MS or Lyme
 

Hi I am Liza
I am here because I have had neuro symtoms for 16 years now ranging from tingling numbness, paralysis, fatigue headache optic neuritis (twice) Positive CSF , I have had a previous MS diagnosis , later changed to a Lyme Diagnosis , and then had another neuro tell me it was not Lyme even though the WB came back highly positive for Lyme , but my symptoms seem to correlate with ms more than Lyme, I went for Lyme treatment 2 years antibiotics , My new Neuro says this was to long for it to still be Lyme, so I am essentially back to square one and fed up I don't care witch it is I just want an answer so I can get a treatment plan and hopefully stop feeling so sick, My symptoms have been relapsing remitting over the years and at the moment I am quite ill, and also three months pregnant, I also have a 8 mo. old baby and am in a panic that I will be this sick with two small children! I do not know what I will do , my quality of life sucks right now and I feel like I am not going to be able to do the things I want to so with my children and raise them the way i want , i just want to be normal, or at least know what I have so I know what to expect the fear of waking up one morning and having something be paralyzed with two babies to care for is more than I can handle.

Hi, Liza-Jane, just wanted to welcome you to the community. You'll find lots of support here, and probably some answers to your questions also. I'm not sure if you've looked around on the other forums, but here is our "MS Community" link:
http://neurotalk.psychcentral.com/forum17.html

You also might find some help and/or friends who have had experience with Lyme on this forum:
http://neurotalk.psychcentral.com/forum91.html

Feel free to jump in anywhere. Sometimes it just helps to connect with someone else who "gets it"!

The interesting thing is--
 

--we have another, fairly famous Liza Jane on this forum who was greatly responsible for putting together the spreadsheets for tracking/suggesting tests that can be done for neurological symptoms. These can be found at:

www.lizajane.org

I sympathize with your predicament, and the confusing messges from doctors. A lot of the symptoms you describe can come from many possible conditions--Lyme is a great mimicker of things like neuropathy, MS, B12 deficiency--and they themselves can mimick other things. It's often very hard to distinguish if symptoms are coming from the brain/central nervous system or from the peripheral as the symptoms can be experienced exactly the same.

Can you tell us what tests you have so far, and what the results were? You may be well aware that the diagnostic cirteria for many of these conditions are in some dispute, especially the MRI criteria for MS and the serological criteria for Lyme--and the MS and Lyme boards here have lots of discussion about that. It's part of the reason that many of us like the aforementinoed spreadsheets--they help to suggest other avenues to doctors as well as track our own results, (And you must ALWAYS get copies of all test results you have had, to keep for your own reference and to copy for future doctors.)

Welcome Liza. We have a wonderful ms community here at Neurotalk. I
hope we can be of help!:)

Welcome to NT

I'm glad you found this wonderful place.

There's lots of friendly people here who will help you figure things out.

Let us know if you need to know how to get around.