Anonymous Lyme disease story

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When Staton Rabin was three years old, her parents offered to buy her a toy typewriter. She insisted on a real one, and has been writing ever since.

In 1994, while working for movie studios as a freelance story analyst and shortly after completing the manuscript for her first novel, Rabin came down with a mysterious illness. It started with arthritis-like pain in her right knee, and some weeks later evolved into crushing weakness, nausea, fevers, and burning pain in her muscles that she described as “feeling almost like I’d been poisoned”. Within a few more weeks she was mostly too weak to sit up or walk. The illness came in waves-- for hours she’d be crippled by it, then she’d seem to recover for a few hours. Eventually, those brief episodes of recovery stopped happening. Her GP at the time misdiagnosed her with “a virus”, and when she didn’t get well claimed there was nothing wrong with her, unplugged her IV dextrose at the hospital, and had her summarily discharged. “My father

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visited me in the hospital, at the time. He said I looked absolutely green, I was so ill. Yet that doctor dismissed me.”

Rabin went from hospital to hospital, seeking help and never doubting for a moment that she had contracted some sort of infection. But her symptoms were always dismissed and medical tests showed nothing except an occasional fever. She seemed to recover fully for a few weeks, then got even more ill than before and was virtually bed-ridden. What she didn’t know was that she had just entered phase two of her illness.

Then, one day, a neighbor told her that her symptoms sounded exactly like Lyme disease—an illness that had already infected several people on her block in Tarrytown. A recent California transplant, Rabin knew little about Lyme. She bought a book, COPING WITH LYME DISEASE, and realized that she had many of the symptoms of classic Lyme. She asked her new doctor at the time, who by coincidence happened to be an