At the age of 26, I was bitten by ’something’ while cutting firewood in Virginia.  I had a anaphalactic reaction to the bite, and needed an emergency room visit and an epinephrine shot.  They suspected a tick bite and gave me 3 days of doxycycline.  About 6 months later, I began having GI disturbances and was tested for giardia, which was negative.  At that same time, I was diagnosed with ADD and was medicated with Wellbutrin.  Three months after that, I had a severe case of vertigo.  Brain scans revealed no abnormalities.  Three months after that I ruptured the L4 disk in my back.  Two months after that, I began having fasciculations (twitching) in my left calf.  I also began to have chronic congestion, and was usually very tired.  I needed 2-3 cups of very strong coffee each morning to get going, but thought that was probably what everybody needed.  About that time, I started waking up around 3 am a couple of nights per week for an hour or so.

I worked very hard, both in school, and at the gym to keep in shape.  If I started to miss my trips to the gym, I began to feel worse.  So, I just made sure I went to the gym everyday for a hard work-out.  Little did I know that this was probably serving to keep my growth hormone levels up pretty high (which is a very good thing in these disorders!).

In graduate school (ages 27-31), I lived in two buildings that were water-damaged.  One was built in 1940 and the basement had been flooded many times.  I stored much of my outdoor equipment in the basement and would go down there serveral times per month.  After about 3 months in the house, I began having serious trouble sleeping, and would often wake up between 2 and 3 am and stay awake until 4 or 5 am, then sleep until 8 or so.  I also started to find clear sores inside my mouth, had frequent gum infections and my bowel habit changed.  I also had a chronically swollen axiallary lymph node in my left armpit.  The lymph node was removed to check for cancer but that test came back negative.  I also started to get dizzy when I stood up.  I saw a number of specialists and was finally diagnosed with neurally mediated syncopy after a positive tilt table test, and was put on a beta-blocker. 

As I wrapped up graduate school (age 31) I was cleaning the basement of the house I was renting.  The basement often flooded with big rain storms and had standing water upon occasion.  About an hour after I swept up the now dry basement, I began to cough a lot.  This developed into pretty serious congestion and malaise within a day.  It ended with a trip to the hospital where the performed a bronchoscopy to clean my lungs out. The treating MD found a lot of little red sores that he couldn’t explain.  He was quite mystified but decided to treat my with Cipro in case it was bacterial.  Looking back, it is quite likely that I breathed in mold spores while sweeping the previously flooded basement in that old house.  At any rate, the Cipro didn’t help, so I was prescribed another round.  This didn’t help either and in fact I began to have more digestive problems.  This was later diagnosed as yeast (candida) overgrowth due to my diminished immune function and the back to back rounds of Cipro. 

I managed to finish my PhD and went off to work at a Fortune 500 company.  The job was stressful and required me to be on-call, which meant my sleep was often disrupted.  Over the course of several years I continued to decline.  I knew something was seriously wrong and continued to seek care with my local physicians.  I was diagnosed with IBS (a catch-all diagnosis), with no known cause.  I became sensitive to many, many foods and could only tolerate steamed vegetables and meats.  Carbohydrates made me feel horrible within an hour.  I saw an infectious disease specialist who found that I had re-activated EBV and lympopenia (low T cells of unknown origin).  I had re-occuring prostrate and testicle infections, along with low sperm counts, low ADH, very high osmolality, low testosterone, and intermittently high 24 hr cortisol.  My sleep study showed I was not going into phase 4 sleep, which is needed to recharge the immune system.  My large team of local MD’s were completely baffled and I was diagnosed with yet another catch-all diagnosis, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.  I was told there was no known cure and that I needed to learn to live with it. 

At that time, I became very frustrated with my team of doctors.  I realized that they did not know how to solve new or difficult problems.  Somehow this ability had been beaten out of them by medical school and/or the health care system.  Insurance companies and managed health care only allowed for short 20-30 minute visits.  My problem was obviously going to take more time to solve than that, so I ‘fired’ my local MD’s and began to search the internet for an MD that could still think and solve new problems.   Enter Dr. Ritchie Shoemaker.