Spirochetes

" 'What happens is that the spirochetes, if they aren't treated right away, change form, so that the treatment can never catch up with the disease.  Each time the doctor tries something new, the form is different.  The disease goes deeper and deeper into your system.  This man has it in his spinal cord, and it's gone into his brain, he has neurological symptoms.  Now he's going to doctors who have it themselves, to see how they're treating their own diseases.'

I stare down at my arm, mesmerized with horror. 

As she talks, against my will, I am picturing the spirochetes in my own body, spiraling deeper and deeper into my defenseless system, burrowing their way into my spinal fluid, sliding unstoppably into the crevices of my brain.  Each word she speaks makes this real, inevitable, incontrovertible.

All my feelings of triumph, of power and victory, are sliding downward, cascading toward ruin. She is destroying everything I have accomplished."

---Roxana Robinson,  "The Treatment" in A Perfect Stranger (2005)

In this very tight short story, Roxana Robinson captures the struggle of a middle-aged woman who is most likely afflicted with late-stage Lyme disease.  Robinson has tone-perfect dialogue and some very memorable descriptive passages, in particular one that focuses on the apparatus through which the protagonist adminsters her intravenous antibiotic, Rocephin.  What is most remarkable, however, is this story's accurate rendering of the mental enervation of chronic illness, and the divisive and humliating boundary between those who enjoy good health and those who struggle with disease.  In this passage, a patient who has managed to convince herself that she is recovering from her infection has her healing vision dismantled by a nurse (memorably described as "powerful and clumsy, like a shaggy little bull")  who reveals the devastating reality of her disease.   Robinson's account of the "other[ness]" of disease  is a crucial text for anyone who must treat patients with serious illnesses--Lyme disease or otherwise.