By Kaitlyn Oleinik

My Lyme journey didn’t begin with a catastrophic moment. It began subtly--too subtly.

Years before my symptoms exploded, a family member spotted a tick on my thigh during a float trip on the Black River. I was six years old.

We brushed it off, literally, and kept moving. No one knew the importance of testing the tick, monitoring symptoms, or starting early treatment.

Years later, I watched an episode of “Mystery Diagnosis” that featured  a young girl who shared my every symptom. Her diagnosis: Lyme disease. When I stumbled upon a list of Lyme symptoms online, nearly every box was checked.

My Western Blot came back “indeterminate,” but the response to doxycycline was undeniable. Each time I took it, my symptoms eased. Each time I stopped, the pain and neurological dysfunction roared back.

Back then, I did not know about Lyme-literate doctors. Lyme was controversial, misunderstood, too “unlikely” in the eyes of many clinicians, especially since I lived in Southern California.

I know now that those early cracks in my health were the beginning of late-stage neurological Lyme disease—something that would later evolve into its most devastating form.

By age ten, my body began to wage a war no one could see.

I cycled through sinus infections, rashes, paresthesia, joint swelling, headaches, visual disturbances, immune dysfunction, and debilitating pain.

Tests for lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, and countless other autoimmune disorders repeatedly came back negative. Doctors labeled me sensitive, dramatic, hormonal, depressed, and anxious.

Brain fog and fatigue at school

At school, I struggled to keep up with the intense schedule of balancing my activities, social life, and schoolwork. My friends seemed to have so much more energy than I did. Brain fog made me forget words mid-sentence. Fatigue and acute illnesses made me miss months of class at a time.

I wanted to be the dancer, cheerleader, musician, horseback rider, and high achiever everyone expected. But my body had its own plans.

The medical system didn’t recognize my body as being under attack. They just saw a young girl with vague symptoms and dismissed them.

But the truth was already living inside me: Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacteria that causes Lyme disease.

I treated for a couple of months with oral doxycycline and returned to a manageable state where I was able to graduate high school and move away to Colorado for college.

Things were looking up until my junior year of college when my house flooded and became infested with mold. I then went through two deaths in the family and a breakup that began to trigger a Lyme relapse in 2014.

When Lyme turned psychiatric

The most terrifying part of my journey wasn’t the pain, or the fatigue, or even the medical gaslighting.

It was feeling as if I was losing my mind.

After decades of chronic infection, three years of being bedridden and isolated, inflammation, immune dysfunction, prednisone, IVIG, and aggressive treatments, my brain reached a breaking point.

I spiraled into delusions, fear, disorganized thinking, and a loss of reality so profound that in February of 2020, I shaved my head, fled my home, ran down the street towards the freeway, and ended up hospitalized under an involuntary psychiatric hold.

To everyone around me, it looked like severe psychiatric illness—bipolar I disorder, psychosis, or some unexplained break from reality.

But what no one asked was why. No one connected the neurological symptoms, inflammation, infections, medications, immune reactions, severe and unexplained rapid weight gain, and years of endocrine disruption that preceded the unraveling.

Lyme didn’t just affect my body, it inflamed my brain. And brain inflammation doesn’t present itself neatly. It presents as panic, delusion, mania, terror, depression, auditory hallucinations, and paranoia.

It presents as something society labels “mental illness.”

Why I Wrote Revival

I wrote Revival: My Journey with Neuropsychiatric Lyme Disease because for most of my life, I was encouraged not to talk about what happened to me. Because stigma thrives in silence. And because the only way to destigmatize neuropsychiatric illness is to tell our stories about it.

I wrote this book because “we are only as sick as our secrets” (Alcoholics Anonymous), and I chose to set mine free.

I wrote it for the millions who are told their physical illness is “all in their head.”

I wrote it for the families who don’t know that Lyme disease can cause psychiatric symptoms, personality changes, and neurological decline. Research showing that bipolar disorder and psychiatric illness in children are linked to tick-borne infection is growing.

I wrote it to show the medical community that mental illness can have infectious origins, and that dismissing complex patients causes unimaginable harm.

Most of all, I wrote it to give the girl I once was the validation she never received: It wasn’t your fault. You weren’t dramatic. You weren’t attention-seeking. You weren’t crazy. You were sick.

I am now thriving in remission from bipolar I disorder. I am close to declaring remission from Lyme disease. I went back to college and earned a bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Sociology. I am now a graduate student studying Forensic Psychology to learn about crisis intervention and victim advocacy. I have a 4.0 GPA and am in the honor society. I am riding my horse, traveling, as well as writing and recording music. What happened in 2020 feels like a distant nightmare.

In the end, my story is a reminder

Lyme disease took nearly everything from me- my childhood, my friends, my body, and my mind. But it didn’t take my voice. Revival is my way of reclaiming it.

If my book helps even one person feel less alone, get diagnosed earlier, or find the courage to advocate for themselves, then every moment of suffering will have meant something.

As I say in my opening pages, this isn’t just my survival. This is my revival.

Click here for more information and to order this book.