You’re reading this book because you have Lyme or you care about some- one who does. If your experience has been anything like mine, you feel misunderstood, isolated, lonely, and restricted. You can’t do many of the things you used to do: traveling, dating, going out, physical activities, demanding work. The scope of your life has been sharply reduced.

You live in an internal, invisible prison. Many people suffering from Lyme look good on the outside. Most of the time when I had it, I looked great even as I felt horrible. Because of that, many people who don’t have Lyme don’t take it seriously. Neither doctors nor family nor friends believe Lyme is as real or as challenging as it is. They think we’re pretending. Or we can cure it with mindset. Or it really isn’t that bad.

Sometimes I looked awesome but I felt terrible. I felt like I was running a marathon every hour of every day. A marathon asks you to give everything you have for four hours. Lyme asks you to give everything you have, every day, for years, to do the simplest of tasks.

Lyme takes different forms. It can mess up your joints and be present primarily in your body. It can mess up your head, creating confusion and memory loss. It can put you in a wheelchair.

Lyme can kill you, but it probably won’t. It will just make you wish you were dead. Lyme kills you on the inside, but you’re still alive on the outside.

I wished I were dead more than once. I decided to kill myself more than once. Clearly, I didn’t do that. Why not?