Two and a Half Friends

A week or so after I saw my friend and her luggage to the car that was waiting to whisk her to the airport, I happened to reacquaint myself with an old friend–one of my best friends from high school in Michigan. I thought I remembered something about her having MS, and so I thought I would just talk with her to get her view on the whole subject. One of the first things she asked me was... you guessed it: have you been tested for Lyme? Well, I had told her, like I told my other friend, no, no, this isn't Lyme. But then she went on to explain how there are several types of Lyme tests, and that the main one isn't very accurate, blah, blah, blah... I didn't pay much attention, really, because I thought, "I have been tested... The modern medical community surely would give me the better of the two tests. I'm sure it's not Lyme." Oh. Yeah.

While waiting for my big Neuromuscular Specialist appointment, I had a vitamin level followup visit with my Internist. I thought, "it can't do any harm to ask for another Lyme test." So I did. She told me in the strictest of confidence in her training, that the test I had earlier had certainly given any infection the proper incubation time to show a positive result, but that she would be happy to run another test, if it would make me happy. Guess what? It was negative. Same testing procedure, and it still came back negative. What is it that Einstein said about how to define insanity? Let's see... doing the same thing the same way and expecting different results. Yeah, it's something like that.

But for the time being, I was set at ease.

It must've been maybe just a few days after my long overdue phone call with my high school friend, when an acquaintance, who really had barely known me for a minute, asked about the possibility of Lyme. I couldn't believe it! Here I was, not really wanting to talk about my physical dilemma with a freshly-made acquaintance, and they went and were shoving their Lyme theories down my throat! I was astounded. Truly astounded.

I mean, how many times must someone be bludgeoned over the head by something as far away from the "truth" as I had been? These people were unrelenting! But I digress... there would be two more people actually who would ask me the $5 question before I got the gumption I needed to do what was needing to be done.