The Life Cycle of the Lyme Spirochete

My doctor explained to me that there are three stages in the Bb organism’s life:
1. Spirochete. This is when the spirochete (again, a coil), just kind of rides your body’s metro system, as a presence in the blood vessels. My understanding is that this is how the infection begins, though the stage is not exclusive to early infection.

Antibiotics such as doxycycline and minocycline are best used to treat the Lyme organism in this form.

2. Cell-wall-deficient form. My doctor told me that once you start using an antibiotic that is effective against the spirochete form, Bb sheds its cell wall and retreats into your body cells—your neurons, your muscle cells, et cetera. Now those antibiotics can’t penetrate your cell’s membranes to get at the Bb. The presence of Bb in your cells is what commonly causes the wide array of symptoms you might experience. Bb is especially drawn to fatty cells, like the glial cells in your nervous system, causing any number of psychiatric, cognitive, or neurodegenerative problems. In your muscle cells, it might cause pain or weakness, for example.

My doc said the best antibiotic—and perhaps the only one—to penetrate the cells and kill the Bb is azithromycin, also known as z-pack.

Borrelia burgdorferi

I have a fantastic LLMD (Lyme-Literate Doctor) in Iowa, where I live. The doctor I was seeing before him lost his medical license (see video in preceding post) so I started seeing this doctor. He is very smart, and explains Lyme disease to me in a way no one else has before, and I want to share what I know with you.

Lyme disease is an infection by a spirochete known as Borrelia burgdorferi (Bb). A spirochete is an organism that looks like a spiral, a coiled spring. Syphilis is also a spirochetal infection, and in many ways, manifests similarly to Lyme.
The way to treat Lyme is to manage the symptoms while getting rid of the spirochete. To manage the symptoms, you might need any number of medications, since Lyme is known for its myriad presentations. For example, you will probably need medications to reduce your levels of pain. Some patients need medications for severe mood swings or cognitive deficits. You might need medications to manage cardiac problems, like blood pressure drugs. Or gastrointestinal support. On and on.

Each person’s Lyme disease is unique, with one aspect uniting all of us: symptoms come and go, they wax and wane, and many are not detectable with standard diagnostic testing. You can probably see what the challenge is here. With that type of symptomatic constellation, there are a whole lot of doctors who are going to think it’s in your head, a response to stress and not an actual disease.

Doctors are not perfect. They are people, biased and jaded like all of us.

The way to get rid of the spirochete is generally with the use of antibiotics. If you have Lyme disease that has become chronic, you’ll probably need antibiotics for months to years. Antibiotics can be unpleasant to take, for a few reasons. One is that they can bother your stomach a lot. Most antibiotics should be taken with a meal, but check with your pharmacist on this. Part of the reason they bother your stomach is because they eat up all the healthy organisms in your digestive tract, the ones that help you maintain a gastrointestinal homeostasis, so to speak. They can also do the same to women’s vaginas, leading to yeast infections. To deal with either of these problems, you should take a probiotic such as acidophilus, available in the vitamins section.
If you’re on intravenous (IV) antibiotics, you have to deal with a PICC line, a port in your chest, or some other way of getting the antibiotics into your blood once or twice a day. I have had a PICC line, and I did not enjoy it, because I found it a little scary to be injecting medicine directly into my blood stream, because it was very hard to shower with the PICC line (it should never get wet), and because I didn't know what to do with the line that dangled down my arm.
All the same, IV antibiotics can work very well, sometimes when oral antibiotics do not.

One other problem you run into with antibiotics is the Jarisch-Herxheimer reaction, colloquially known as a “Herx.” This is a central issue to Lyme disease, and I'll post on it soon.

Well, kids, this has been Lyme disease 101. I will continue to make posts that are educational, as well as very biased posts on the way I see the Lyme disease controversy, and autobiographical posts, about my own experience with it. If you'd like to submit your own story to this blog, please click on the "Share Your Lyme Story" link above. And please, comment, follow, and share this blog.