Elize's Lyme Disease Recovery - Elize St. Charles, Ph.D (Dec 2016)

Jan 19, 2017
“Elize's Lyme Disease Recovery” is a presentation by Elize St. Charles, Ph.D. that took place at Silicon Valley Health Institute on December 15, 2016.

I was once told by my dear friend, Doña Queta, that the path of a true healer is rife with pain and suffering. Doña Queta believes that all true healers have suffered and that the deeper their suffering, the more profound can be their ability to heal. She recognized this healing energy in me.
There are many things of which I am proud but one of my greatest accomplishments was healing myself of Lyme Disease. When I was finally diagnosed CDC positive for Lyme Disease in 2006, I had suffered this infection for at least 37 years. Though I rarely appeared ill, I constantly suffered a plethora of weird physical symptoms: the skin on my hands and feet peeled off in sheets as a child; most of my life I heard as if through a foghorn, and I experienced sudden neurological sensations regularly sometimes feeling as if I were being electrocuted. These symptoms and many more eventually manifested into an incapacitating illness.
As a child, I was always the one being run to the doctor. I was fed antibiotics for chronic earaches and acne. In fact, my mother, a nurse, later told me that she had expected me to be deaf by the age of 30. I was miserably cold, even in the summer. At 19 years old when my joints blew up and I wasn’t able to walk for six months, I undertook four years of detoxification that rehabilitated me such that I was able to carry to term three children. (I later learned that infertility is a common problem for the Lyme infected. In addition, the infection is transmitted transplacentally, and so all infected mothers transmit the infection to their offspring.) I experienced serious memory loss toward the end of my last pregnancy, and severe postpartum depression. I lost my appetite for 30 years making eating a serious chore - though I continued to love cooking. I was temporarily blinded on three occasions and experienced pelvic inflammatory disease three times in my 30s. In my early 40s I was diagnosed with chronic shingles. Eventually the fascial tissue holding up my pelvic organs was destroyed by the infection, as I now know, and required pelvic reconstruction surgery. For years I suffered pain that made the 2-day ruptured appendix crisis at 13 years old feel like a hang nail - and no one believed me. Depression and a sense of isolation were overwhelming.

As the infection infiltrated my brain I developed brain allergies and uncontrollable emotionality. I somehow learned to live with it all and keep trudging. I credit my daily hatha yoga practice with keeping me semi-functional until my 40s, when a traumatic insult tipped the delicate balance and threw me into a downward spiral that has taken years to overcome.

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