I set up this website about 15 years ago (it is now December, 2018) to promote my personal life coaching practice. It was my intention to use my personal and clinical chops to make a living at what basically came naturally at that stage of life.
Things changed.
I got very ill with late stage Lyme disease. The discovery of that diagnosis explained a number of maladies I’d had during the prior 15 years. Never having had a Lyme rash or other immediate symptoms, I was doomed to develop late stage disease, with which I struggle to this day. But, I’m much better than I was, and can live what looks like a ‘normal’ life – I work, I have my family, I have my guitar…
As I had to pull back from counseling others, I began writing about my growing understanding of, and struggle with, Lyme disease. Much of what I learned was through trial and error, as well as via participation in a large listserve of doctors, scientists/researchers, writers, and fellow sufferers sharing emails of personal and professional observations and studies. I became fluent in the realities of the ‘Lyme wars’ that shed blood to this day. Following trusted, but in retrospect some very bad advice, I had a rough ride, spending about 7 years completely disabled on my couch. When I experienced improvement and wrote about it, other ‘Lymies’ contacted me for information and advice that I freely shared. Then there were setbacks, relapses, and complications. Nothing was straightforward and I wasn’t getting very far.
In 2013, we pulled up decades of roots and left Willits, CA for Santa Rosa. I’d gotten well enough and needed to pursue gainful (self) employment. I was able to do this via my personal and professional network that had formed over the years and so was able to set up both a counseling practice and I also worked with another practitioner at a functional medicine practice. I took an opportunity to work at a psychiatric hospital as a medical hospitalist in 2014. I wasn’t ‘well’, but I was OK.
I relapsed (Lyme) badly in 2015. What I thought had been helping left me on thin ice. I continued to work despite feeling horrid much of the time. Thankfully, my affected physiologic systems did not include my intellect or frontal lobes. I was able to work and found the demands of work, especially the hospital work, to be helpful by distracting me from my miseries. The counseling and functional medicine practices - not so much. By early 2017, I took leave from those activities and put all my efforts into hospital medicine. As of early 2018, I became the director of the hospitalist service.
While I struggled with Lyme, mostly using antibiotics, other medical challenges littered my path. Despite having lived a ‘health freak’ life with the intention of never becoming like my patients, my body had other ideas and I became a very complicated patient. My game plan to live a very long life with minimal medical maintenance evaporated. I had no choice but to surrender to this reality and to take my damn medicine. Now at age 72, my version of a medicine chest resembles those of my age cohort though a large section of mine is packed with antibiotics that I cannot do without. So it goes. So it went. Now, 12 years into battling Lyme, and having tried many scores of both allopathic and alternative approaches, antibiotics are the only things that have really made a difference for me. I have many days now when I feel completely normal. It’s an unfamiliar state, but it’s pretty damn nice when it happens.
I know other Lyme patients have had very different experiences than mine. Some have gotten their lives back with one or a combination of many different approaches -many that did not work for me. I decided that I really don’t know what any other Lyme patient should do. I took down all my Lyme writings from this website, though much of it still floats around the world online and in print. I had to stop being available to help other Lyme patients. I have had to focus my limited bandwidth on my own life, healing, and my work.
I love my work. I’m having the most gratifying time I’ve ever had in my 45 years as a physician. I love being in a chaotic demanding hospital setting where other doctors (the psychiatrists), nursing staff, and patients depend on me for medical decision making. I enjoy the challenges and I appreciate the staff and administration with whom I work. It’s professionally, personally, and interpersonally stimulating and satisfying and gives me an opportunity to teach, for which I seem to have a knack. I see no reason to stop for some fantasy of ‘retirement’. My personal identity as a doctor has matured over the decades to the point of embracing what I do as a deeply fulfilling calling. For most of my earlier career, this wasn’t the case. It was just very hard and sleep depriving work that I was good at. Period. Retirement was a wet dream. All things considered, I am very lucky to be here, now.
We moved recently and in a new neighborhood of ‘nextdoor.com’, I saw an ad for a band looking for a lead guitarist. Fast forward eight months and I’m having the time of my life playing with a band called Terrain. www.terrainband.com Their material is perfect for bringing out my best lead chops and they’re a wonderful group of like-minded geezer rockers. We’re gearing up for our first gigs, hopefully this winter. The material is both their originals and some classic rock –Tom Petty, Neil Young, Spirit, Yes, George Harrison, etc. In my 59 years of guitar playing, this magical instrument has been my ally, my best friend, my muse, and my spark when there was none. I’m very fortunate to be an electric guitar player, tinnitus be damned.
The unbearable heat of northern California summers and the horror of fall wildfires has morphed into cool and sometimes wet days and long nights – my special time of year. More time to snuggle with Kat and our two Havana Brown cats, Ollie and BB. Despite the miseries of life in these bodies, I won’t complain. I could, but I have far better things to do. Onward~~~~~>>
