visit to Dr. Streit Lyme Disease Specialist May 24, 2011

May 24, 2011 Visit to Dr Streit in Howell, NJ

Today it was as if I was in a dream. My head hurt a little. So did my knee. I could not sleep last night. Today the weather was very warm and jungly and lovely and I wore a skirt for the first time this year.

I drove to Howell NJ and arrived at the doctor’s office, just past a K Mart and a Wa-wa, 40 minutes early. A strange brown building on the side of a busy road.

I began asking myself, “A doctor I found on the internet? On the Internet!? What am I doing? What was I thinking? Why am I here? The internet? Really?”

I considered not going in.

But I went in thinking I could always leave, or opt out of more bloodwork, or something, anything.

But within thirty seconds of entering the pleasantly well lit building I was at ease. Well more than that, there was a strange and glowing Twilight Zone feeling, an aura about the place. It was nothing about the décor. I mean it was a traditional doctor’s office in every sense of it, but there was an atmosphere that made me feel I was both in the right place and in a dream.

On the wall were many awards the doctor had received, including Patient’s Choice Awards for 2008 and 2010. The women at the front desk were exceedingly pleasant.

Strangely I felt like I was with my people and in the company of peers. The patient ahead of me was having disability forms filled out. I could feel how tired she was, though she looked normal. She was lean and young and well groomed.

It was so strange. The waiting room was filled with people almost exactly like me, woman about my age who looked sort of young and fit but you could feel in all of us this something not right.

Though it was as if not long ago you would have found us all out on a hike together, gardening, wandering through the woods with our dogs.

It was like I had found my people. My sick people, but my people still.

In the past three years, I have so often either been in an ER with people who have been in accidents or who are giving birth, or in offices like the cardiologist or the first and second neurologist where I am thirty or forty years younger than everyone else sitting around me.

I filled out paperwork. I read magazines. I was led to a small but pleasant exam room.

Soon Dr Streit appeared. He looked at my recent labs, asked me a few questions, listened as I described my odyssey, and I could hear myself, as if I were someone other than myself, talking about me…

He took my bp which was a very normal 120/80.
He examined me as a typical MD might. Then he did some muscle testing, which surprised me but which was fine.

And then he said that he was quite sure I had advanced Lyme disease, from what he had seen and heard.

And he was very interested in the head pains that would wake me up, and the night sweats, and how I would wake in pain and terror. “What did others make of that?” he asked me. “ No one has had any idea,” I said. “They just give me painkillers that strangely don’t seem to work.”

He drew my blood expertly and kindly, and I said I knew the other tests I had had were considered unreliable, but were these tests he was doing tests he felt confident in, that they would rule in or out Lyme and various coinfections?

Yes he said. And I said Good and described the strange voodoo aspect and the excruciating pain and that if I didn’t have an infectious disease from North America that I wondered if I had picked something up in Africa in 2008.

And that is when he told me that he was quite sure I had Lyme as I was a classic case, and that he also suspected I had babesia, another tickborne infection, and that it is like malaria and that they treat it with anti malarial drugs.

Intriguing.

So my blood is being sent to California. The results will be back in 3-4 weeks.


I told Dr. Streit I was most grateful for his help and asked him how he ended up a Lyme specialist. He said he had always been interested in medicine and helping people, and about twenty years ago he began to see many mystery patients, “exactly like you”, he said. “Very very ill but tests wouldn’t show anything”, and so he began doing research.

I told him how grateful I was to all the women at the front desk who had helped me on the phone and in person. “Yes, well they were all once Lyme sufferers too.”

It was such an oasis of kindness. So much kindness there.

I left there feeling strange and dreamy.

I drove to where I could turn around and was compelled to go into a TJ Maxx, really, compelled, which is uncharacteristic of me for the past two to three years when I only do what is absolutely necessary and always choose the shortest most direct path between necessary points.

I walked right into TJ Maxx and bought a pink sunhat.

This reminds of how earlier this year when I had my session with Olympia, I then went and bought some party shirts.

Then I went and got an iced tea and a salted caramel square.

It was a very Alice in Wonderland sort of day.