HHS Aims to Accelerate Technologies for Combatting Lyme Disease – Chief scientist tells of her several year battle with Lyme disease
Published March 5th, 2021 at Nexgov.com authored by Brandi Vincent
“Then I got what I thought was the summer flu. But I never had the bull’s-eye rash—now, we know not everyone gets a bull’s-eye rash,” she noted. “It kind of went away. But about six months later, I completely collapsed.”
Doctors originally thought she could be suffering from mononucleosis. But after many weeks of seeing her suffer, Honey’s mother—who was trained as a nurse—pushed doctors to consider that maybe the mystery illness was bacterial, not viral. She was prescribed medication that seemed to make her better.
“And then I had 10 years of just slow health decline. It was like weird symptom, after symptom, after symptom. And finally, about a decade later, I completely collapsed in 2009. And that was my worst. At times I needed a wheelchair, had Parkinson’s-like shakes, couldn’t see. I looked at letters, and they would look like wingdings and hieroglyphics,” Honey said. “After I got a definitive diagnosis, by then I’d already dropped out of school and couldn’t work. It took two and a half years of nothing but full-time recovery.”