Since I had a few months to wait for my appointment with Dr. Boucher, I thought I would still search out things I could be doing in the interim. During my search, I came across Dr. Ernie Murakami of the Dr. E. Murakami Centre for Lyme in Hope, BC. Dr. Ernie was a retired Doctor that had dealt with many patients that he believed were dealing with tick borne diseases. Unfortunately, his treatment did not follow the “standard” protocol and he was forced to retire, or lose his license.

Since his retirement, Dr. Ernie has been tirelessly working to increase awareness of tick borne diseases and educating Naturopaths and whatever Doctors are interested in learning more. He had a contact form on his website, which I filled out and sent to him. He called me a few days later and we had a LONG chat about my symptoms, where I lived, and where I travelled. He suggested that I may be dealing with more than just Lyme and that if I wanted to go the route of a private Lab to have my blood checked, I should have it checked for several things such as Lyme, Babesiosis, Bartonella, Ehrlichiosis and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. I contacted a Lab in California, IGenex, and spoke to them about cost. At the time I decided not to go ahead as I knew that most, if not all, Doctors in Nova Scotia would not accept the results of the IGenex test.

This discussion with Dr. Ernie, however, got me headed towards additional research on “co-infections”. Apparently, a tick could carry any number of various infections and that the percentage of those that carried more than one thing was steadily climbing. To make matters worse, ticks from different areas could be carrying different things and migratory birds could be dropping them in new locations all the time. How the heck would you know what the tick was carrying? Even if you found the tick on you and sent it off for testing, there is no guarantee that it is checked for everything. It may be just checked for the most prevalent things in your respective area. Lots could be missed.

That’s when I began to appreciate “Lyme Literate” Doctors. They could look at your list of symptoms and pick out which symptoms could be attributable to Lyme. Which ones may be the result of Babesiosis. What ones might be Bartonella. They also knew what tests to do to find out all the different things that could be going on in your body.

I had sent an email to Nova Scotia’s Chief Medical Officer in which I mentioned the possibility of Babesiosis and Bartonella. He advised that there were no lab confirmed cases of either in the province. I then went to my GP to ask what lab work I should get and she wasn’t aware of any. Pretty hard to get lab confirmed cases if Doctors were not aware of the appropriate lab work to be done.

The more I learned, the less I seemed to know. I started questioning everything because I still had faith in Doctors, especially Infectious Disease Doctors, and I couldn’t understand how there could be so much conflicting information and yet there were two totally divided groups – IDSA (Infectious Disease Society of America) and ILADS (International Lyme & Associated Diseases Society) and the IDSA wanted nothing to do with anything ILADS said and actually went out of its’ way to try and discredit all the Doctors, Researchers, etc. that belonged to ILADS.

Why? This just didn’t make sense to me.

What was going on?