It began innocently enough.
In fact, I was in a really good place in my life when it happened. I was, for the first time in my life, totally devoting all of my resources to a major project for the good of the whole: a creative trilogy of books I believe will help launch a major movement toward stopping childhood sexual abuse.
On top of that, when the life-altering tick bite actually took place, I was volunteering to help prepare cabins for the summer camping season at a mission camp.
Unknown to me, a tick latched on that day—camouflaging itself in with a cluster of moles on my back that it closely resembled in size, color and shape.
Two weeks later—miles away from the camp and back into my writing life–I became extremely ill and discovered I was carrying a Lyme-bearing stowaway.
I knew little to nothing about Lyme as a disease going into the situation.
Over the next weeks and months I was quickly to learn just how serious—and even potentially disabling and deadly—the disease can be.
My initial approach and round of literature I found on the disease tended to minimize it.
You can address this naturally. It’s not that bad—you’re just going to have some fatigue and irritating symptoms like skin rashes and aching joints and minor brain fog.
And the reaction of people around me mirrored it.
A tick bite? Oh, my kids get those all the time in this part of the world. It’s no big deal. Just go on a round of antibiotics to be safe and you’ll be fine.
And then began the steady progression of debilitating symptoms.
This was no minor lifestyle-altering condition—not just an uncomfortable, painful, tiring disease to be managed like chronic fatigue or mono. What I had was clearly no mild or “stopped early enough” strain of Lyme!
The enemy I was battling had moved closer into the crippling, debilitating phase. Vision issues, hearing issues, strange muscle lapses and weaknesses, odd mental misfirings (how did my sea salt grinder end up in my paper drawer??), serious joint pain, heart palpitations and dramatic reduction of energy and capacity levels were all cascading in on me, in rapid succession.
Worst of all came the severe pain. Only on the left side of my face!
Trying to describe it to someone the only images I could come up with were, “It’s like someone is pounding a hammer on my left jaw, while inserting a firebrand into my left ear. On top of that, the ear begins to ring, the skin between my ear & my temple on the left side of my face begins to crawl & my head starts pounding just above the left temple.”
This was a life-altering, game-changing new reality.
In desperation, I began to reach out for information to those with deeper levels of exposure to the disease and its seriousness—some who’d had friends become permanently disabled or die from it, and others who’d spent thousands and thousands of dollars and much of their life focus over a four-to-six year period to battle it to the point of healing.
This, I quickly learned, was a disease with the potential to be as disabling as MS or ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig’s)—with the potential to kill.
A doctor friend in Haiti cautioned me to take it extremely seriously given the damage she had seen it do, a friend in Dallas let me know the disease had killed a 50 year old doctor in her church, and a friend in the upper Midwest (where the tick first latched onto me) pointed me in the direction of a friend who’d tried 12 doctors in the area who were clueless as to how to treat it before finally locating a specialist.
That specialist, a worthwhile several hours drive away for this man whose life had been dramatically altered to the point of disability in his early 30’s by a simple tick bite, connected him to others who formed a support group. With this doctor’s help they took their lives back, one by one–with two to five years of grueling expensive treatments.
Later a friend gave me a copy of the award-winning DVD on the topic: Under Our Skin. I watched as the same kinds of stories this survivor in my hometown area had told me took shape on screen.
A beautiful young bride whose husband has to lift her in & out of chairs and bed by the time her battle against the disease hits its peak.
A once strong healthy park ranger, before his tick bite changed his life and cost him hundreds of thousands to fully treat.
A band manager for Bono’s U2 in her 30’s whose life was completely shut down by the disease.
A baseball player who had to give up his pursuits.
A mother who didn’t realize she had it before passing it to her unborn children–the disease causing miscarriages in some cases and birth defects in others.
And so many others.
I had no idea. All this time, I’d been as ignorant of this killer disease Under Our Skin calls an epidemic (more cases of Lyme reported than AIDs the year before it came out!)
I began to realize could choose to take it seriously—or I could let the disease follow its natural progression to permanent disability and even early death.
Somewhere in the middle of my new serious efforts to craft a plan for battling this disease (that in my case will involve complete relocation to a totally different climate and culture in attempting that as a solution before having to come back to my hometown for access to the specialist after all!) it dawned on me that I could look at it not just as a challenge but also as a gift. I was now living the most perfect and concrete illustration I’d experienced to date of the more abstract and internal damage done by pedophilia .
The parallels came tumbling in so fast I could hardly keep up with them.
A damaging predator had latched onto me with no warning and at no fault or request of my own and begun sucking the life out of me and infecting me with its diseased self.
Now I was left to pick up the pieces and completely reorder my life if I wanted to recover from all the damage done in that relatively short season of carrying a parasite around with me.
And in the process, it emphasized some points to me about helping to stop child abuse.
1) Early detection is key.
Had I caught the bite and taken it seriously immediately and not carried my little predator around with me for week—or if I’d been able to immediately start round after round of antibiotics plus heavy nutritional supplementation until the symptoms cleared up instead of having to try natural treatments and doctors & clinics not knowing how seriously to take it themselves first– the damage done and life change caused would have been nowhere near as severe.
The same is true with childhood sexual abuse. Joyce Meyers has estimated from her studies of and personal experience with this issue that it takes 3 years to heal a child of sexual abuse; 30 for that same survivor if the abuse is not addressed until adulthood. That’s why we must do more as a society to begin uncovering and stopping the abuse while it’s happening—in childhood.
2) But it’s never too late to start healing!
Stage 3 of Lyme—the disability and permanent damage to vital organs stage–can show up months or even years after the initial bite if the symptoms are not fully addressed to get the disease as completely healed as possible. I don’t plan to allow my Lyme to get to that stage! I may not have started treating on the day of the tick bite, but I can reorder my life now to do everything in my power to seek healing and persist until all symptoms are gone and damage is reversed.
When I led sexual abuse recovery groups, the average age of the survivor entering a group and telling people about his or her abuse for the first time was 50. Speaker and author Josh McDowell, now in his 70’s, has just recently begun telling others and going public about his experience with childhood sexual abuse. The author of The Shack and the president of Compassion International are others who began addressing their abuse later in life.
But each is now becoming a powerful force for the good, and helping forerun the movement that is coming. It may take longer to heal the later we wait to begin addressing it, but it is truly never too late to turn the damage of the past into something of hope and help for others.
3) It takes a community.
When my journey of addressing this disease began, the county I was a resident of at the time had little to no resources or support for the situation. That left me pretty much on my own to find help and support. Yet Lyme is not just an individual kind of disease where a person’s behaviors or poor diet choices bring it on! It is environmental by nature, and therefore, society’s responsibility as a whole. We all have contributed to this growing problem (some sources are suggesting a coming epidemic of it, even, with many other types of insects beyond ticks now carrying it) by our collective damage to the world.
In a similar way, we all bear some responsibility as a society for the conditions that allow parents and teachers and coaches and priests and ministers and camp counselors and scout leaders and friendly next-door neighbors to hide pedophilia behavior for year after year after year. We have ignored all the factors that contribute to this issue for far too long. We can do much more.
And that is my greatest hope for my current book project—and all of the spinoff projects in progress that its success can help launch.
I didn’t choose the title CRACKING THE CODE in My Father’s Secret Life only because the trilogy of books uses a creative and attention-grabbing code as the hook driving the story forward into this dark, hard subject. The phrase “cracking the code” in the title has a double meaning.
While the more obvious numerical code is being cracked and driving the story forward and keeping the subject matter from being too dark for the reader, the story is also playing itself out in a way that uncovers the secrets I learned from a lifetime of damage by my pedophile father—who infiltrated every one of the classic safe places for children, leaving a trail of multi-generations of victims in his wake–and helps us “crack the code” as a society on how to detect the patterns and behaviors and symptoms and covers and lies and facades much faster.
Overcoming Lyme has required an entire adjustment to my life—even so far as a planned relocation thousands of miles away in a completely different culture to optimize (and hopefully greatly shorten!) the healing journey.
And overcoming childhood sexual abuse has been an even longer journey that has impacted every aspect of my life.
But I am a fighter. I will continue to heal from both, and to do whatever I can to sound the alarm and educate the whole about what we can do to make a difference and stop the spread of these intensely damaging predatory dangers that exist in our world.
That’s what makes the pain worth it. That’s what takes our own individual experiences out of the realm of private internal damage into becoming catalysts for world change.
Stopping Abuse 