My Story
My story has many colours, the variety of which I have only realised recently by looking back retrospectively. I was a seemingly very healthy young working mother. I led a busy life, working full time with two small children and all that goes with juggling that scenario. I was also an avid runner and exercised regularly in the beautiful place I live, in Killarney Co. Kerry Ireland.
In 2015 my husband and I were struggling to acknowledge that perhaps our little boy at only aged 3 had some serious health issues. We couldn’t quite explain one particular issue but rather numerous small things that lead to an unhappy exhausted small boy complaining of pain around his body and “bad things” in his head. He didn’t seem to fit the bill with anything in particular he was tested for by the various doctors we visited.
His ill health also coincided with the arrival of his little sister so it was difficult to judge what was going on. It wasn’t until I started to feel unwell myself in late 2015 that unknowingly this would lead to us both getting a diagnosis of Lyme disease. A diagnosis that ended up to be very difficult to come by, I was 15 months experiencing a myriad of debilitating symptoms and our son Jack had spent 2 years of his precious little life not feeling well.
Our story changed because I had the misfortune, or sometimes I feel the fortune, of getting bitten by ticks myself in the autumn of 2015, two years after our son had his tick bite. I had two classic bull’s eye rashes appear on my legs that I now know are synonymous with tick-transmitted infections such as Lyme disease. Unfortunately I was ignorant at the time as to what a serious situation could arise from this.
Lyme disease never entered my head. I ignored the rashes but I started to feel unwell six to eight weeks later with fatigue and drenching night sweats. This developed into many random symptoms over time including vertigo, facial nerve pain, ear pain, pins and needles in my feet, migratory joint pain, to name a few, along with unimaginable fatigue that never lifted no matter how much I slept.
By this time, I think our GP was at a complete loss as to what to do with Jack and I. However, in one of the consultations she asked had we ever been bitten by a tick and suffered a bull’s eye rash. This was the beginning of getting some direction to our illness.
Following diagnosis, we began a long and complicated treatment journey; this involved an array of medical and alternative therapies. Six months into treatment when our son was not improving we started to look further into alternative therapies and came across Biomagnetic Pair Therapy due to success stories from other Lyme disease patients. It really was the game changer for us and we finally started to see improvements that over time brought profound healing and restoration to both of us.
The recovery from a chronic illness takes time and requires a change in many areas of a person’s wellbeing and lifestyle. I became a Medical Biomagnetist by accident; I wanted to do more for our recovery at home as we had to travel quite a distance for this therapy. As soon as I started learning and practicing this therapy I was consumed by it and there was no going back.
This therapy can offer treatment for so many areas of well being because it looks at the body as a whole. It has allowed me to view all the parts of myself, not just the illness and to contemplate why some people get sick and some don’t. It encompasses all systems of the body that can be out of balance, including emotional issues, chronic stress, toxicity levels, immunological response and can also help to induce relaxation.
The way we live today in a constant busy switched on environment can cause us to lose touch with ourselves and our state of well being. It is important to take time to assess all areas of your health and seek out something that will bring some form of calm and balance into your life. Don’t wait for a major event to stop you in your tracks and make you change lanes as it did for me.
The saying “Listen to your body when it whispers so you will never have to hear it scream” is a real nugget of wisdom.
These events in my life were also the beginning of an awakening for me to the dangers of ticks and to the prevalence of them in our local environment. Not just in our parks but in our farms, forestry, mountains and often back gardens. The raising of awareness around behaving safely in tick habitats, awareness on what Lyme disease is and the limited means we have to test for it, is a very important task and something I hope to continue to push forward.