Lyme Disease Blues

It seems likely that every fatherhood has specific, sometimes crushing, difficulties. The first serious difficulty for me has been Lyme Disease. Diagnosed two weeks before our daughter was born, I was started on a yearlong course of antibiotics the day after her birth. What this has meant is that at a time when a healthy person would have been pushed to the very limit of sanity by the new responsibilities, I have started each day with about a quarter of the normal energy I enjoyed pre-Lyme. (We reckon I’d had it for several months, if not years, before being diagnosed.)

Lyme has not diminished my joy as a new father. I am present for an incredible amount of domestic bliss – which I’ll write about at length down the road. But what Lyme has also given me are frequent intense headaches and eye-socket pain, migrating patches of pins and needles all over my body, mild arthritis in my extremities, extraordinary moodiness, chronic forgetfulness, and severe, nearly relentless exhaustion. As I write this post, my eyes feel like two bowls of dull, but intense, pain.

Meanwhile, the disease’s mental, spiritual, and emotional aspects make the physical stuff seem pretty tame. At a time when giving of myself has never been more necessary, I am left so depleted by my roster of tasks that I lose perspective completely. I feel not only that I am tired, but that I am wounded – near death, almost. To fight the good fight, I receive acupuncture, practice tai chi, eat well, surf (it exhausts me but leaves me feeling whole), and focus on my healing as though it were one of my central responsibilities, which it is.

I hope, and assume, that I will look back on this period of the first twelve weeks of my daughter’s life and wonder how God got me through it so well. For despite the hardships of Lyme disease (and just of fatherhood itself), the last three months have probably been the best time in my life.