I took Ashley to the doctor for blood work, and they ran the CDC’s Lyme screening test, but when we returned for the results, she told us they were negative.
“She doesn’t have Lyme,” the doctor declared.
I was stunned. I had been sure that was it. But the doctor insisted the results were clear. She sent us home with no diagnosis. We were back to square one. My daughter was in the grip of something insidious and pernicious, and there was no one we could turn to for answers. I felt helpless and hopeless and lost.
* * *
—
We were in a seemingly endless loop of Ashley acting out and our attempts to respond. A few months later, I took her back to the doctor to have her retested for Lyme disease, but once again the screening came back negative. By then, I’d done a good deal of research and I knew the initial test for Lyme was not always accurate. In order to rule out Lyme, we would need more advanced screening, such as the ELISA test or the Western blot test. But when I asked—or rather begged—Ashley’s doctor about these tests, she told me we didn’t need them and she wouldn’t order them. When I objected, all four of the doctors in the practice were adamant that Ashley didn’t have Lyme. One of them even laughed at me.
At this point, Ashley was suffering from extreme insomnia. She’d stay up until three or four in the morning and be completely exhausted the next day. We arranged for her to be medically excused from attending classes and allowed to enroll in a home study program again. It was so awful to watch my daughter, who had been so vibrant, loving, and engaged in life, suffering and not being able to function as a normal teenager, experiencing all the excitement, joy, and life moments that high school brings. She was missing out on so much. I just wanted her to get better!
But Ashley continued to get worse. Often, she would get angry out of the blue and rage for hours at a time. Her anger would erupt like a volcano in the house. In fact, sometimes she would get so angry she would run out of the house. One morning, in a fit of rage, she did just that. It was rather cold out, and drizzling, and she left with no jacket. I knew she didn’t want to talk, but I worried about her safety and warmth and went after her in my car, hoping I could coax her back home—but she kept running and ducking and I quickly lost sight of her. I drove around, hoping to see her. It was early in the morning and the streets were deserted. Finally, I let my instincts take over and steer me (and the car), and it was then that I caught a quick glimpse of Ashley ducking behind a closed Japanese restaurant. There were two driveways to the parking lot, one on either side of the restaurant building. I was approaching the first driveway, but I decided to pass it by and drive down the second one, calculating that I might be able to head her off and get her in the car with me.
But just before I turned off the main road, something strange happened. A white van going in the opposite direction crossed the median directly into my path, sped up, cut the wheel sharply, and turned down the driveway Ashley had just run through. The van disappeared behind the restaurant, which was where I’d seen Ashley go.
My heart was pounding. The van cut in front of me so quickly and so close to me that we had avoided colliding by a mere second or two. What was more, the van seemed to be following Ashley. I quickly pulled into the second driveway, expecting her to have walked the short distance to the second driveway, but there was no sign of her. It didn’t make sense. She couldn’t have just disappeared. I pulled around the back of the closed restaurant, and finally I saw her, huddled in a corner by the restaurant wall. The white van had stopped just a few feet from her. The driver’s-side window was down, and the driver was gesturing with his hand for Ashley to come closer.
“Hey!” I screamed out. “This is my daughter. What are you doing?”
The man in the van seemed shocked to see me. It was early morning, the restaurant was closed, there were no other cars on the road—everything around us was desolate.
“I was just asking for directions,” he stammered. Then he sped away.
In that moment, I knew beyond any doubt that if Ashley had gotten into the van, she would have been killed. I just knew it. If I hadn’t caught a tiny glimpse of her, I would have lost her. And I knew exactly why the driver had risked heading straight into oncoming traffic and nearly crashing into my car to turn in right behind her. He had seen her, too. He knew the shops were closed and the area behind the restaurant was deserted. He saw an opportunity to do evil.
Ashley got into my car and we drove home, both of us frightened. I was so rattled, I hadn’t even looked to get the van’s license plate. If I hadn’t been clear about what was at stake before, I was certainly clear about it now. We weren’t just trying to find out what was wrong with Ashley. We were trying to save her life.
* * *
—
Throughout this ordeal, I’d been working to stay open to the Other Side. It felt especially important because I felt so lost and directionless and needed as much help as I could get. I believed that my Team of Light would come through. No doctor had been able to give me an answer, but maybe the Other Side could.
By then, Ashley had developed severe stomach problems, and we added a gastroenterologist to her team of doctors. He diagnosed her with IBS-C (irritable bowel syndrome with constipation). He prescribed medication, but it didn’t seem to work. The situation was only getting worse.
Shortly after the incident with the white van, I was randomly surfing my Facebook news feed when a particular post by someone I’d gone to high school with caught my eye. It included the words “sudden personality change,” and there was a link to something called PANS—pediatric acute-onset neuropsychiatric syndrome. PANS is an infectious disease that can lead to inflammation on a child’s brain, causing severe anxiety and personality changes. Another disease, referred to as PANDAS, has the same symptoms but is triggered by strep throat. I sat bolt-upright: Ashley had been diagnosed with strep throat earlier in the year. PANS and PANDAS, the research said, could make previously lovely children begin to act as if they were possessed.
They were even known as the possession diseases.
The link led me to one of the very few PANS and PANDAS specialists on the East Coast, and I made an appointment right away. She gave Ashley the antibiotic amoxicillin, and within twenty-four hours some of her worst symptoms diminished. Another antibiotic, azithromycin, helped even more.
But even then, we couldn’t be sure of what was wrong with Ashley. Not all of her symptoms synced up with PANS or PANDAS, nor did we know exactly which destructive virus had invaded her body. We couldn’t be sure the antibiotics alone would cure her, or even keep her symptoms at bay for very long. We were still searching for an answer. The doctor sent me home with a packet that included a seventeen-page article about the disease, which I intended to read when I could find a quiet moment.
Things were getting desperate. Even though I knew the Other Side was in this battle with me, I needed more help. They had led me to the PANS doctor, but now I needed more guidance. I was watching Ashley unravel and lose her life energy—I was watching the Ashley I knew disappear before my eyes. I had to find a way to fix her. I had to pull her back from the brink, because if I couldn’t, I didn’t know who else would.
One morning at home, while I was sifting through the stacks of medical bills and research and test results that had piled up all over our house in the last three years, I felt an especially strong sense of desperation. The thought of everything Ashley had had to go through was too painful to bear. I went to my bedroom, and I quietly closed the door behind me. Then I did something I hadn’t done since I was a little girl—I got down on my knees and prayed.
“Listen, God, Team of Light,” I said out loud, “I really need help.”
Instantly, I felt my father push through on my screen.
My father had crossed only weeks earlier, and since then he’d been incredibly responsive, sending me all kinds of signs. And now,
in this darkest of moments, he was there for me again. I raised my hands up to the ceiling—up to God.
“I give up,” I said. “I surrender. I need you to show me what is wrong with Ashley. I know there is something more than what the doctors are saying. I know she isn’t bipolar. I need you to show me what is wrong with my child. I surrender. Please, please, show me what is wrong.”
That night, I got ready for bed, completely drained and exhausted. I turned off the lights and then, suddenly, I got a download from the universe. It was clear and specific.
The packet.
Read the packet.
Turn on the lights and read the packet now.
The packet that the PANS and PANDAS doctor had given me was on the kitchen table—I’d forgotten about it. I turned on the lights, sat at the kitchen table, and pulled out the lengthy article, which was titled “Hidden Invaders.”
When I got to the middle of the second page, I froze.
Imagine the sound of a car screeching to a halt, followed by complete stillness and silence. That’s what this was like. A single word jumped off the page, as if it were lit up by a neon light.
Bartonella
“We all know that cat scratch fever, caused by bartonella, can cause rages and mood swings in patients,” I read. It was written so matter-of-factly, but to me it was a blinding revelation.
Bartonella! This had to be it! I opened my laptop, went straight to Google, and typed in the word. The screen came up, and the first thing I saw was a photo. When I saw it, I gasped and started to cry.
It was a photo of the very same rash I’d seen on Ashley’s back three years earlier.
Bartonella, I learned, is an infectious bacterium. If it gets into the bloodstream, it can cause intense psychiatric rages and mood swings. It can lead to trench fever, or to the more commonly known cat scratch fever, which can then lead to encephalopathy—a brain disease that can result in permanent brain damage, or even death.
I had my answer. I knew it with every ounce of my being. I would have staked my life on it. My Team of Light brought me to the truth. Ashley had bartonella.
Then I got another download that showed me exactly how and why this disease had overtaken her with such force. Ashley had gotten the HPV vaccine a few years before. The Other Side showed me that something in that particular vaccine had damaged her cells—literally infiltrated her “cell doors” and left them unable to close and lock and fight off disease, which meant that whatever attacked Ashley was able to thrive.
I stayed up until four A.M. doing research. When my husband woke up, I told him the Other Side had shown me what was wrong with Ashley. That morning, I took her to see the pediatrician, armed with the packet. I’d even printed out copies of the photo of Ashley’s rash and articles from medical journals affirming that bartonella causes anxiety, rages, and mood swings. I handed them all to the doctor and explained how the HPV shot had damaged Ashley’s cells. The doctor smiled and shook her head.
“With all due respect, Ashley does not have bartonella,” she said. “The HPV vaccine is perfectly safe.”
Then she took down a medical book and showed me a passage that said bartonella presented as a three-dot rash, not the kind of rash Ashley had. I tried to show her the articles I had found, but she waved them away. She even let out a patronizing laugh and assured me that I was absolutely wrong about Ashley.
Not all that long before, at this point in the conversation I would have deferred to her authority and given up. But not anymore. This time, I had my Team of Light with me. They had shown me what was wrong, and I knew they were right. And so I insisted that the doctor give Ashley a blood test to screen for bartonella.
The doctor agreed to run the test, probably to humor me. Two days later, the test result came back.
Ashley was negative for bartonella.
I knew this couldn’t be right. The Other Side had steered me straight to bartonella as the cause of Ashley’s ordeal. So why were the results negative?
“I don’t care what the results say,” I told the doctor. “I know this is what she has.”
Just a few days later, I was talking to my friend Wendy, who happened to have been diagnosed with Lyme disease. She asked me about Ashley, and so I relayed to her what the Other Side had told me about Ashley and bartonella. Wendy gasped. She told me bartonella and Lyme usually go hand in hand…they are co-infections. Wendy had been treated by a world-renowned Yale-trained internist who subspecializes in zoonotic infections, Dr. Steven Phillips, located in Wilton, Connecticut. He was actively engaged in research toward a durable cure for Lyme. A very busy man, he had a two-year waiting list for new patients. Two years was too long for Ashley to wait.
“Let me see what I can do,” Wendy said.
I knew she was well connected, and I knew she would do anything to help me, but still, this seemed too much to hope for. And yet Wendy got us an appointment to see Dr. Phillips in two weeks.
He read through Ashley’s medical history, and he listened as I told him about my certainty that she had bartonella. He asked me if Ashley had recently developed a certain symptom—IBS-constipation—which would be a good indicator of bartonella. My jaw dropped. As I previously shared, Ashley had come down with it just a few months earlier.
“This is textbook bartonella,” he said. “I’m also going to test her for Lyme. They often go hand in hand.”
This time, he ran the more advanced ELISA and Western blot tests for Lyme through the labs at Stony Brook University, as well as a specialized test for bartonella through Galaxy Diagnostics, a laboratory in North Carolina and the most specialized testing facility for it in the country.
When the results came back, they showed that Ashley had tested positive for Lyme disease and highly positive for bartonella. In fact, the levels were so high, the doctor believed she’d likely had it for the past three years.
Three years! Exactly the span of Ashley’s ordeal.
He immediately put Ashley on a treatment for Lyme and bartonella, and ultimately the parasites that often accompany those infections. The medication she took had its own hellish side effects—she experienced intense pain in her bones and muscles, and once even felt like bugs were crawling inside her body—but all of her psychiatric symptoms disappeared. The antibiotics seemed to get her anxiety under control, but the exhaustion and brain fog that had now taken over were a constant battle.
That is when the Other Side intervened again. Another dear friend led us to a second brilliant doctor, Kristine Gedroic (an M.D. with three different board certifications: family medicine, medical acupuncture, and integrative medicine), located in Morristown, New Jersey, who had cured my friend’s son of Lyme and restored him to health. A cellular test conducted by Dr. Gedroic revealed even more. But before she tested Ashley, she asked me to write up Ashley’s medical history—her symptoms, and what I felt was wrong. I wrote exactly what the Other Side had told me. Then Dr. Gedroic ran a cellular blood test. When we met with her to get the results, she sat down with a look of astonishment on her face and said she had never in her life seen something like this: What I had written down was exactly what the tests had revealed. There was a very high level of aluminum inside Ashley’s cells. And it was a type of aluminum specific to vaccines: Gardasil, the shot Ashley had received for HPV. The doctor went on to explain that the aluminum stuck in Ashley’s cells had damaged her mitochondria and thinned the membranes of her cell walls—what I had been shown as her “cell doors” in my download!—allowing whatever bacteria and viruses were present in her body to run rampant. Her cells literally couldn’t shut their doors against the infections. Her immune system couldn’t keep up. The doctor prescribed a protocol of IV treatment to restore the health of her cells and flush the aluminum out at the same time, as well as numerous herbs and naturopathic treatments to treat any Lyme, bartonella, and parasitic infections that were present.*
&nb
sp; It was an astonishing moment.
Ashley began getting better. She was improving. More and more, we saw the same sweet, loving girl we’d been so afraid we’d lost. Her fatigue, bone ache, and brain fog also lifted. Her sleeping patterns regulated.
Not long ago, Ashley took her ACT test—a college entrance exam that lasts nearly six hours. For the past three years she’d barely been able to focus on anything for longer than a few minutes, but she aced the ACT.
As of this writing, we are not out of the woods just yet. Ashley has her ups and downs, and we all need to stay vigilant. But she is incredibly strong, and her force of will is amazing. She continues to improve, and I am so proud to see her fighting back and regaining those unique and special parts of herself. I couldn’t possibly have more love and admiration for her than I do, and I’m humbled by the beautiful, generous power of her spirit. We still have a way to go, but we are getting there. I am certain that Ashley is going to be okay.
And I am certain the Other Side will lead me to what I need to know to make sure that she is.
* * *
—
Sometimes the Other Side sends us cardinals and rainbows and groundhogs. Other times, it sends signs that are more internal—gut instincts, pulls, dreams, random thoughts. Tugs from the universe in one direction or another.
I am not implying that the Other Side will always fix everything for us. That’s not how the universe works. There are doorways and passageways we cannot avoid, no matter how hard we fight to heal a wound or cure a disease or mend what’s broken. Parents who fight as hard as or harder than Garrett and I did still lose their children to terrible afflictions. There are no guarantees that the Other Side will deliver a miracle. But what we can be certain of is that in our darkest moments, we are not alone. We have a support system in place. We have forces on our side that are determined to help and guide us—which is why it’s so important for us to always stay open to the extraordinary reach of our Teams of Light.
Signs Page 23