Focus – Opinions and Features

By Laura Durnell Porochista Khakpour’s insightful and haunting narrative of her battle with incurable late-stage Lyme disease is more than a memoir of her own illness. In Sick, Khakpour spotlights America’s diseased health care system, and in particular how it infects the most... Read More »

Phyllis Mervine, Founder and President of LymeDisease.org, submitted the following public comment to the federal Tick-Borne Disease Working Group. Towards the end of the Tick-Borne Diseases Working Group (TBDWG) meeting on June 21, 2018, there was some discussion about the... Read More »

By Shona Curley Before Lyme, when something didn’t go my way, I stressed out. Like most healthy people, I was perfectly functional that way. I rushed my kids off to school, taught Pilates for eight hours, got home in time for dinner, dishes and bedtime – even if I was... Read More »

By Aaron J. Jackson It’s been almost a year since I tried to kill myself. As a doctoral student living in the leafy suburb of Brookline, Massachusetts, in 2015, I chanced upon a tick—a tiny vampire the size of a poppy seed—that changed my life forever and nearly brought it to an... Read More »

By Janet Jemmott There was no stopping the barreling train of this Herxheimer reaction. I’d been in a migrainous state for ten days. I’d medicate with Imitrex; the headache would fade, only to pop back up the next morning or late in the afternoon. I planned my activity carefully,... Read More »

By Phyllis Mervine I was just cleaning up files on my computer and found this series of vignettes I wrote 10 years ago. I’ll be 75 in a couple of weeks and my work is not done yet! I had Lyme 10 years before I was diagnosed, but lived with another diagnosis all that time, getting... Read More »

Every May 26, Australia observes “National Sorry Day,” a commemoration of the country’s mistreatment of Aborigines. It began 20 years ago, as a day of mourning for what’s called the Stolen Generations–children of indigenous people forcibly separated... Read More »

by Rebecca Zelis It has been nine years since a diagnosis, and over a decade since a tick-borne disease inflicted itself on my son’s brain. Imagine riding a roller coaster for nine years, and you’ll understand a little of what parenting a child with neurological Lyme disease... Read More »

The Tick-Borne Disease Working Group held its fourth meeting via webcast. Our Lonnie Marcum live-tweeted the day’s proceedings. Move the scroll bar to view her tweets (and re-tweets and comments from LymeDisease.org President Phyllis Mervine.) Read More »