To lyme or not to lyme

Hello there! I hope you all had a good weekend. It's been a good weekend for me as well despite one small problem I've spent a majority of it lying on the bed/couch feeling utterly exhausted. Even writing this blog post is a struggle because I just find it so hard to concentrate on anything, it feels like my mind has brushed its teeth put on its comfiest pjs and turned in for the night. Oh yea even though I'm utterly exhausted I usually find it extremely hard to fall asleep at night. Hence why I'm writing this blog post at 10.30pm. The reason why I'm so tired, my brain is mush and I'm writing in the late night hour is because I'm in the process of being diagnosed with Lyme disease.

I say in the process because Lyme disease can be hard to get a definitive diagnosis for, so even if you test negative on the blood test you can still have it. I have a wide range of Lyme symptoms and have already had three main co infections confirmed but once these last test results come back I should hopefully have a better picture of what's going on with me. So what exactly is Lyme disease I hear you ask? Well I am no authority on the subject by any means I can only tell you guys about my experience so far and what I've learnt along the way.

About two years ago I was bitten by a tick within Australia. My husband and I were going for a drive up in the hills, about 45 minutes from our home when the call of nature well... called! We pulled over onto a side road and I went to the toilet between the car and the start of the bush.  I was probably there for five minutes or so and didn't notice or feel anything. We drove home and everything was cool. The next day I woke up and don't remember feeling any different until about lunch time when I realised as I was driving that my knees were starting to feel sore. I had been hitting the gym pretty hard in the last few weeks in preparation for our upcoming wedding so I just put the pain down to over doing it with the weights. While driving I also went to brush my hair off my neck when I noticed the tiniest bump near my collar bone. I have two cats and often carry them over my shoulder when I pick them up. I remember thinking to my self 'damn those cats must have scratched me' causing me to bleed and form a little scab.

The next morning my knees were so sore that I could barely walk. As I was walking up this hill to get to work I had to pull my leg around in a circle to move forward as if they were in braces because I just couldn't bend them it hurt so bad. Again silly me just thought I had seriously over strained my knees by using the leg weights at the gym! I ended up leaving work early that day so I could go to the doctor and get my knees checked just in case. The pain level by this point had reached ten out of ten. I have absolutely no idea how I drove home in a manual the pain was excruciating! Unfortunately I couldn't get a doctor appointment until the following day so I decided to have a shower, relax and rest my aching knees. Whilst getting ready I looked more carefully at the little 'scab' on my neck. It felt like it was ready to fall off so cringing I decided to just pull the whole thing off. It was so hard to pull out! It was then that I had a closer look at it, a real close look... And I realised it was a bug!!! A tick to be precise :( I was so unbelievably grossed out about this that I freaked out quite a lot as you would imagine!

Funnily enough even though I've never knowingly encountered a tick before, I recognised it straight away and had the foresight to put it in a jar. Really because I didn't want to lose it and have it reattach to me! but also because the only thing I've ever heard about ticks is that they can carry lyme disease. I thought to myself strangely in that freaked out moment that I should keep the tick 'just in case'

Once it was removed and I had calmed down I decided to google ticks and Lyme disease. In all my years I've never encountered a tick and I've been camping in the bush plenty of times through out my childhood, so I really wanted to find out more about them. While reading up on Lyme disease I realised that one of the main symptoms was that it will affect your joints especially your knees as they are the biggest joints in your body. I decide to let the doctor know the next day what I thought had happened to me as I was convinced now that my knee pain was caused by the tick. 

The next day I saw the doctor and told her what had happened and what I had read on the internet. She examined the bite site to make sure there was no tick left behind and then agreed to prescribe me with two weeks of antibiotics. Even though I mentioned that I had read that two weeks wasn't long enough, she assured me that that was all I needed but to come straight back if the symptoms didn't start to dissipate in a day or so. She also sent me for a blood test to test for lyme disease even though she firmly stated that it didn't exist in Australia, she thought however I may just be experiencing another form of related infection. The test came back negative and after a few days my knees seemed to go back to normal and I felt fine. So I kept taking my antibiotics and forgot all about it.

A few weeks later however I noticed a lump under my skin near my collar bone. Worried I decided to book back into the doctor to have it checked out. I had to go to a different doctor this time as my other doctor was not available. My doctor had a look and confirmed that it was a lymph node. When I told him I had recently been bitten by a tick he put it down to the fact that my body was fighting the tick infection and thus my lymph nodes had come up in response. Little did I know that this was a sign that the Lyme disease was still active and progressing.

To cut a long story short for the next two years I starting accumulating a multitude of weird symptoms such as nerve pain,  pins and needles all over body, knife like headaches, extreme fatigue, weight gain, swollen glands in my throat, my face, nose and throat always felt swollen, I had hot flashes, tightness around my neck, unexplained depression and the thing that finally made me realise that there was something seriously wrong with me... all of my joints started clicking and hurting at the same time. It felt like they are just grinding in their socket! When I crouched down on my knees and then stood back up again, both my knees make a large cracking and popping noise. My jaw also constantly clicks and aches when I eat. 

I did go for numerous checkups for these symptoms during those two years. I had all of my blood levels checked but everything came back as normal. These symptoms would also come and go. So once they stopped and I felt better I forgot about them and continued on. Little did I know though that they would be back in a few weeks but always different. So I persisted on and as the years went by the symptoms got worse and worse. One day while I was looking up my various symptoms and possible causes I came across a lyme symptom check list. I looked down the list and basically checked  everyone of my symptoms off the list! I started to relise that it was quiet possible that I had never killed the bugs off in the beginning and that over the years it had just been going nuts enjoying free reign over my body.

I am of course seriously upset that if these doctors had been better educated about Lyme disease they would have relised that two weeks of antibiotics wasn't long enough to eradicate the diesease from the body and I wouldn't have spent the past two years suffering a multitude of symptoms and feeling like I'm a hypochondriac. But I do realise that as doctors they were simply following the medical guidelines set for all doctors in Australia. What I can't forgive is how the doctors treated me when I went back two years later asking them to retest me and investigate the possibility that I might still have Lyme disease.

The response I got when I asked my main doctor and another doctor to test me more thoroughly for lyme diesease was astounding. 'It doesn't exist here in Australia, two weeks is more than enough to treat any infection from a tick and (my favourite) 'there's nothing wrong with you, you must be depressed!' To me it's simple if you don't know what is making a person sick then why don't you simply come out with 'I don't know' and refer me to someone else. I don't think it's right to just put it down to the person being depressed. To be honest I was depressed by that point but it was because I had been sick for two years and no one believed there was anything wrong with me.

After leaving this last doctors office in tears, I got online and researched some more. After a lot of reading I found out that we had a lyme literate doctor in our area that actually acknowledge and treated lyme patients. I booked into this doctor and after a three month waiting period (yup that's how popular he is pretty weird considering no one in Australia is meant to have lyme) I finally saw him! He was great he listened to everything I had to say wrote down all my symptoms, looked at my past test results and then scheduled his own tests. He could see from previous tests (that I had sent over seas in desperation one day while waiting to see him) that I had tested for a few of the main co infections all ready but he asked me to send more urine and blood tests to an Australian clinic in Sydney to see if I would test positive for the main strain of lyme.

I will be seeing him again in February and will hopefully finally find out my results then. So there we go my little lyme journey so far :) I'd be lying if I said it has been easy these last few years but at the same time I am so grateful that I found that tick and pulled it off myself. If I hadn't found that tick who knows where I would be right now. You have to find the positive in everything or at least try to :) well the next blog post I write on lyme will hopefully come with a firm diagnosis!

Until then stay happy! 

Jen :p

Embrace your creativity # 2

Hello there! so this week I'm going to continue telling you about how I negotiated my way through my existential crisis and came out in one piece on the other side!

I have been working full time since university now for about 11 years and while I have really enjoyed all of my jobs and the people I have met, there has been something missing. The jobs would always start out ok I would very busy learning new job roles and duties, meeting people and forming relationships. But after a few years I found that I had pretty much learnt and mastered all I could in these jobs. They just stopped challenging me.

There wasn't really the opportunity to 'climb the corporate ladder' in these jobs and I guess in a sense I didn't really want to. Once I learnt the basics of the business I lost interest. I'm the type of person that always needs to be challenged and have a goal. This can be a blessing and a curse in a way. A curse because unless you have the get up and go to keep making new goals and challenging yourself you become extremely bored and remain in an eternal rut. If you're self motivated however and constantly challenge yourself, not only do you open up a million opportunities for yourself but you learn and grow more as a person. The more knowledge and wisdom you acquire in life the more you can fine tune who you are and exactly what it is that you want out of life! I seem to fluctuate between these two extremes, there are some things in my life I'm so determined to aim for and persist with until I have achieved it and than other times I allow self doubt and fear to take over! 

So here I am in my current job, it's been 7 years now and the challenge of learning has definitely worn off. But technically its a good job that pays well and has good benefits. I had been stuck in a rut career wise for a few years but didn't really realise how bad it was until I had an existential crisis. 

This existential crisis snuck up on me quietly. I was very happy in my personal life and would leave the house every morning with a smile on my face excited for the new day ahead but when I walked into that office the reality of yet another day of 'the same old stuff' hit me. By the time I returned home the life had been completely sucked out of me and so I recharged by spending time with my family and friends doing normal fun life stuff but also losing myself in endless episodes of the bold and the beautiful (don't judge me the bold and the beautiful is a quality show... no really I'm serious!)

Being a bold and beautiful enthusiast I would look on you tube for the current American episodes that had been illegally uploaded (disclaimer: illegal uploads are wrong) We're about a month or more behind in Australia so it's a thrill to know what's happening ahead of time! Living on the edge oh yea! ;) While watching these videos I kept seeing a picture of a guy in a hat on the left hand side of the screen that you tube was suggesting to me. I ignored this image for a few days when finally out of annoyance/curiosity I decided to click on it and see what it was all about.

It was a video made by a you tuber called danisnotonfire and watching this video was like taking the red pill in the movie the matrix. Little did I know once I pressed play on that video there was no going back for me! Now you tubers was a totally new thing for me, up until this point I had always thought of you tube as basically a place for funny cat videos and of course illegal uploaded episodes of the bold and beautiful. What had I been doing with my life?? I hadn't even scratched the suface of the youtube world! Well to cut a long story short my education of the world of youtube had begun. I watched endless videos of Danisnotonfire, Amazingphil , The Superamazingproject, Tomska, Ninebrassmonkeys, Jack and Dean, Carrie Fletcher, Sprinkleofglitter, Zoella, Paperlillies, Catrific, Mr Kate, Troye Sivan, Kickthepj, Crabstickz the list could go on forever there are too many favourites to mention. 

Watching all of these guys making videos and expressing them selves creatively really hit home to me, This this is what I had been missing! You see for a really long time I had been burying my head in the sand hoping that in some way it would block out the relentless question in my head that I just didn't have an answer for..

What am I meant to be doing with my life?

I still don't know the answer to this question yet but to quote Oprah Winfrey 

'What I know for sure' is that I am a creative person. Being creative makes me feel alive! It defines who I am and I've realised that it is the secret to understanding what I should be doing with my life. 

The life lesson that I learnt during all of this is to find out what your passionate about in this life and then fill and surround your days, weeks and months with those things!! 

I realised that there is a sense of joy and happiness that you recieve from doing something that you really love that is integral to the wellbeing of us humans. There I was so busy juggling all the balls of being a responsible adult that I had forgotten one of them and that was self fulfilment. So with this new found enlightenment I decided to put a plan into action. I sat down and wrote out a list under three headings,

1) What do I love

2) What am I good at

3) What have I always wanted to do

I seriously recommend doing this list it really helps put things in perspective and having it written down on a physical peice of paper some how made it feel more attainable than just being a floating thought in my head.

From looking at this list I gained a better understanding of my self and what I needed to feel happy and fulfilled. It also helped me set myself some new goals. I realised that I had always loved writing and that I wanted to start my own blog post and develop my writing skills. I realised that I missed media, cameras and editing and so I decided to try starting my own you tube channel and making short films. Finally I decided that I wanted to incorporate more creativity in my day to day life. I wanted to develop new skills and start doing those things that I had been putting off for years! For example I cook everyday but I wanted to become better at it master more recipes and well basically get my jamie Oliver on! Also refurbish old furniture and design new furniture, learn to play the piano, read more books and appreciate more music!

Once I started that list i just found more and more things to add to it. Honestly with all the awesome things to do in life who has time for fulltime work I ask you?? :p I still have those days at work (like we all do) when it seems like the working day will never end. But it doesn't bother me like it used to. I'm very grateful that I have a job that is helping support me and my family and I now know that as long as I keep being creative in my life I'll be ok. And who know if I work hard enough and develop my skills I may be lucky enough to turn my creative hobbies into a full time career :)

Well that's it for now! Hopefully your eyeballs are still functioning after reading that long convoluted blog post lol but more than anything I hope it inspires some of you to find your passion in life and make it a part of your daily life!

Untill next time peeps!

Jen :p

Embrace your creativity # 1

Why hello there! my name is Jenny and this is my blog soverywitty! I decided to start this blog as I needed to find myself a creative outlet again. I've always had the 'need' to be creative in one way or another, whether it be baking a cake, making my own short films, growing vegetables in the garden, renovating my house or turning my hand to some craft project that has caught my eye. However somewhere along the way I kind of let this love of creating slip and general day to day life got in the way. This blog post is the first instalment of how I found me again and learnt the first of many valuable life lessons  :)

I always intended on having a career that involved some form of creativity, in fact from a young age I dreamed of being a director. When I was about four, my mum took me into her university where she was studying to talk to one of her lecturers. While looking for this lecturer we happened to walk into this huge auditorium, it was the universities tv studio and it was filled with lights and cameras. I just remember looking around in awe and being so impressed! That moment made a huge impression on me and ever since then I have always had a great interest in media and film making. From then on  I would often watch an amazing movie or stage production (Phantom of the Opera tops them all so far) and cry afterwards just because I wanted to be apart of something so amazing! ha ha  bit lame I know ;)  I didn't really get to indulge my new found interest until I reached high school where they had media and drama classes. Media was by far and away my favourite class, it was probably the only class other than drama where I received a's and b's. 

It was in my year 11 media class that I made my first ever short film called 

'the Exam' It was set to the very beautiful music of Tchaikovsky's 'Dance of the Swans' It is the gripping emotional journey of a student making their way to their exam which ended with a twist of course ;) I was so dedicated to  this film that I wrote the whole story board and timed each scene down to the second. Due to the constraints of technology and lack of knowledge I had to literally count the seconds when I was filming to ensure it corresponded correctly to the music. Yes an extreme old school way of doing it! But it worked! Well mostly...

We didn't have the technology back then to just lay a soundtrack down and edit it, I used an analogue editing suite which was attached to two vcrs you pressed ok for the input and ok for the out point (what I hear you say?!) If you got three of these done and then realised you had made a mistake you had to start again. Needless to say this took me a long time and I wasn't even able to add the music to the film as I had a crappy media teacher who couldn't show me how to use the equipment. So you had to play the tape and the cd at the same time to watch the film! Ahh yep seamless and professional from the start :p

Because of my love for media I decided to go to university and study it for a career. Studying at uni was like a dream come true for me. I loved learning how to use the cameras, edit and run live productions. I felt like I had finally found something that I could potentially be really great at! There was one thing though that I wasn't really prepared for and that was the level of competition amongst all the film makers. The majority were just normal lovely people but unfortunately there was also a lot of pretentious twits who enjoyed telling people about the 'funding' they had obtained for their film. It kind of spoiled the experience for me in a way and even though logically I knew these people just needed to be ignored, I let them intimidate me at the time. I also did a great job of letting my insecurities talk me into thinking that I wasn't good enough at film and I unfortunately didn't grab the opportunity as much as I should have. As a result I ended up working almost full time in the last year of university. The freedom of money and independence slowly took over and after graduating I didn't pursue it any further.

I don't regret working full time I gained a lot of life experience and met some some lifelong friends in the process. I really believe that there are no missed opportunities in life, no matter what choice you make you will always learn something that will benefit you later. However after about 10 years of working hard,travelling,socializing, getting married, buying a house renovating said house and basically enjoying life and growing up. I found my self craving a new challenge. I had become bored with my career and I needed to be creative again (although at the time I didn't realise this!) So there I was quietly travelling through life unaware that I was heading at hurtling speed towards an existential crisis!

Well that's it for this week! drop by next week to read the next instalment of life lesson #1 Until then have a good week! ;) 

jen :p