Friend with CLD or Chronic Lyme Disease and depression

I have been in a rough stressful situation for the past week. I found out that my friend Nicole has Chronic Lyme Disease and it's a serious disease. She told me that she used to go up to a doctor in Wisconsin and had to pay $500 each time to get her medications but 2 months ago her doctor got shut down(treatment of Lyme Disease is highly controversial) so now she has only 2 months worth of medication left. The disease has left her with 20/100 vision and she says that it's slowly destroying her brain and body. I'm so scared for her and i don't know what to do or say. Plus now she is trying to find a new doctor and the only one she found is all the way in Connecticut but it will cost $500 for her to start off. Plus she says she's nobody in school and she sometimes drinks on the weekends. She's also only 16!! I didn't quite know exactly where to post this.

Why does your friend need to go so far for a new doctor? If she's already been diagnosed and prescribed medication, can't she just see a local doctor to have the prescriptions refilled as necessary?

Is there a school counsellor she can talk to for support?

Platypus wrote:Why does your friend need to go so far for a new doctor? If she's already been diagnosed and prescribed medication, can't she just see a local doctor to have the prescriptions refilled as necessary?

Is there a school counsellor she can talk to for support?

The issue with CLD is that insurance companies do not usually cover the long term treatment because there is controversy to whether the Lyme bacteria stays in the body that long.. There are no local doctors that are willing to prescribe the powerful medications that kill the Lyme bacteria to her because they fear that the Lyme bacteria will develop a resistance to the medication. Although that is possible it's better than having the disease progress. So now she has to find doctors out of state which can be very expensive. This is what lyme disease dot org says about chronic lyme disease.

If Lyme disease is not diagnosed and treated early, the Lyme spirochetes can spread and may go into hiding in your body. Weeks, months or even years later you may have problems with your brain and nervous system, muscles and joints, heart and circulation, digestion, reproductive system, and skin. Symptoms may disappear even without treatment and different symptoms may appear at different times.

and here's a graph showing the most common neurological symptoms http://lymedisease.org/lyme101/lyme_dis ... ptoms.html

I just don't know what to do at this point.

I'm familiar with Lyme disease. Well not personally familiar, but I am aware of the symptoms and controversy. From what I've read, there is a lack of scientific evidence to justify long-term antibiotic therapy for Lyme disease. Long-term antibiotic treatment is associated with risks and negative side effects, rather than any improvement of patient condition. I think if no local doctors will continue your friend's medication, there may be valid reasons. Could it not be that some your friend's symptoms have a cause other than Lyme disease? And that all the focus on Lyme disease could be delaying a full diagnosis and more appropriate treatment?

Dja427 wrote:I just don't know what to do at this point.

I would support your friend emotionally (listen to her, ask her how she is etc.) and encourage her to seek counselling as well as a new local doctor.

If you are finding this too draining, don't take on all your friend's problems. They are not your problems to solve. As much as you may want to help her, you can only do so much. Look after yourself too.

They don't know what else it could be since this is after she was diagnosed with regular Lyme disease so they then diagnosed her with CLD. It's hard to find an explanation as to why the symptoms linger on. Maybe it's some sort of chronic autoimmune reaction to the lyme disease that's going on idk but no matter what it is, it's a terrible beast.

Well, I'm the bearer of bad news lately. Another friend of mines parents are getting a divorce.

At the risk of sounding like an uncaring Therapist: How does all this affect you? What do you feel when you hear these things going on in your friends' lives? If it is simply empathy and sympathy you feel it should not make you so depressed to see these things happen. Is there maybe an underlying reason why these things affect you so deeply?

Sorry if I sound like a shrink but I was just wondering why these things affect you so deeply. When bad things happened to my friends I was sad with them and offered to listen but it did not drive me into a serious state of depression...

Good Luck and stay strong!