“Jansen”
Another man stood up and entered the room. Huh?
Engineer Jansen followed him and expressed surprise.
“Sanchez, not Jansen”
Ah. Sorry.
Patience.
Time passes.
More time passes.
“Jansen”
“Not Sanchez?”
“No”
More looking into the eyes. Up, down, left, right, etc etc
“Disc is much paler, inflammation is down.”
“We will stop treatment, as we see no more activity”
3 More Weeks
Engineer Jansen expected that attitude, and came prepared. His big goal for today was: obtaining the extra 3 weeks of antibiotics, as with the article patient. The article “Unusual presentation” has a quite similar patient, who gets 6 weeks of doxycycline in total, sees some improvement after 3 weeks, and more improvement after 6 weeks. Yet another article has a patient with 12 weeks.
Standard protocol in Spain is 2 weeks when Lyme is detected early, 4 weeks if later and the blood test detects Lyme. The Lyme blood tests however, are very insensitive. Literature describes so many cases with negative tests, also with lumbar punctions (“spinal taps”).
The engineer now has had 3 weeks of doxycycline, and after that sneaked in the remaining 8 days of Cefuroxime that he got the very first day in Urgencias, so he was under treatment every day since, with just one day of that Cefuroxime remaining. So, 4 weeks in total, though without visual improvement.
“I really think it’s not necessary”
“I understand that completely, but borrelia/Lyme really is a nasty bacteria, it can hide and come back..”
“I lost one eye, that is quite a disaster, losing another eye would be a catastrophy.”
“3 more weeks of antibiotics probably will not kill me, but losing another eye would be, a catastrophy”
“We could do vitamins..”
The engineer looked really unhappy.
“This article…, they do 6 weeks, the other article 28 days IV Ceftraxione”
She gave in, even though she disgreed.
3 more weeks.
I wonder if they see many patients that interfere with their treatment like this.
(Sorry!)
Tomorrow Centro Salud in home village for extracting blood for the serologia tests.
Together with engineer De Waal, for his followup blood tests.
Yes, toxoplasmosis IgG and IgM are both listed. Jolly!
Status
4 weeks in, the bad news is that there currently is substantial vision loss in one eye, the good news is that the inflammation has stopped. Now hoping that vision improves in weeks or months to come, as with the article patients.
