4 months in the hospital?? Scary. Lyme can be nasty if it goes untreated for awhile. I'm so glad your friend's daughter is doing well now.

Not a lot of people get lyme in TX. But my aunt is an E.R. nurse in Maine -- she spoke to the infectious disease doctor at her hospital and he thought the IgeneX lab was valid even thought my infectious disease doc. here thought it was a joke. But I found a lyme literate doctor, drove 3 hours to somewhat rural TX, and aggressively pushed for IV antibiotics. I had to stay overnight in a hotel for 3 days to insure everything was okay at the start of the treatment. But I really wanted to wipe it out of my body before I started any MS drugs. And I figure if I didn't really have lyme then nothing really lost in the long run. Fortunately, my insurance paid for it all as it is costly.

There is a Dr. Brian Fallon at Columbia Univ. who recently started a lyme clinic. He believes there is such a thing as chronic lyme (again people debate this). He is a psychiatrist and does a lot with neurological lyme stuff. He also feels that longterm antibiotics, particularly IV antibiotics, can be helpful for those people with stubborn infections or neurological lyme problems. One of the nurses that came to my house to check out the PICC line said she used to work in Virginia and she had seen some terrible cases get miraculously better (people who couldn't walk, think, or talk) after months and months of IV antibiotics.

Anyhow, maybe if I had not gotten the rash and fever while in Washington DC I wouldn't have caught the MS as early as I did...because I had never had any MS symptoms that I can think of -- and I've racked my brains to go back in time and try to see what I could recall and there is nothing. Sometimes I wonder if the mono or the lyme triggered MS. Guess I will never know.

But like you Jules, I thought, what rotten luck! MS and lyme.