‘I was doing well in my job when I became ill, but I have had to take two years off work and spend £500 a month on medication’
Ciara McMenamin (30) lives in west Belfast with her partner Kate. She says she hasn’t been able to work for two years due to the disease and had to access private healthcare to be diagnosed.
“I was a business development manager and was doing really well in my job,” she says. “I was really fit and took sick after coming back from a business trip to Barcelona two years ago. I had flulike symptoms and I never recovered.
“I started to have fits, my muscles started to spasm and I got a really bad face pain and the whole left side of my face had drooped. I looked like I had taken a stroke. When I went to hospital they thought it was viral and sent me home.
“I didn’t get better. It would happen when I ate sugar, or drank anything with alcohol in it, just all these random things — I would get pain instantly. And the pain was just constant. They told me it was shingles,
then trigger neuralgia and they gave me anti-epileptic drugs and painkillers.
“I knew I didn’t have any of the things they were telling me I had and I was getting worse as the days went on.
“Then I went private and sent my bloods off to the London Clinic of Nutrition. They sent them to a private clinic in Germany and it came back positive for Lyme disease.” From then, Ciara was able to get treatment. She says she was grateful to be able to get herbal and antibiotic help in a private Dublin clinic. Others, she says, are not so lucky.
“I think that a lot of people who think they might have Lyme go to the NHS and are told they don’t,” she says. “They don’t have the money or the resources to go private.”
Two years on from contracting Lyme disease, Ciara says it still impacts greatly on her life. “It costs a lot of money if you want to get better,” she says. “It’s almost £500 a month for medication.
“I am getting there now. The pain used to be a 10 out of 10 and now it’s maybe a two. But I have been constantly taking supplements and watching what I eat and looking after myself. I have had to take nearly two years off work because of this.
“I was 28 when this happened to me. I was doing really well in my job. I didn’t want to be sick, I didn’t want to be at the hospital wondering what was going on with me.
“I would call on the NHS to take it more seriously. People are really sick. Lyme disease goes to your tissues, your joints, your vital organs and it wrecks your immune system.
“It is easily fixed. Why have someone on painkillers and tablets that will cost the NHS millions per year? Why not treat people for a year with antibiotics and make them better? It doesn’t make sense.”
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