Round 1: 28 Days of Oral Antibiotics

They helped—they didn't cure.

September 4, 2019

I started a 28-day course of Cefuroxime Axetil (Ceftin) the evening after receiving my diagnosis of “only” Lyme disease from Dr. Kane.

A couple of months later, during a consultation, a holistic Lyme practitioner I ended up working with looked at me puzzlingly after I shared that I was given this prescription.

“Ceftin? Why did he give you that?”

This practitioner preferred Doxycycline, noting its “intracellular penetration.” “Doxy,” as it’s known, is more commonly prescribed for Lyme disease, although the CDC recognizes both as appropriate first-line treatments.

Dr. Kane informed me about the common GI-related side effects of diarrhea, nausea, and vomiting associated with Ceftin, but I experienced none of them. In fact, I barely noticed a thing while taking it.

(Interesting aside: This was about six months before the COVID lockdowns. At the time, none of us knew what was coming, and everything was about to change.)

Did I Start to Feel Better?

I never actually felt “bad” in terms of being ill, fatigued, flu-like, etc. And this was true throughout the journey.

Lyme, with its inflammatory effect on multiple joints, was affecting my functionality (e.g., I had to stop working out and doing outdoor work) and mood. Still, I never felt bad, so it’s hard to answer this question properly.

Did those symptoms improve? No.

As each day passed, I kept wondering, “Is there going to be some kind of symptom outbreak again, like there was in July?” There wasn’t, so that probably means something was working, but whether that was from the antibiotic is difficult to say.

I kept living my life thinking that, at some point, things would just go back to normal.

A Coincidence

In those days, as reflected in my email exchanges with Gary, I found myself thinking something “deeper” was going on, meaning spiritual or subtle.

I even considered past-life explanations because I have a scar near my coccyx that looks like a surgical incision. The thing is, I’ve never had surgery, and never had an accident that would explain it.

I mentioned this to my friend Bertrand, an evolutionary astrologer who had been giving me readings since my early 20s. He was another person, like Gary, whom I projected a kind of paternal authority onto because of his truly gifted ability to understand your inner world.

It was easy to hang on to his every word, and on this subject, he said without equivocation, “That scar is from a past life. It’s as if someone betrayed you and stabbed you in the back.”

I didn’t fully believe it. But I didn’t dismiss it either.

For that reason, during the second week of antibiotics, I attended a five-day past-life regression training led by Dr. Brian Weiss (author of Many Lives, Many Masters) at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York.

Not because I wanted to learn the technique, but because he guided group regressions, and I thought something might be revealed, such as about the scar, its origin, maybe even about my case of Lyme.

Nothing like that came up.

But one detail stayed with me. On the first day, he spoke about the idea of snake venom as medicine, which also showed up in a regression he conducted on a participant.

(I had a vivid dream involving a snake, which I wrote about in the first article.)

This was one of the first of many coincidences I noticed during my six-year experience with Lyme. I didn’t expect them, and I didn’t go looking for them. But when they happened, they gave me a felt sense that what I was going through wasn’t entirely random, and that I wasn’t completely alone in it.

Considering how isolating and scary the journey was, these coincidences or “signs” were a kind of medicine and helped me keep going.

“They Don’t Work”

Three days after finishing the round of Ceftin, I returned to Dr. Kane’s office for a check-in.

Before that, I took time to write down the many symptoms I was still experiencing, which the doctor didn’t seem to pay much attention to.

Since Dr. Kane was in a hurry — as I would come to learn was common among many of the doctors I saw — I went through the list quickly, raising issues that weren’t met with the same level of concern.

That was that. Our encounter was over. I left the office with a summary of the visit and a one-page explainer on Lyme disease, advising me to “watch for tick bites” and noting that symptom resolution could take six to eighteen months.

While taking the antibiotics, I picked up a copy of Healing Lyme by herbalist Stephen Buhner. I began diligently following his protocol after learning that antibiotics alone don’t necessarily lead to a cure.

As I was leaving, I mentioned that I was taking herbs to Dr. Kane, and he said, “They don’t work,” and “Stay off the internet.”

I went back home with my paperwork, no scheduled follow-up, and no further guidance.