I've been taking Mepron since the beginning of October. It's atovaquone, an anti-protozoal, meant to kill off the Lyme co-infection Babesia. As you can see from the pictures my son took, it's not exactly tasty. In fact, it's like eating paint -- it's gloppingly thick, fluorescent yellow, and the taste is profoundly bitter with a gloss of artifical sweetener and artificial fruitiness.
In other words, it's absolutely horrible. And a bottle costs $1000.
But! I am responding to the new protocol. Babesia likes to hang out where there are red blood cells, and I've been having symptoms in my spleen and heart as it dies off. I've had some very good days mixed in here and there which are keeping me hopeful.
The bad days are still very bad. Trying to ride this edge of killing as many bugs as my body can handle but no more -- it's tricky. Some days I think it's too much, I've gone too far. I'm getting stabbing pain all over, I can't think straight at all, my heart is misbehaving, and I'm under a blanket of nausea. Those days I spend time in Epsom baths, eat a lot of probiotics, take Marinol, and play a lot of World of Warcraft.
But then the holiday week comes up and I get a normal day, or two -- and I mean, I feel a glimpse of what it must feel like to be all the way healthy, and I don't even know how long it's been since I felt that way. Maybe never.
I meant to make this blog more of an accounting of how the treatment is going, week by week. But I just haven't felt well enough, or clear-headed enough, to manage it. I'm hoping this is a bad hump to get over and things will be easier soon.
For the record, the protocol this cycle is Mepron, 10 capsules of artimisinin (from wormwood. I had a small moment of trying to convince myself it was capsulized absinthe and I was really in Paris in 1890, but that, uh, didn't work.), doxy 500 mgs BID, zith 500 mgs BID, nattokinase. That's MWF for two weeks, with Flagyl 500 mgs BID thrown in on the last two days of the cycle.
This Lyme treatment ain't for sissies.
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