The bacteria that cause Lyme disease are helical. Here you can see them at 400x. The disease was apparently first discovered in children around Lyme, Connecticut, who were showing symptoms of arthritis.
In children, such as my son Paolo, Lyme can manifest in a variety of symptoms depending on how long it’s had to set in. A rash is often one of the first signs you’d look for. Another telltale sign is something known as Bell’s Palsy. This is typically partial paralysis of the face, one side or the other side. Occasionally the paralysis can affect both sides of the face at once. In Paolo’s case, the right side of his face is currently paralyzed.
He resembles someone who has had a botched Botox treatment, unable to raise the eyebrows, properly close the eyes all the way, or smile. When I took Paolo to the doctor yesterday to try to determine what might be going on with him, she looked at the list of presenting symptoms and then simply asked him to close his eyes and smile. Right away she said, “Oh, he has Lyme. I’m certain of it. He has Bell’s Palsy.”
“Bell’s what?” said I. This was all news to me.
“Bell’s Palsy, partial paralysis of the face,” she said. Wow, thought I.
“Well, that’s why we’re here,” I said. No wonder he’s been so cranky, I thought to myself. Nerve paralysis, joint pain, fevers, and not being able to close one eye (it’s been very weepy) can really grate on you after a couple of weeks.
Fortunately it looks as though he will recover from the facial paralysis perhaps within a week of antibiotic treatment. It also looks as though we caught this early. It is hard to detect right away with a blood test but the doctor thought it could be two or three weeks into it, which makes the blood test a helpful indicator, and the Bell’s Palsy is timed just so as an indicator of time the disease has had to set in as well. The antibiotic has to be taken for 28 days, twice a day at a slightly high dosage. I was also told that Paolo’s discomfort will increase in the first couple of days of taking the antibiotic, as the bacteria die off and begin to slough out of the body. Fever, joint pain, and all that sort of thing, sort of like a person suffering from rheumatoid arthritis I imagine.
That sounds easy compared to the botched blood draw we experienced yesterday with a less-than-competent technician. She attempted to draw blood without asking me to sit with Paolo or hold him, and she described the pain as “like a mosquito bite” rather than “like a long pinch” so he expected it to end quickly. “He moved,” she explained to me after she had finally called me in to assist, Paolo wailing and crying and holding his arms close to his chest. One arm was already bandaged and she was trying to get to the other one and had selected this opportunity to ask for help from me. It goes much better when you double-team the kid from the beginning but she took him away quickly and I was with my other two children in the waiting room wondering what she was about to do. After all of that, Paolo absolutely refused to cooperate and the technician sent us away to another facility “where they have more technicians to hold him down.” I explained this to Paolo as we left and he just cried more. Upon reaching the other facility, we sat in the car in the parking lot for about 20 minutes, my other two children trying to persuade Paolo to go in so this ordeal could end. He sat and cried and wailed, one side of his face immobile, tears streaming on both cheeks.
Fortunately by the time he felt ready to go in—me offering any reward, anything he wanted, if he would just go through with this—River was able to show up to help me with the other two kids, who were trying to follow me into the blood draw room with the evil chair. I had to pick Paolo up and carry him to the chair as he suddenly became uncooperative again at the last minute. These technicians were much better. But they still had to fish in the vein for the blood to come out. “Is he eating and drinking fluids?” the technician asked me. “I’m not getting any blood here, and I know I’m in the vein.” A moment before, she had commented on Paolo’s “beautiful veins”—clearly visible—a trait he inherited from his mother. So why no blood?
“He has a superpower,” I explained. “He can hold his blood in even when there are needles poking into him.”
Now he wears an eyepatch to help the eye that won’t close and with his crooked smile, brand new toy white owl that he can carry around à la Harry Potter (his early birthday gift from me, the reward we negotiated for cooperating with the second blood draw), and fingerless gloves he favors wearing around the house to mimic people who handle birds of prey, Paolo now resembles the pirate-wizard-blood-withholding superhero he truly is.