Lyme and the Australian Army
My story started in 1967, when my family migrated. I was only two years old, so Australia was all I knew. Life was good growing up in a country town and in 1982 I joined the Army. I wanted to travel and serve my country and this looked like the best way to do both.
In 1999, I spent some time on an Army training area, Rockhampton, Qld. A few days into the exercise I started feeling tired. At the time, I put it down to the hours I had been working and that my body was just taking the opportunity to have a rest, but it was more than that. I was sleeping at least 14 hours a day and I was unable to make it through the day without an afternoon nap. I also had a big red rash on the side of my body, circular in shape. Within a few months I saw a doctor about my tiredness, he diagnosed me with depression and prescribed some antidepressants. The medication seemed to help, but I never felt quite right.
My Army career continued into 2001. It was at this time that an old knee complaint started to get worse, I couldn’t understand why, but the pain continued to grow.
I took immediate action and saw a trusted surgeon. Within a couple of week I was undergoing an operation to recover both knees, however this only made things worse. Late 2002, after 20 years of service with the Army I moved to Melbourne, where I started my new life with my wife and young children. The aches and pains were bad and I was still taking the antidepressants, but it started to get worse.
The pain was unusual. The pain felt like someone had a flat tipped screw driver and was jamming it under my knee caps, trying to use the screw driver to prise my knee caps away from my knees.
During this time there were a few other things happening in my life. The most notable and memorable was tonsillitis. This was not normal tonsillitis, in that it took two complete rounds of penicillin to bring it under control. I ended up suffering from tonsillitis four times that year and each time was just as bad as the first. I visited my GP for help and he referred me to a surgeon who organised x-rays and scans. His comments remain in my head to this day, “You have damage, you have problems, but the total of your damage does not equate to your level of pain you are experiencing”. By this time I was relying on a walking stick and had started taking pain killers to remain mobile. Within 6 months I was in a wheelchair for most of the day.
I then saw a rheumatologist and cancer specialist and started extensive physiotherapy. I understood the reason for the physiotherapy and gave it my best, but try running around a small swimming pool with those screw drivers under both knee caps, continually pushing out, trying to push your knee caps off your knees, it just messed me up more.
Doctors gave up on me. Nobody could understand the pain. They all said “you’re sick, but not in the area that I specialise in”. I managed to get some relief via a couple of naturopaths. This helped, but did not change the underlying issues. My wife and now teenage children renamed me ‘Disease Boy’ and by this time, the wheelchair was always at the ready. In March 2013, (yes, 14 years later and no help in site) my wife noticed a strange shaped lump on my neck. With my army service and the time I had in the sun it was thought to be cancer but a quick biopsy showed it to be a granuloma annulare. We soon identified that these were a random autoimmune response and that it was common among people with the autoimmune disease like Lupus. Back to the GP we went for a referral to a rheumatologist. The rheumatologist acknowledged my issues, but it was not Lupus and he referred me to an immunologist. I told my story again to the immunologist at Melbourne’s Alfred hospital. He told me that he had no idea what was wrong with me but be promised to not give up.
By March of 2014 I was starting to hurt in more ways than one. I could not stand for more than a couple of minutes, I am back in my wheelchair and the infections started again. I headed back to the Alfred and I was told I had a positive blood test for Lyme disease.
He would not tell me much more, other than I had to now see a doctor who specialised in infectious diseases. I went back to the car and cried. I don’t know if this crying was relief for finally having an answer, or something else but I know that I have cried a lot over the last 14 years. There are several problems with Lyme disease. First is that it has been identified in medical journals as “The Great Imitator”, as many with this are wrongly diagnosed with MS, Chronic Fatigue, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, Rheumatoid Arthritis and psychological disorders. This makes it confusing to doctors. The second is that veterinary science has acknowledge and been working with Lyme disease since before 1959 and there are many papers detailing that the disease is in Australian since that time, but Australian doctors are being told by authorities that the disease is not here, so they don’t know how to look for it.