Hi Melody,

This post is timely for us also. John did have testing for lymes and showed positive in two bands. Does that mean he has lymes? Not always. The doctor has to take into account all the symptoms, your risk of exposure, your medical history, etc.

Positive results can be due to cross-reacting antibodies from other spirochetal diseases or from autoimmune diseases. In John's case, he has had numerous blood transfusion which increases his potential to have a cross reacting anti-body. All of his blood product were leukocyte reduced/filtered and irradiated to greatly reduce exposure to stuff. And his original problem was autoimmune in nature. Testing lymes is not black and white. There are two schools of thought...one is that Lymes is underdiagnosed and treated; and the other is that it overdiagnosed and treated. And, what lab you use seems to play a role in this also.

IGENX is the lab we used. But you cannot diagnose based soley on the lab result. And the doctors are all over the map on how to test and diagnose Lymes.

This is all pretty knew to us and I do not fully understand this stuff yet. John has a very low risk of contracting lymes....no pets, can't do yard work, we don't spend a lot time outdoors in the woods. The problem is that the symptom for lyme are also the symptoms for many diseases. I feel that we can show an causal relationship between his symptoms and his treatment for SAA fairly easily. Prior to John getting ill, he had no bug bites or flu like symptoms. It's a conundrum. I'm not sure what we are going to do with this info. His doc is doing some further checking but we are not yet convinced that Lymes is his problem.

Don't know if this helps any....

Marlene