How, then, do we explain the fact that it helps people with chronic Lyme disease feel better?
My ambitious and once-athletic wife has wrestled with chronic Lyme disease for her entire adult life.
She has contended with unrelenting muscle stiffness, extreme chest pain, numbness in face, hands and feet, eye twitching, difficulty writing, speaking and forming words, memory loss, brain fog, incontinence, sinus and dental pain.
But mostly, almost constant fatigue: “It’s like your body is being invaded and your immune system is fighting a battle every single hour of your life,” she says. “You go to bed and sleep for 10 or 11 hours but when you wake up, you’re still exhausted. Your body’s been battling the bacteria all night long.”
For my wife, Lyme disease (named after the Connecticut town where…
6 Ways to Be Better Under It
I wrote these words in a writer’s notebook when I was a high-strung, painfully sensitive 18-year-old:
The only way to find happiness in your lifetime is by always trying to be the calm in the center of the storm.
As it turns out, I somehow found happiness; more likely, it found me. But that “calm in the center of the storm?” Didn’t happen. It eluded me then, and it eludes me now.
For years, I have gravitated to people who naturally possess that unshakeable Zen-ness I so admire. I think specifically of my dear friend and personal guru, Cam. In…
Letter to a Father with Alzheimer’s
Dad,
So, I have this memory. You were there, too; but don’t worry if you don’t remember. I can remember for you.
It’s a hot, breeze-less summer day in 1971, and Hatzic Lake is lukewarm and the color of milky coffee that’s been left on the counter all morning. Motorboats tear across the water, yanking water-skiers across the surface of the lake, filling the air with a sound like a swarm of angry wasps. You are chest deep in the water, with your feet braced in the soft, muddy lake bed. …
Here’s what happened when a sensitive, liberal, bookish musician asked for the hand of this man’s daughter
To understand my father-in-law, Weston, you need to see his man-cave. His wood-paneled basement den in Nanaimo, British Columbia is a cozy but somewhat cramped archive of the wildlife that Weston has, in his lifetime, either shot, fished or wrestled to the ground with his bare hands. Represented are: two species of African kudu (a reclusive, jungle-dwelling deer), a warthog, two different kinds of impala, a blue wildebeest, an eland, a gemsbok, a blesbok and a magnificent Cape buffalo. Rounding out the collection are a Fallow deer and a Blacktail deer, more antlered ungulates that Weston shot locally. It’s a…
Go Ahead and Laugh: Writing Letters Was Actually Pretty Radical
I miss writing letters.
More truthfully, I don’t miss the cramp in my right hand. I don’t miss running out of space and having to jam run-on thoughts up the margins of the paper. I don’t miss how long it took to get a response to nagging questions, such as “Are you still my girlfriend? I had to ask, since you referred to me as ‘Richard’ in your most recent salutation…” What I do regret, is the loss of the intimacy.
In my writing studio, I have a cardboard shoe-box in which I keep all the letters I received between…
