Ten weeks ago, Canadian social services seized my sister’s 11-year-old son because she sought treatment for their Lyme Disease from a licensed doctor.
Before her illness, my sister Christine was a driven, Yale-educated MD and health consultant, author, and avid outdoor enthusiast who spent every spring and summer afternoon on her mountain bike pulling her infant son and dog in a trailer through overgrown forest trails. But when my nephew was nine months old, both he and my sister suffered a strange series of relapsing summer flus with high fevers, vomiting, and joint pain. The pattern repeated a number of times and then appeared to resolve. But over the coming weeks and months, a host of seemingly unrelated symptoms began to emerge.
In a span of just over a year, my sister lost thirty pounds and was transformed from a fit, healthy athlete to a skeletal invalid who suffered unremitting headaches, joint pain, nausea, and dizziness and who struggled just to get out of bed each morning. Meanwhile, my nephew erupted in rashes-- large rings, coin-sized bullseyes, and lines of little dots like beads on a string appeared all over his body. By the time he was two, he’d developed a dry cough that kept him awake every night. By two and a half, he forgot how to count to ten-- something he’d been doing effortlessly for months. Then, just before his third birthday, my formerly energetic and cheerful nephew became unexplainably exhausted and inconsolable. Silly things like dropping his hat made him burst into tears and nothing comforted him. All he wanted to do was climb into my sister’s lap, suck his thumb, and go to sleep. A few days later, he began repeatedly punching himself in the head-- hard enough to leave bruises-- for no apparent reason...................
