Uninhibited Podcast Shownotes

Episode: Dr. Kristin

Welcome to Uninhibited, a podcast with the mission to discuss taboo, multicultural, multi-generational, and multi-layered topics that matter to women. 

Our host, Dr. Makunda Abdul Mbacke, is an Ivy-League trained OBGYN, practicing medicine in rural America. She is a mother, career professional, part of Generation X, and so much more.

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1:07 - Our guest today is Dr. Kristin Ryman, who is a family doctor living in Allentown, PA. She’s a married mother of four and three-time survivor of Lyme disease. 

1:45 - Dr. Kristin shares about her life trajectory before the illness changed her life. She was on a path of entering traditional medicine, training at Stanford and choosing a longer-term residency in Pennsylvania, which allowed her to also juggle having kids and being a mom. During this time, Dr. Kristin received the tick bite that transmitted the Lyme disease that triggered her health challenges. 

3:24 - After receiving the tick bite while in residency, Dr. Kristin used her resources to find out more about the disease. She didn’t have typical symptoms, like a bullseye rash, but treated herself with four weeks of antibiotics, which she had been trained to do.

5:12 - As life went on - two more children, graduation, becoming faculty - work duties and stress intensified. In 2011, Dr. Kristin realized she hadn’t felt herself for about six months. It was only after a patient came to her claiming she had chronic Lyme disease (and described all the awful symptoms, and handed over all the internet research she had done) that Dr. Kristin realized how much she didn’t know about the disease.

9:00 - Dr. Kristin learned that there are two schools of thought about Lyme Disease - the traditional and the “crazy Lyme doctors.” The crazy Lyme doctors are actually called the International Lyme and Associated Disease Society, and have established their own set of evidence-based, peer-reviewed research and guidelines that don’t even enter into traditional medical education. There was so much about Lyme that traditional medical education hadn’t taught her. This set off the lightbulb that maybe this was the disease that was haunting Dr. Kristin herself.

11:50 - Dr. Kristin didn’t initially go get medical advice or treatment for herself because the testing for Lyme is highly inaccurate and insensitive to the active disease. 

13:32 - Her recommendation for determining if you have Lyme (even if a doctor initially says you don’t) is to listen to your body. If you know there is something wrong within your body, just because a test says there is nothing wrong doesn’t mean you stop fighting to find answers. 

15:00 - Dr. Kristin spent about a month researching and panicking, trying to find out if she really did have Lyme disease. She describes it as feeling as if she had taken on some of her patient’s fear. Everything she found continued to point to Lyme as the culprit of all of her health issues, so she started to pursue aggressive antibiotic treatment. 

18:45 - Dr. Makunda asks when Dr. Kristin started to feel better again, once she started treatment. Dr. Kristin explains that it took about a month of taking pills, feeling strange pains in her body, sleeping 12 hours a night, having strange neurological experiences, before she started to feel more like herself. She shares that the side effects, like the crippling brain fog, and co-infections of Lyme have derailed her ability to function. 

22:40 - “The biggest piece for me was I am learning things that I can’t unlearn and I don’t think that this new set of information makes me very welcome in medicine.” - Dr. Kristin speaks to the marginalization she felt as she learned more about Lyme that isn’t exactly welcome in traditional medicine.

26:30 - After ending the second round of her antibiotics, Dr. Kristin woke up one day slammed by all of her symptoms again. She visited a chiropractor that same day, which didn’t help her symptoms, but seemed to impart a calm that overrode her fear - she knew that she would be able to handle this. The next morning, all her previous symptoms were gone, but replaced with a terrible sciatic nerve pain in her right leg. That pain haunted her for the next two and a half years.

32:56 - One of the possible answers doctors had for Dr. Kristin was a bulging disk, for which they offered surgery. Dr. Kristin explains that she resisted the idea of surgery for about six months, before the pain drove her back to ask the surgeon to go ahead with it. He actually told her he wouldn’t do it… but later had no recollection of this conversation. 

34:52 - Dr. Kristin explains how she started on her path of finally healing. The pivotal moment for her was about a month after being discharged from the hospital, on all types of pills and medications and herbal medicines, and she visited a homeopath. The homeopath gave her a remedy and gave her a new perspective to approach her life with.

42:40 - “I had a very clear knowing, and the knowing said this: If you are going to live, you are not going to live being fearful, you’re not going to live running around checking to see if anyone’s scattering kindling behind you because you’re going to be burned at the stake for being a crazy Lyme doctor. You’re going to birth yourself anew as whatever doctor you’re going to be, and you’re going to be that.” - Dr. Kristin

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International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society - https://www.ilads.org

Attend conferences, read news from the Board, find resources, and read up on the latest Lyme research and literature. 

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