More Lyme side-effects and some thoughts

So six weeks into my treatment, two weeks into double the doxy dose.  I am feeling better and worse.  Better because the pain is still not bad and my eyes continue to be good.  There is a light at the end of this tunnel and I find myself looking forward to the day I can reclaim some of my dreams in life.  The day when just getting through the day is not my only goal.  Worse because some of the new side effects are pretty bad and I have no energy.  I am still tired and weak, with more neuro symptoms now, tingling and burning in my hands, a general feeling of wrongness and agitation, light and sounds bother me still and I get weird vertigo here and there, I also feel like I have trouble thinking and reasoning and the trouble speaking is still an issue here and there.  I lose my voice on and off, but that happened before a few years ago so It was not such a new thing.

I continue with my day to day tasks when most of the time I want to get a TV in my bedroom again and hibernate in there until I am better.  That is not an option though, I don't want to deal with any more de-conditioning than I already will.  So I continue to go shopping, walk around, and do a tiny bit of cooking and a lot more of laundry.  Packing has not been coming very well though I did manage to get rid of some more things in preparation. I am back to feeling mostly as if I am just existing instead of living.  My biggest hope is that I soon start to feel steadily better.

A chronic illness steals so much, friends, dreams, abilities, hobbies, and all the little things people take for granted that you just do everyday like hot showers, hair and makeup, long walks and museum visits (ok maybe not every day but regularly).  I want to be done with this Lyme disease so I can feel like I have the hope of enjoying life most days instead of only being able to enjoy it occasionally on my good days.

I watched Julie & Julia today (again) and it reminded me of how much I miss cooking, its one of the things I have done as simply or as little as possible for a while now.  Mostly I am too tired to do anything that takes longer than a few minutes at a time and honestly right now there is not much I actually want to eat.  The Doxy  kills the appetite and upsets my stomach, its rather like being pregnant in the first trimester, things smell and taste badly and I have to bribe myself with junk that I should not be eating.  I also can't tell if I am hungry or nauseated half the time.  On the up side chocolate makes me really sick so that addiction was cut off rather quickly. I have lost a little weight in the past 2 weeks so I guess I can't complain about that side effect. I do need to make a concerted effort to eat healthy food even when nothing sounds good. I do have to eat something when I take the medication or I get more than just a little sick.

All in all I suppose the treatment is going as planned, I knew it wouldn't be easy, though, of course, I hoped it would go faster.