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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/28/as-my-daughter-got-sicker-and-sicker-our-quest-for-answers-dragged-on-how-did-we-all-miss-the-bacteria-taking-over-her-body>
"There are many reasons to feel guilty. I’m a nature writer who preaches about
the importance of wild childhoods, and my daughter has been made chronically
ill by one trip to the countryside. I’m a journalist whose job it is to
interrogate information and yet I didn’t demand better answers for her from NHS
doctors. But the guilt is most painful when I remember a freezing wet day in
October 2021.
Milly’s U10s football club were playing the league’s top team. Milly, player of
the year the previous season, a whirl of blond energy across the pitch, had
lost her enthusiasm for the beautiful game. That morning, she really didn’t
want to play: she was tearful and exhausted. There was nothing obviously wrong:
no cough, sickness, temperature. Her twin, Esme, was playing but without Milly
the team were a player short. I told Milly they needed her. Stoic, she
staggered off but couldn’t step on to the pitch. Instead, she curled into a
ball of misery and fatigue beside her coach. The rain fell. Her team lost 15-1.
I cringe when I flick through the notebook where I recorded my daughters’
football matches (I was tragically keen). Below most results from the 21/22
season, I’ve written “Milly ill” or, worse, “Milly played ¼” or “Milly played
½”. All the time, cajoled or compelled to lead her “normal” life, Milly was
getting sicker and sicker. We had no idea what was wrong. Every morning she
looked terrible, dark circles beneath her eyes. She complained of perpetual
tiredness, talked of being “disconcentrated” – she later learned to call this
“brain fog” – and mentioned strange stabbing pains, mostly in her feet when she
walked. Soon, she was too ill to go to school. Lockdown was over but it had
become a permanent state for Milly, my wife, Lisa, and me.
What we didn’t know then, and wouldn’t discover until this spring, was that
Milly’s body was being invaded by an insidious bacterium,
Borrelia
burgdorferi, which hides in connective tissue, confounding immune systems,
wreaking havoc. Milly had Lyme disease, which takes its name from Old Lyme, a
coastal town in Connecticut. This bacterial infection is not contagious but is
transmitted by a tick, a tiny, blood-sucking insect that hops on to human skin
in the countryside, where it is transported by other mammals, particularly
deer. There are 476,000, and rising, annual cases in North America alone.
Global heating is making ticks, their bacteria – and human illnesses – much
more prevalent."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
