‘ This Is How I Save My Life ’ Excerpt From Amy B. Scher

Amy B. Scher’s “This Is How I Save My Life” is the true story of a fiery young woman diagnosed with late-stage, chronic Lyme disease whose journey takes her from near-death in California to a trip around the world in search of her ultimate salvation. This excerpt coincides with the book’s release in paperback from Gallery Books, an imprint CBS sister company Simon & Schuster. I am twenty-eight years old when I arrive in magnificent India. I am here with my parents, an updated vaccine record, and a visa, searching for something I cannot find at home: a cure. In a tiny hospital on the outskirts of Delhi, a female Indian doctor is offering experimental embryonic stem cell therapy to patients from all over the world. That is what I have come for. For the past seven years, my body has been falling apart, sometimes via a slow decline and sometimes like an avalanche. It has been my full-time job to try, mostly unsuccessfully, to put it back together. My medical diagnoses seem too many to fit in my petite, five-foot frame: inflammation of the heart, autoimmune disease, brain lesions, encephalopathy, arthritis, chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy, fibromyalgia, connective tissue disease, leukopenia and neutropenia, endometriosis, and, finally, the reason for them all: late-stage Lyme disease. But the formal names assigned to my suffering do not begin to convey the actual experience of it. Over the years, there have been hundreds of symptoms, each playing a pa...
Source: WBZ-TV - Breaking News, Weather and Sports for Boston, Worcester and New Hampshire - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Health Simon and Schuster Source Type: news