor out of respect to him. Though this experience was very hard on both of us, I do not believe him to be a bad doctor. He has years of experience and has helped lots of people. His specialty is with all things heart related and people have had great success with him in these areas.
Our experience in the doctor's office is what most every Lyme patient experiences and it is so sad. I am going to do my best at explaining our experience for you. You will be able to pull your own conclusions to how we were treated but I can tell you when we got out to the car I cried and yelled and ranted for a good 5 minutes before I was okay to drive away. We felt disrespected, I think that is the best word to use, we were made to feel stupid and unknowing, little people in comparison to the “all-knowing doctor” that he is.
The week before I had dropped off a copy of a list of Kevin’s symptoms, a health/life history, and the positive Lyme’s test results from California, along with a note stating that we had not realized that he wanted to do a Lyme’s test so we had already done one using IGeneX labs. I was trying to be respectful and give him the information that he needed to treat Kevin the best that he could since Kevin is a new patient for him.
The receptionist had not given him the papers before we were there so he spent about 30 seconds looking over all of the sheets, one full page of symptoms, 2 pages of health history and 4 pages of Lyme test. He told us that he cannot use the test because it is from the states and he told us that the test was wrong, his test (a Canadian medical test that targets acute Lyme) was better and it was negative therefore Kevin does not have Lyme’s (we believe Kevin has chronic Lyme disease which many doctors in Canada don’t believe exists). He told us that we need to stop chasing after every disease of the month and that the only way for Kevin to get better is if he will just admit that he has depression and anxiety. He went on to tell us the year he graduated from medical school and his long list of accomplishments that he has had in his career, all of which were very impressive but none of them had anything to do with mental health or infectious diseases. If he had a long list of mental health accomplishments in his career it would have made sense why he was telling us this but it really just felt that he was trying to gain dominance over us. He told us how much money he was making per visit and that Naturopaths were only out there to get your money and send you home with all of these vitamins and supplements that do not work anymore. The amount he said wasn’t much and he reasoned that he wasn’t doing this for the money. He told us that the only way he would continue being Kevin’s doctor is if he never goes back to the naturopath again and told us we shouldn’t do any research regarding health.
He made cultural and sexist biases towards Kevin with labelling him a farmer, a closed off male, and that he went to Belize for a mission trip. When Kevin tried to explain that he had actually lived (and was born) in Belize for some time and that is why we wanted to see an infectious disease specialist due to the high number of parasites/infections down there, he cut Kevin off. He told Kevin that if he had any infections, he would be dead, or have a very high fever. So to this day the doctor believes that Kevin was only in Belize for a short mission trip unless he has read the history outline that I wrote up for him.
The reason that we need the medical doctor so bad is because Kevin’s EI is going to be running out next month and so we need to get him signed up for long-term disability benefits through Kevin’s workplace. We need a long form filled out by the doctor in order to make that happen. We did ask if he will fill out this form and he asked if we will agree to his treatment plan, he would only fill out the form if we followed his plan. His plan is for Kevin to continue to see the counselor and then they will make a treatment plan together; he also needs to fill out a survey about depression and another one about anxiety. Right now, we are praying that the counselor will be able to talk to the doctor and get us set on a good path. We, at this point, do not want any anti-anxiety or anti-depressants (firstly because we don’t think this is the root of Kevin’s symptoms and because he isn’t mentally feeling depressed or anxious). We will be continuing to see the naturopath but we will no longer be talking about any of those treatments with our doctor or asking him for further testing. We are also on the lookout for a new doctor but because of the benefits it makes that tricky.
Lyme's is not a new disease; the bacteria has been around for hundreds of years. It is not a rare disease, but it is often not diagnosed or recognized in the Canadian Health Care System especially once it becomes chronic. Chronic Lyme disease changes your life and I wish that the Canadian Health Care System would recognize it and not make patients feel like they are making it up and it is all in their head. I almost started crying right in the appointment because of how rude our doctor was talking to us, people have told me that I should have. The feelings I felt during this appointment are never feelings that anyone should have sitting in a doctor's office.
