Neurologic Lyme disease

The first time I met a group of severely disabled Lyme disease patients I spent hours listening to their stories, some of them heartbreaking, and mourned, with them, their lives of frustration and pain. A month later, when I met the same patients again, several could not recall me. At first I was insulted. Had I been that forgettable, my empathy that banal?

Then I realized something I had never fully grasped despite my research, despite my own Lyme disease. Unless you have personally encountered the shadowland of the most afflicted patients-a world eclipsed by strange lapses of memory, broken speech, and the struggle to follow the simplest train of thought-you cannot begin to fathom the dense, disabling fog that may accompany the disease.

To this day, popular perception holds that Lyme disease is an affliction of knees, characterized by swollen joints and an inability to serve in tennis or descend a flight of stairs. Musculoskeletal symptoms can be a hallmark of Lyme disease, but the early rheumatologists had recognized just one part of the elephant-it would take more time, and a broad array of specialists, for the widening picture to emerge.

For full text of the online version of Psychology today by Pamela Weintraub on December 30, 2008 - 3:06pm in Emerging Diseases