Success Story: Whitman’s Reversal of Lyme Symptoms

A Tick Bite Changed Everything

Whitman was developmentally normal until age eight when he was bitten by a tick in the summer of 2020. Before that he was perfect and healthy, but at that point I was told:

They said to treat it like a bug bite. So fast forward to November 2020, he had an emergency appendectomy. And that’s when the firestorm started for his body.

So what we now think is that the Lyme, Babesia, and Bartonella were all being fought off by Whitman’s immune system. And when he had the appendicitis and the surgery, it caused a storm in his system that his body can no longer fight. It had to go into fighting that. And so his body just had a really hard time recovering from the surgery. He actually really, truly from that surgery on, he was never the same. That was the beginning of the story.

The next day, when he came out of surgery, he was having a lot of chest pain and he was not walking well. And so I kept asking the nurse about it, and she kept reassuring me it was normal. And finally I said, “I’m gonna need you to call the doctor on call and have them come in because something’s not right.” And so they came in, and they reassured me everything was fine, and he was just gonna go home and recover and be just fine.

Even Worse by Thanksgiving

And so we continued on. We brought him home, and every day was worse. We had Thanksgiving as a family. He couldn’t get out of bed. He couldn’t eat his food. He tried to eat. He would vomit it. And we ended up going back to see the surgeon the next day.

We then sent him for another CT without contrast, and it showed that he had developed a large intra abdominal hematoma or adhesion in his lower right quadrant where the appendectomy was. Whitman was a ten out of ten pain at this point, and he went back for surgery again. They tried to drain the abscess, and they hit coagulation. Nothing would come out. They tried in several places. They couldn’t get it. He went back, and then they were pretty quickly out, like, “I’m sorry. This is just gonna have to go away on its own.”

At this point, he was having a really hard time controlling his bowels and his urine. He was in excruciating pain. He had developed what I called eye shakiness. I didn’t know what it was at the time, a hand tremor, and he was having a really hard time walking with his right side. The doctor then said:

I had no idea what to do. I had never had a medical professional speak to me that way, and it was just a very difficult concept, you know, that I’ve I’ve now seen a lot, but that was the first encounter. And the nurse said, “You need to report him (the surgeon). That was completely inappropriate. I have been with Whitman every day that you’re here, and he is the most precious patient I’ve ever had. And he is not faking it. He is not tricking you. You are a good mom.”

Whitman Was Afraid He Was Going to Die

And so that carried on until Christmas day, and we tried to do a normal Christmas, but it wasn’t. The whole day was a really terrible day, really. By the end of the day, he was wailing in bed, just crying and crying and couldn’t go to the bathroom and couldn’t control himself and tremoring, and his eyes were full on nystagmus at this point with any tracking.

He said he was afraid he was going to die. We said, “We’re gonna take you to the hospital here.” And they started helping him, and the doctor comes in and says, “I’m so concerned. What can I do?”

And I just told her he was still struggling. Now the bowels were were not happening. He was having what he said was sharp, stabbing pain in his belly in one spot right where the appendix used to be, which is what we know where the hematoma was. And so he’s having this horrible, horrible, horrible pain.

And she said, “Okay, okay, well, I just don’t think we’re capable of taking care of him. I’m gonna call USC, and I’m gonna request a pediatric transfer immediately by ambulance tonight. We’ve got to get him where he can get help.” She came back in the room with a completely changed demeanor, and she said to me:

Lyme Disease Diagnosis at Last

After that appointment, that was kind of the last straw with what we were doing that way. We made an appointment with a holistic, integrative, integrative functional medicine provider. I have a friend who works for him, who’s a nurse, but she said he doesn’t see children, but she got us in with the doctor. And immediately that day, he said, “He has Lyme disease and co-infections.”

I also found Doctor William Padula after searching for Lyme and eye vision issues. And when I found him, we immediately booked with him and went to him, and that was in May of 2022. We flew up to Connecticut, and Dr. Padula immediately started working with Whitman and got him stabilized and helped him get his foot on the ground a little bit. We got rid of the wheelchair that week, and Whitman just minimally used the walker after that. Dr. Padula gave Whitman prism glasses to stabilize the system and help with all the vertigo as well that was going on.

But while we were at Dr. Padula’s office, he kept talking about something called spasms of accommodation. Whitman’s eyes were moving like this because of spasms of accommodation. His eyes were trying to accommodate what his brain couldn’t do. I kept thinking, “I wonder if you could have a spasm of accommodation in your belly. You know, are these like belly spasms? Is there something we could do to stabilize that?” So I just thought about it a lot, wrote it down, and just tried to be present while we were there. But when we got right when we got back home, I started researching abdominal spasms of accommodation.

Whitman Had ACNES (Anterior Cutaneous Nerve Entrapment Syndrome)

And up popped an article from Boston Children’s Hospital that I ended up having to purchase on the pediatric surgical journal to read the whole article, but there’s something called ACNES. It’s anterior cutaneous nerve entrapment syndrome, and it’s where your anterior cutaneous nerves can become entrapped after a surgery, a trauma, or like a large hematoma that would put pressure on the abdominal wall that cause adhesions that would trap the anterior cutaneous nerves.

This was exactly Whitman’s symptoms. This is 21 months after his surgery. He finally ended up having anterior cutaneous nerve entrapment syndrome surgery, which is called something else. And it took the pain away for twelve weeks, and then it came back because his nerves regenerated. So then he had the surgery again. So after that second surgery, it did take the pain away, but then it started to creep back up.

Stem Cells Helped

And we had just gone to a seminar about stem cells. So we made an emergency appointment with the stem cell doctor, took him there, and had stem cells injected into the point of pain. And then he’s it lasted for a year. He had no pain. It crept back a little bit this past May. He had more stem cells injected and no pain.

It’s inflammation, it’s adhesions, it’s the nerve regeneration, and probably a lot of the Lyme, Baronella and Babesia stealth infections getting in that area and irritating it and not letting it fully heal like like you should be able to heal. The stem cells and exosomes allowed his body to heal.

Our Lowest Low

When we went back one of Whitman’s doctors and told her, she said:

She gave us a referral for a psych hospital where he should go spend three weeks relearning how to be a person and not call himself sick anymore. And I think that that might have been our lowest low because we were so heartbroken and sick and confused, and she was wrong.

Our Highest High

Our highest high was probably watching him play his basketball game last week. He was just crushing his goals, living life, and being able to be a kid again. He still is within limits, but he’s just able to be a little person again, and that’s that’s a high. That’s everyday kind of high. You know? Just as a to other parents, like, you fight for your child, you advocate for your child.

At the end of the day, you’re the provider. You find physicians and NPs and PAs to help you, but you have to handle it yourself. You have to keep good notes. You have to be thoughtful about what you do. You have to plan your encounters, and you have to go outside of your comfort zone. It wasn’t good enough for me that Whitman just could be alive. I want him to live and live out loud.

He’s walking. He’s playing basketball. He’s crushing all of his goals. He’s strong. He’s courageous. He’s the same kind of boy he was before he got sick. And he’s chronically healing is what I like to call it. We’re just on this healing journey. We still have ups and downs, but when we started, we were here, and our new baseline is here, and we wanna be here. You know what I mean? We’re just continually working on it. We’ve finally figured out it’s a marathon, not a sprint. You know, everybody tries to tell you that, but we’re like, we’re gonna defy the odds. We’re not gonna be that one family that takes forever to heal.

Our children need to know more than anything that you believe them because if you believe them, they’re gonna get better. Don’t let your sickness become your identity and know that things can get better.

Learn the Top Five Things Whitman’s Mom Did

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