Los Gatos, CA
Infected: 2017
Diagnosed: 2018
Current health: “She is back to her active self.”
The following is the story of Lucy told by her father Dave.
Lucy is a competitive soccer player. She plays left wing, which is a position that demands sprinting constantly – to support the attack, or to get back to help on defense. She plays the position because she’s always been fast and has good stamina. Well, in Spring season 2017, we noticed that Lucy was jogging in her position. She wasn’t sprinting. At first, we thought it was teenager attitude. We talked to her about it. She insisted she was doing her best. Then we noticed she’d come home on weekends and just take a nap in the middle of the day. This was not our Lucy. Something was amiss.
So we took her to her pediatrician and explained the symptoms. He ran heart & lung tests. He ran blood tests but they were all normal. The pediatrician decided there was nothing wrong with Lucy.
But her lethargy continued unabated. We, as parents, knew there was something wrong. Fortunately, we had a close friend who worked in the field of Lyme Disease testing. (Tom Paskert, CFO, IGeneX) I had been at many lunches with Tom where he talked about how misdiagnosed and under-diagnosed Lyme disease is. I talked with my wife about this and we asked Tom – could Lucy’s symptoms possibly be Lyme disease? Tom suggested we get her tested. It would cost us quite a bit, but, after discussion, we felt it was a worthwhile expenditure because we knew something wasn’t right.
Our challenge was that we needed a referral from her pediatrician. We talked to him about it. He assured us that it couldn’t be Lyme disease because the blood tests he’d run didn’t show any inflammation or symptoms and we had never seen a red rash on her around a tick bite. But, fortunately, he was willing to write the referral, despite not believing it a worthwhile test.
We took Lucy to IGeneX and had her tested. IGeneX’s tests came back positive for both Lyme disease and Babesia. We then took her to Pacific Frontier Medical where she underwent a six-month treatment regimen that seems to have completely cured her.
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We feel very fortunate that IGeneX was able to identify her disease and that Pacific Frontier was able to treat her successfully. Of just as much importance is the need for a patient to be their own advocate and to pay attention to symptoms that are out of the ordinary for the patient. By good fortune, our perseverance as parents helped us identify and cure our daughter.
Click below to see a video of Lucy’s story.
