To cut to the chase, I had my SOT shot on 11/29/18 and at the 180 day point (6 months) I can say that I have had some relief from my symptoms. Am I 100% sold on SOT – NO! But I can say that out of all the treatments out there and talking to everyone who has had one or the other, this is by far the best resulting treatment. Everyone is different, as you should already know with Lyme. And unfortunately, at this point, I can’t give you an assurance that SOT will cure you like some of the other people swear by it, I can assure you, that I am one of the most heavily infected people and my story below will shed some light on why it will take me the full amount of time to get rid of the bacteria and heal.
My immune system has returned to eliminate my Babesia and Bartonella, and lessen my Candida and Mycoplasma Pneumonia. My symptoms are far less than what they were 4 months ago. My fatigue and fog are diminished significantly, but I still have my anxiety and depression lingering brought on by the simple stresses of everyday life. The anxiety and depression are the two things that must be eliminated in order for me to say that SOT is a successful cure for Lyme. So with all this being said, the following is my Lyme story.
My life pretty much began with me getting bit as a kid somewhere in the late 70s or 80s growing up on a cattle farm in central New Jersey. If you go to the area where the farm was, you will find 4 to 10 story buildings in an office park surrounded by developments upon suburban developments. But it was all farmland and forest growing up, and just as I am constantly in the woods now, I was as a kid too either playing, hunting, hiking, you name it – I was always in the woods. So constantly exposed to black legged ticks’ natural habitat and a body that is not allergic to anything, there was no bullseye or any reaction that I would have known about. I was never sick as a kid with a great immune system. So if I got bit, that would have gone easily undetected and symptoms wouldn’t have appeared for another 25 years when I had moved to Vegas…. On top of all of this, I never knew anything about Lyme Disease, nor was there any awareness about Lyme.
Fast forward to the housing crisis. I had just purchased a house for the first time at the day the market must have peaked and within a couple of months all the property value in Las Vegas was almost halved. In the upswing of things, my business was taking off and I was stressed with the growth of the business and all the new hiring, larger clients, project size, and challenges that were coming with all of it. Then pile the house on, and I woke up one morning with half my face not moving. I immediately thought it was a stroke, the business and house brought it on, and I needed to move to Costa Rica and get a job waxing surfboards to be stress free. I was in the emergency room an hour later and saw a couple doctors in Las Vegas to be told it was Bells Palsy. Business was kicking ass and I had money to throw around back then, so I went back to NJ where I knew Robert Wood Johnson Hospital was leaps and bounds better than anything in Vegas. Neurologists there confirmed it was Bell’s Palsy, but not once did anyone in my visit mention anything about Lyme while I was there. Not doctors, not friends, not family – everyone just laughed at it and we all made fun of it.
Since that point, I had kidney problems from stress, stomach problems from stress, and all sorts of crazy shit going on, that my doctor didn’t understand how I was in great shape and day to day health, but yet all these odd ailments. An epic one was I had no more disc in my c5/c6 of my neck. I had to have surgery immediately and fortunately (and you are reading about the first time I found it) I had a rock star of a doctor Lali Sekhon who did a new procedure (in March of 2012) that gave me even more motion in my neck with artificial disc replacement rather than the immobilizing fusion solution.
Unfortunately, that surgery lit the bacteria up. Between the shock to my system, antibiotics, and immune response over the next year I went to shit. But I do remember, it was almost 4 months after the surgery immense mental clarity that I hadn’t felt in my life. Like a fog had been lifted, but at the time I called it “mental clarity” not knowing anything about what type of dense mentally blinding fog that was about to set in.
Business was great! I was traveling a ton, had a couple cars, plenty of money, having fun, always on the go and about 9 months after the surgery things started not clicking as much as they were. No matter what I set out to do in life, as long as I was focused on it, things came easy. And not to say it was luck, I just have a crushing will and work ethic that lends to success. I became distressed. I owned a software company I built from nothing right out of college, I didn’t go to school for it, I just saw a demand in a market and built something to supply it. I couldn’t understand why I was losing myself in conversations. It started with the highly technical conversations that I would just delegate the analysis and contracts to one of my managers. Then it was just the day to day variety of business tasks that you need to have a brain to maintain them, but it isn’t the rocket science part of it. I couldn’t get through the books and the reports. Client follow-throughs, contracts, weekly planning, it all went to hell and in a matter of months. By the summer of 2013, the business was pretty much destroyed. I totally blamed myself for everything, I was super stressed and then bang – DEPRESSION – entered my life. My mother’s side of the family has it with half of the members and my grandmother severely having it, but I have been the happiest go, lucky motherfucker, you will ever meet my whole life. It was gone. I was gone. I didn’t get anywhere near a feeling of not that shitty feeling for 4 years and 3 months later with a Doxy pill – We’re not there yet – I will get to that.
I was seeing a therapist Holly Andres at the time and between her and my doc Kim Adams, they said diagnosed me as severely depressed and started throwing pharmaceuticals at me. Adams had the best interest in mind for me, but again… There is no awareness of Lyme. Adams still keeps calling it Lymes and writing it down that way too – after I have corrected her.
One more thing that doctors missed because of what I feel is industry licensing risk is telling me not to smoke pot. She said it was the manic part of me… Not the case. I am just happy as hell all the time.
I stopped smoking pot just prior to the depression kicking in per her recommendation.
Marijuana has antibacterial and anti-inflammatory properties. If you have Lyme and can smoke it, do it between now and 6 months after you get your SOT shot!
Bell’s Palsy – I stopped smoking pot 2 months prior because I wanted to get my head clear after I purchased that shit deal of a house. It wasn’t until 2 weeks later after I got back from NJ to Vegas that I started smoking again.
October of 2013 I decided to shut the business down from the office and 12 employee model and keep a couple of developers as contractors and everyone work remote from home. No Stress! It worked. I started 2014 attempting a merger with a competitor, but there was too much stress in me bending to what I (even brain fogged) saw as a failing business model. I noticed more and more of my adversity to failure and being around it. I went home and still did well for a couple of years with some of the residual business accounts I had set up. But over the next 3 years, I went through all the money I had saved keeping up with as much as a lifestyle as I could to my prior neck surgery one. I just didn’t realize that there was something like brain fog. It frustrated me and stressed me so bad that I was just shut down with depression. I couldn’t really make any mental steps forward with the business, relationships, and just life.
In October of 2016, I went to the summit of Mt Whitney and tore (not snapped or ruptured) my Achilles tendon by wearing the wrong boots and 4 days of hiking up, down, and around the Sierra with them will do that. But between that and stress from botched business projects that otherwise should have gone smooth, I was noticing I had become extremely fatigued over the past couple of years, and I would wake up and have to take a shit right away out of just getting up distressed and stressed. So I went to my Doc Kim Adams a couple of months after the Achilles healed and I talked about these crazy new symptoms. We looked for cancer, testosterone problems, kidneys, and then she said this to me…. “You are always in the woods camping, we should test you for Lymes!”. My reply was, “That’s back on the east coast not out here, but whatever.” I didn’t think anything of it still.
Middle of August they call me and tell me that there was something wrong and I need to come to her office right away… This was a month after they had my test results and I didn’t hear anything, so I figured it was all the partying I did after college while I valeted and started my business that made me dumb as fuck. But they said I had Lyme(s) disease and that I needed to go to see an infectious disease doc in Vegas. Off I went and Dr. Stephanie Shibata prescribed me 200mg of Doxy 100mg in the morning and 100 at night. She said per my bands that I only had it for a couple of months if that. So I got my script filled and on August 25th, 2017, after taking them for 2 days, I woke up feeling like I did after the surgery. I couldn’t fuckin believe it. I was so happy I couldn’t wait to go back and tell her that I found out what has been killing me. Literally – since the summer of 2013, I did not want to live.
Then … Welcome to the Herx!
I thought I knew what hell was like with depression. These little motherfuckers in my head showed me war. The best of me utilizing the worst of me to pit myself against myself. And the loneliness! It was Hell.
I went back to Stephanie Shibata two weeks later and told her how I felt. She told me that it wasn’t the case and that the symptoms I was having had nothing to do with the Lyme. Idiot! So her bad diagnosis motivated me to do some research and I found a Lyme Literate doctor in Las Vegas named Amy Sparks. Amy didn’t take insurance. She just wants cash. She diagnosed me with Candida and started treating me without a test. She also “has Lyme”. Or so she says. If there is a doctor who is the definition of snake oil, this snake is it. I wasted plenty of money with her only to find out that she kept writing about my financial situation in her analysis of me.
Again, I stepped back from the stresses of life with the help of a friend and started a new business