This is my brain on Lyme

So this afternoon I'm playing Settlers of Catan with my two children, eleven and nine years old. If you haven't played, it's a simple enough game in which you build settlements and cities and pick up resource cards depending on the roll of the dice. What makes the game a little more fun than other board games is that you might pick up cards on anyone's roll, so you're not just watching and waiting for your turn to come around.


In this game I am red. My settlements and cities are red, my roads are red. When the dice roll matches a numbered space adjacent to my red settlement and cities, I'm supposed to pick up a card. But I'm picking up cards for the orange settlements. Or looking at the dice, looking at the board, and concluding there are no matches for red, and picking up nothing, when in fact I should have picked up two or three cards.


In this version of Catan, Cities and Knights, there is also a third die that comes up in various colors, and again with the matching and the picking up of a different type of card, Progress Cards. My son told me later that since we are playing to win he doesn't think it's his job to remind me I'm failing to pick up my Progress Cards. I don't think it's his job either. But, and yet, however...apparently I cannot manage it on my own.


My conversation is not exactly snappy either. I'm asking a question about a rule, and both children are looking at me with bafflement. Eventually one of them realizes that I've been saying "knight" when I meant to say "robber." I find lately that when I have word retrieval problems, I am substituting some other nearby word and not realizing it until I see the confused expression of the person I am talking to.


It's just a game, says my daughter, because she worries my failures will make me sad. And oh yeah, they do. Of course it's not the loss of a game of Catan (though that burns!). It's the loss of who I used to be. Among other things,  a person to be reckoned with when it came to board games. Not a person whose brain skips and jumps and blanks out, unpredictably. A person who gets pity from her children because she loses board games so often, and not gallantly.


Here's some ridiculous optimism: I am looking at my Catan performance as a good sign, because after many months of taking some herbal drops to fight Lyme (samento and cumanda), my new Lyme doc asked me three weeks ago to stop them. So I have been naked against the bacteria for that long, and the neurological symptoms are notably increasing. Brain not working, various extremities numb and tingly, migrating joint pain, shooting pains here and there, and etc etc.


This is a hopeful development because it points to Lyme being the actual cause of my long list of health problems. The bacteria that causes Lyme hides in tissues, not blood, so it (and the other bacteria that hang out with it) is notoriously difficult to test for and diagnose. Having a positive reaction to treatment, whether it's herbal or antibiotic, makes the diagnosis clearer. Or, in this case, a negative reaction to stopping treatment. It's a Progress Card of a kind.