Notes on my progress

The training schedule I'm using is the same one I used to get ready for the dogsledding trip I did with Outward Bound last year. I'm starting with 30 minutes of vigorous walking every other day for the first week and weight training. We heat with wood, so I spend alot of time stacking wood anyway and we have chickens and goats--the feed bags weigh 50lbs each.

So yesterday I walked 1.6 miles in 40 minutes. My goal is to double my walking speed over the course of the winter. Eventually I want to be walking at least three or four miles daily.

I had a tooth out last week and (naturally) it got infected, so I'm on Clindamyacin for the next six weeks.

Symptom wise, I'm doing well right now. My sleep is good, and except for my tooth which hurts like a son-of-a-bitch, I'm pretty okay regarding pain. I had a rough summer with pain, but I was on a bunch of antibiotics. I really didn't know where the disease stopped and the drug side effects started.

When I first got sick, and I was presumed to have Rhuematoid Arthritis, I often thought about that. I got very little pain relief from the NSAIDS. Somehow, I always thought it must be something I was doing wriong. Why is it, in medicine, they never say "The drug is not working" but instead "The patient is not responding"?

My Lyme disease is a pretty average case except for the fact that its taken 20 years to diagnose. Oddly, the first Rheumatologist I ever saw was convinced that I had it. She said I was "textbook" in my symptoms and was pretty much set to treat me with doxy right then. Except that the ELISA came back negative. She shrugged and went back to the drawing board. At that time, she didn't even consider ordering a second test.