5 long years...

Today marks 5 years since Tim started his Lyme treatment.  Had you talked to us then, we would have never in a million years guessed that this is where we'd be today.

To back up a little but, I'll start at the beginning and share some of what led up to the momentous day of beginning Lyme Disease treatment...

Tim had always been a very healthy and fit guy.  He always had physically demanding jobs and physically demanding hobbies and enjoyed it all immensely.  When he started getting sick enough to skip work often (after having never done that in his life) and coming home from his nightly runs and weekly basketball games with knee pain, we knew something was wrong.  He spent 5 months in early 2009 in bed as we went from doctor to doctor to doctor.

Our best estimate is that he saw about 30 doctors in that 5 months.  Based on the experiences of acquaintances, hours upon hours of online research, and a very kind-hearted doctor-turned-Lyme-advocate that we credit for saving Tim's life, we figured out at last that it was Lyme, no thanks to any of the dozens of doctors we sought for help.

Once we knew what we were fighting, we assumed it would be easy to take care of it and get back to life as normal.  If that were true, I wouldn't be writing this post today.  At the time, there were only 3 Lyme doctors in our state, and only 1 of them was accepting new patients.  It was going to be 3 months until we could get Tim in to see him, and we truly didn't think Tim would live long enough to make it to the appointment based on how quickly he had been deteriorating.  This was April of 2009.

After lots of research, we learned that there was a doctor in New Jersey who specializes in Lyme and had an opening in 2 weeks.  We packed up the kids in the mini-van and drove 24 hours each way for a 2 hour doctor's appointment.  That was such a momentous day.  After not knowing whether Tim would make it out alive from this devastating mystery illness, we finally had hope.  That appointment was on May 4, 2009.

We drove home and picked up Tim's prescription at the pharmacy on the way home after a 12+ hour day of driving.  He took a picture of the prescription because of what it represented to him.  Hope.

Also, as a bit of an aside, I'd like to share a couple other pictures with you.  These were taken on January 1, 2009, and they represent the last of our former life.  We took our kids sledding that day and were able to have fun and climb up the hill over and over with them, and we had no idea that within a few short weeks Tim would be in bed fighting for his life.  At this time, Sarah was 3.5, Andrew had just turned 1, and we didn't have Jonathan yet.