There’s Something About Hail Mary

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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A quick warning, there are curse words that are un-beeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org.

**Ira Glass** (0:42)
Desperate times, my friends. Got her desperate measures.
Ora was in college when something mysterious happened. She was at her computer editing.

**Ora** (0:50)
I was editing, editing, looking at this computer and my eyesight started to go blurry.
I just couldn't really see the computer that well. I was like, I need to stop. I can't really see anymore. I was walking home and everything's just blurry.

**Ira Glass** (1:06)
An eye doctor examined her, said there's nothing wrong with her eyes to cause the blindness.

**Ora** (1:10)
Then, I remember I had weird heart palpitations. I went to the doctor to get an EKG and they were like, you seem fine, maybe you're just in love.

**Ira Glass** (1:20)
Pause on that. That was really a thing that happened to you. You showed up with medical symptoms and they said, maybe you're in love.

**Ora** (1:26)
Yeah.

**Ira Glass** (1:27)
She was actually falling in love, but she did not think that explained the heart palpitations. She was starting to get the feeling that people were not taking her seriously, and things were getting worse.

**Ora** (1:38)
It just feels like everything in my body is breaking in a weird way.
Terrible fatigue, horrible brain fog, and this feeling in the left side of my brain. Just like, the best way I can describe it is I feel like an ice cream scoop has been taken out of my head.

**Ira Glass** (1:56)
Symptoms like that come and go for two years. Blurry vision, her legs are weak and tremble, her throat swells up and it feels like she's being strangled, and then some stuff is constant. She's exhausted but can't sleep, pressure headaches, it's hard to think. This derails her life. She's always taking time off from work or showing up late in the day, can't be on the computer for too long, which limits what jobs she can get. She's going to the doctor all the time. She's too tired to go out with friends at night. Remember, she's in her 20s.
A tip on Reddit, of course, Reddit leads her to believe that she may have Lyme disease, even though she'd already been tested for Lyme disease and it came up negative, no Lyme.
A different doctor, not test her again, and this time she tests positive for Lyme. The doctor prescribes the standard treatment for Lyme, doxycycline, the antibiotic. Doesn't work for her.
Then she spends two years on other antibiotics and other drugs. Those fail too.
Maybe it's possible. This is because she didn't really have Lyme disease. That second test she took for Lyme was not an FDA approved test.
This is the nightmarish world of Lyme, this whole debate over who really has it and who just has symptoms. From Ora's point of view, the question was moot. She had the symptoms, she wanted them gone. Reg yoga doctors weren't doing it, so she started looking at all the other treatments that people try for these symptoms, and there are a lot of them. She does sessions in a hyperbaric chamber, gets inside an infrared sauna.

**Ora** (3:27)
I tried this elimination diet where all I could eat was grapefruit and goat cheese and oatmeal.
I tried a very intense regimen of Chinese herbs that a doctor in New York City invented and manufactured himself. But at every turn, you're like, am I being preyed upon? I'm spending so much money.

**Ira Glass** (3:50)
And this drags on for years. She's floating in this unpleasant vortex in interstellar medical space where nobody's got answers. Things get so bad that she leaves her job in the middle of her contract because it was too hard to make it through the day. She moves from New York to the Arizona desert, thinking that might help.
And now it's five years since her symptoms first appeared.

**Ora** (4:11)
I was just looking down this road that looked really bleak.
And this was around the time when I was working with a chronic disease life coach, who was starting to say things like, Ora, what would it be like if you never get better? Why don't we start thinking about that? Like to have kind of radical acceptance. And I felt very resistant to that. But sort of teetering on the precipice of like giving up.