UPDATE

No news is good news! I haven't posted here for a long time because I've been busy with other writing projects.

In my month in DC I met my goal of writing 50,000 words of my memoir. (164 pages.) I'm now back in Seattle and up to about 250 pages. It's a very rough draft-- meaning most of it is crap, and I'm sure I'll end up cutting about half of it. It's ludicrous that this thing is so long-- how can I be so fascinating to myself? Somehow I am. My brain keeps spurting out more and more elaborately detailed memories and I delude myself into thinking they're worth writing down.

I'm starting to suspect a good memoir is particularly difficult to write-- because almost everything about oneself seems significant, but to judge what is interesting to others and to tell it well is tricky.

And to put it all in context, at long last, at the 2.5 year mark, the treatment for Lyme is now like sailing on a glassy lake with a steady wind filling the mainsheet. I am on Rocephin, Minocyclene, Biaxin and Flagyl. Yes, FOUR anti-lymals, but the side effects are nothing more than sleepiness after I take my pills. (I ask you Apollo, God of Medicine, why couldn't I have had that side effect from the start?)

I am sleeping 8 to ten hours a day, every day: deep nourishing sleep. And I have managed to cut down on my supplements to boot. Now I'm only taking half a bazillion pills a day. Hip hip hooray!

During my trip home I started running-- running!-- and I have been able to keep it up for close to two months now, going 2 to 3 miles a few times a week. On the other days I do the gym machines or yoga or just go for a long walk. Exercise, I've discovered, is the key to keeping everything in balance.

My best advice to anyone starting treatment is move around as much as your body will allow. If that just means walking once around the block, that's fine. Be patient, build your strength, but move what little you can, whenever you can!

Last week I started dancing again. It's been a long year with the tendonitis, and I was worried I'd forgotten how. To my surprise, I did alright. There were some moves I'd forgotten, sure, but I'd actually say that in a way I was a little better than I was a year ago. For one, my body was much stronger than it was in January 09, and that made me more confident out on the floor. And then, since I hadn't taken a class in so long, I wasn't really worrying about which moves I did when, I was just going with the flow. It all came back to me without having to think about it too hard, and I was just... dancing!