A July 2014 wedding on Long Beach Island, New Jersey, was the start of my (Parish’s) nightmare. It was a beautiful weekend filled with love. There was lobster and champagne and a crazy Gordon Gekko–style house on the beach. I sang a few songs, made a toast, and cried happy tears for my dear friends tying the knot.

Two days later, I woke up back home in New York City with a crushing head and neck ache. It was weird but I figured that I’d sleep it off. After a few days, I felt better.

The following weekend, when I got out of the shower, I saw a faint red circular rash on my shoulder with a bug bite in the middle. My knees buckled. I called for my husband, Andy. “HUNNEEEE! I have LYME!” He really didn’t think so, because the rash didn’t look like a stereotypical “bull’s-eye.” But I knew, and walked to the ER, where the fresh-faced doctor took a quick glance at my shoulder and said it looked like Lyme. The tiny bite surrounded by the rash that’s diagnostic for Lyme was enough for her to arrive at the diagnosis. The doctor also said to be glad I caught it quickly. I took the twenty-one days of doxycycline as prescribed, following up with an infectious disease specialist a few days later, to be safe. He reassured me that I would have no complications since I caught the bite within a week. Though I still felt uneasy, I decided I was being overly cautious, and convinced myself to move on. A month later, I woke up with my breast swollen and painful. Fearing that this could be a symptom of a deadly cancer, I rushed to my long-time internist, Dr. K, who looked scared, and said my breast tissue felt “like tons of little beads.” Dr. K stepped out of the exam room and called an oncologist, who was kind enough to make room for me that day. He did not know why I had these strange symptoms (“too much soy, hormonal, maybe”) but was certain it was not cancer. I saw him two more times to be sure. He was puzzled by my fixation and panic since he had ruled out the worst. But I know my body, and none of this felt right.

By October, my arms were profoundly, alarmingly weak. A fork felt like a bowling ball after my normal workout at the gym. I noticed my heart was palpitating and racing at night, and I could barely fall or stay asleep. When I did, drenching sweats startled me awake. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw horrifying faces melting into each other. I told Andy I was seeing monsters. My brain felt hazy and unfamiliar, and I was suddenly scared to be alone.

For the weakness, Dr. K sent me to a sports medicine doctor, who barked, “You’re weak! You need to lift weights!” I told him my sternum ached. And my ribs. My bones. I feared I had lymphoma. I was so weak from the five-pound weights  lifted in his office that the next morning I couldn’t wash my hair. I whispered to my sister-in-law, “Something is very wrong.”

From there, I had a migrating, burning red rash on my sternum. I went to a second infectious disease doctor at NYU. I asked if all of my symptoms could still be from Lyme and he said no. When I pressed, he told me he was sure because he “went to medical school” and “Lyme is killed 100 percent of the time in the test tube with doxy.” His flip answer unnerved me, so I asked if he could send me to a Lyme specialist. He laughed and said, “Oh God. A bunch of shysters!” Instead, he sent me to an allergist who detected no allergies, yet prescribed me a strong antihistamine anyway. It didn’t work.

I returned to the infectious disease doctor and asked him to check my inflammatory markers, which he thought was a “great idea.” I wondered why he didn’t think of it himself, especially when the results turned up a high rheumatoid factor, which means I had signs of an autoimmune problem such as rheumatoid arthritis. He had no explanation or remedy.

In the midst of this, another NYU infectious disease doctor I knew joked about my spiraling health, asking, “How does your husband take it?” That outrageous comment sent a wave of shock through my system that solidified my determination to get to the bottom of my illness and share my story with everyone who’d listen. By Thanksgiving, I was relentlessly short of breath. It was my most terrifying symptom. I went to a cardiologist, who performed an echocardiogram and said my heart function was at 40 percent, like “a seventy-year-old man’s.” She used the words “heart failure” and said she was not sure why. Tears streamed down my face as I lay there gasping for air. The cardiologist paged Dr. K, who worked at the same hospital, to come and console me.

During Christmas week of 2014, I was in California with Andy, resting at our friend’s beautiful farm. I was too weak and short of breath to walk from the bed to the car. I couldn’t sleep and stayed up all night crying. I asked Andy to do an online search of all my bizarre, disparate symptoms and tell me what was wrong. I believed I was dying. He pulled up a comprehensive online checklist written by a well-known Lyme specialist, Dr. Joe Burrascano. I had thirty-seven of the sixty symptoms. Full-blown Lyme. I was enraged, overwhelmed, and afraid. Luckily, my friends knew a specialist — a Lyme-literate doctor in San Diego, four hours away — who mercifully agreed to see me over the holiday if I could get to him. He examined me, took some blood, and listened to my story. He calmly said, “You have Lyme. Lyme does all kinds of weird things, but you’ll get better. Amazing that I am only the twelfth doctor you’ve been to. Most find me somewhere between twenty and a hundred.”

I flew home feeling terrified but took some solace in the fact that I finally had an answer and a plan. But I was not at all comfortable starting such a potentially grueling treatment with a doctor on another coast. After furious research, a last-minute email to friends led me to Dr. Phillips. I got in on a cancellation in January 2015 and began treatment with him. He clinically suspected that I also had Bartonella, which, he explained, complicates Lyme and was a possible cause of my heart failure. He ordered a blood test that was positive for Bartonella henselae. To my detriment, all the others had missed it, delaying my life-saving treatment by five months.

I started on the pulsed, rotating course of long-term antibiotics he prescribed, along with a Chinese herbal protocol by Dr. Qing Cai Zhang of New York City’s Zhang Clinic, and a strict paleo (anti-inflammatory) diet. In days, my muscles and joints calmed down. Within eight weeks, my brain fog lifted and the nighttime visions of melting faces stopped. My heart recovered normal function (70 percent) by April.

At this writing, it’s been five years since I started proper treatment for Lyme and Bartonella. Although I still take short courses of antibiotics when I begin feeling symptomatic, I’m generally about 97 percent better and have been for about four years.

Now I look back on a childhood marred by chronic, excruciating bladder pain and inflammation (my urologist said my bladder looked like “a bloodshot eye”) that was later diagnosed as the idiopathic “interstitial cystitis.” I also suffered strange facial tics, and recurrent strep throat and congestion resulting in the removal of my tonsils and adenoids at age twelve. I also experienced sudden allergic reactions, intermittent anxiety, and panic attacks that my pediatrician called “generalized anxiety disorder.” I now recognize that I likely had some strain of Lyme or a similar infection for most, or all, of my life. And now,with treatment under Dr. Phillips’ care, a S ll of those earlier symptoms, including interstitial cystitis and anxiety, are gone, too. I didn’t know who I was until I treated Lyme.

In Our Own Words: Here’s how we each relax and enjoy the health we’re so grateful to have.

Dana: “I live in New York City and love wandering with no destination, day or night. Sometimes I bring my angel, Lucy, who’s a Tibetan Terrier rescue from Puerto Rico. She lights people up (including me) and gets treats everywhere she goes. One day a guy snuck her his bagel and cream cheese. I find it therapeutic to travel, but I always return to my ‘happy place,’ Santa Ynez Valley in California, with its Tuscan-like landscape, relaxed vibe, zillions of beautiful, grazing animals, and close friends. You’ll also catch me singing a lot, which has always given me a peace I can’t describe.”

Purchase the accompanying Chronic book by Dr. Steven Phillips and Dana Parish, out now!