Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Amy Tan

Amy Tan, the author of the Joy Luck club amongst others, is also a victim of Lyme disease. She has a section on her website where she describes some of the more bizarre psychological manifestations

Hallucinations began, what I now realize were likely simple partial seizures, the result of lesions on my brain. I saw people walking into my room, two girls jumping rope, numbers spinning on an odometer, a fat poodle hanging from the ceiling.

and her difficulty in getting an accurate diagnosis and treatment:

after I started antibiotic treatment I took part in a study in which my blood was sent out to five different labs for the ELISA and Western Blot. The results were all over the place -with Lyme-specific bands lighting up in one lab and not the other. There was almost not a single consistency.

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