After 40 straight weeks of the triple-antibiotic therapy, and on the very day I moved into a new home and a new country, I stopped treatment.  Now,  six weeks on, I think it is time for a review.  The first thing to say, as a headline, is that I am improved and I think I continue to improve.  It hasn’t been all plain sailing though: I’ve had two periods of ill health since then, one of which resulted in me self-medicating with Amoxycillin (antibiotic) for a week.  I got a respiratory virus which ultimately morphed into a chest infection.  After another two weeks I’m more or less clear of that.

A much more interesting episode occured about a week, to ten days, after stopping the medication which I think may have been my immune system somehow ‘resetting’ or my body ‘clearing out’ after the medication.  I suddenly developed a temperature which waxed and waned for 3 days, bouncing between normal and 102 deg.  I was sweating profusely, even when my temperature was ‘normal’, sometimes in the day and sometimes at night.  It was sufficiently worrying to cause me to register with a doctor who took blood and sent me off for a chest x-ray (for possible TB!!) – all of which came back unremarkable, except for a borderline result for a diabetes marker.

Meanwhile I have been able to walk further, and more regularly, and generally have suffered less muscle pain, fewer episodes of cramp-type feeling.  For the most part I am sleeping better and thinking more clearly .  During this period I have been coming to grips with a new home / location, doing more driving, helping look after my step-granddaughter on a regular basis.  I think all of this is really positive, but I still have 7 weeks-worth of the triple antibiotics in a drawer in case.  I’m monitoring my health and recording anything that might be Lyme rrelated  on my spreadsheet.  Next week I’m off to London for three days, one of which will be spent at a Lyme conference sponsored by Public Health England.