Halfpipe skier on road back from Lyme disease
Excerpted from the Sacramento Bee: (01/10/2014)
Sometimes, in the middle of a halfpipe run, skier Angeli VanLaanen would become so dizzy and disoriented that she couldn’t even figure out where to land.
“Scary,” she said.
Scarier still was that doctors had no clue why she would suddenly experience blurred vision. Or why she was constantly so tired. Or had frequent headaches.
They tested her for routine illnesses. Nothing.
And then for things like a brain tumor and multiple sclerosis — “the really scary stuff,” she said.
Turns out, she had Lyme disease, a bacterial infection transmitted by a tick. The 28-year-old was bitten as a kid and the disease went undetected for 14 years.
Now, after going through an arduous treatment program that kept her away from competing for three years, VanLaanen is back to her hard-charging ways. She’s chasing after a spot on the U.S. Olympic team in ski halfpipe, an event making its debut at the Sochi Games.
She even made a film about living with the disease entitled “LymeLight” (www.vimeo.com/65479794). In one of the more poignant scenes in the 30-minute film, VanLaanen talks about her lifelong struggle to find out what was wrong with her, saying: “I feel like me again. This is Angi. I like to be productive. I like to do things. I don’t want to be in a bed, sleeping all day, days in a row, not out there doing my life’s dreams.”
She then wiped away the tears before smiling.
“It was a long road to recovery emotionally,” she said, “and I went through a roller coaster of all the unknowns.”
VanLaanen believes she knows about the time when she was bitten: She was 10 years old and spending time in Wisconsin when she came in from the woods one day covered in ticks. Her mom and aunt extracted the creatures as best they could.
“Who knows how many were on me that summer,” she said.
Her symptoms began as dizziness and a chronic sinus infection. She also had severe headaches, muscle spasms, back and neck pain, and digestive difficulty. Even more, she was constantly tired. So much so that after a ride up the chair lift she had to rest.
No one could figure out why. Some doctors even suggested it was all in her head.
“That was quite traumatic and very hard for me,” said VanLaanen, who grew up in Bellingham, Wash., skiing on the slopes at Mt. Baker. “When I graduated from high school, I decided to just live my life and deal with these symptoms. For the most part, I would hide them from people, because I was looking to move forward.”
Her career was flourishing, too, shooting scenes for ski movies and competing at events such as the Winter X Games. All the while, she physically felt horrible.
“My pain tolerance just went up,” she said. “But the neurological symptoms, the vertigo, just having no balance, that’s scary.
“I was trying to keep going since there wasn’t an answer. Everyone thought mentally I couldn’t handle the pressure or that I was lazy because I was tired all the time.”
Finally, in 2009, her aunt — after seeing a documentary on Lyme disease — encouraged her to check and see if that was a possibility.
Bingo.
For more: http://www.sacbee.com/2014/01/10/6061871/halfpipe-skier-on-road-back-from.html
Lyme Handbook 
I’d really like to re-blog this for awareness.