Katina I. Makris - Autoimmune Illness and Lyme Disease Recovery Guide: Mending the Body, Mind, and Spirit

Copyright 2015 by Katina I. Makris

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Jenny Zemanek

Cover photo courtesy of Thinkstock/PeterHermesFurian

Print ISBN: 978-1-63220-444-8

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63220-757-9

Printed in the United States of America

Dedication

For Jake,
because you help me reach for the stars.

Divine love has met and will always meet every human need.

Mary Baker Eddy, Science of Mind

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

B ooks like this do not get written overnight and a lot happens behind the scenes as well. Besides distilling my thirty years of practice and experience into words and a healing model, I feel the need to honor some very important individuals who helped Autoimmune Illness and Lyme Disease Recovery Guide reach its final form.

A handful of great medical masters provided me with their decades of clinical know-how and selfless attention to my work, in the critical hours I needed you the mostthose final edits on content.

Thank you, brilliant Richard Horowitz, M.D, my twin aquarians with vivid spiritual understanding of these diseases, those extra hours you gave to me on your precious weekend time helped us all understand the crossover between the myriad of illnesses. Explaining so acutely how blebs do actually interfere with immune function is incredible!

Kenneth Liegner, M.D., I can always count on you. I reach out my hand and you are there, helping to guide me through a twisting path. Thank you for your immense kindness and professional collaboration. You shine in the history books and in my heart.

Mara Williams, LPN, my recent guest host at Lyme Light Radio, and such a dear friend and integrative medicine colleague, the autoimmune and lyme disease sections of this book would not be as accurate without your help. Thank you for your wise insights as you work so tirelessly in the deep trenches with thousands afflicted with these illnesses. Your dedication to those who suffer is as big as your heart is mighty.

Jeffrey Sullender, PhD, twenty-five years of friendship and colleagues for decadesbesides saving my life ten years ago, we have traversed incredible literal and metaphoric mountain paths together. Your genius mind, our endless conversations, and our creative synergy helped me to write this very timely book! Thank you for our deep wellspring of collaborative vision and proofing, too!

Three years ago the universe aligned me to cutting edge, innovative Michael Arata, M.D., and how thankful I am for your support and kindness in the final read-through at the last days pre-press, as well as our mutual allegiance to facing the chronic disease crisis of our culture. You are a gem!

My editor Abigail Gehring, since that late summer day we sat in the coffee house in Brattleboro and I shared the layout of this book, you believed in my desire to help others and have been so supportive of helping me bring Spirit back into healing and our daily lives. Thank you for your gentleness and your commitment to my work.

Dede Cummings, my agent, you rock ! Securing a two-book agreement and helping cement my pathway as an author and speaker was supreme! Thank you, wonder-woman.

My guiding star, Suzanne Kingsbury, is a magnificent author, editor, Salon leader, soul sister, and creative genius who literally kept me alive post-op when I underwent dire major surgery as well as during the intense months of creating this book. Without your perspective and love, this book would still be inside me and not in written word. Bless you, Baby! You make me Dream Big.

Without a shadow of a doubt, my life as a writer would not exist without my incredible literary assistant Arianna Meehan. Thank you, beautiful lady, for the endless months typing, talking, assessing, care-taking, pet-sitting, and helping me create my work. I could not share all this knowledge without your patience and steadiness. I still see you on the beach at Frost Pond, the waters shimmering around you, our spirits laughing in play amid the heaving demands to glean words and metaphors. I am honored to have you by my side.

Lovely Autumn Kent, you are a treasure I cherish. Though I am gifted with Big Picture vision, I am a disaster with detail management. You, however, are the glue that keeps my office running, my schedule intact, my social media fresh, my clients and abundant creative energy in check! Thank you from my true heart for all the oddball items you manage so effortlessly and the true generosity you share with me and my family.

Fearless Nell Conkright, you are my Artemis, jumping in to type complex work, when wicked pressures eclipsed reason. Thank you for your talent and exceptional savvy and for being brave when I faced very daunting life challenges in the midst of professional demands. My allegiance to our sisterhood spans beyond eons. Bless you!

To all my fellow writers at Gateless Gate Writing Salon in Vermont, your exceptional minds and rarified writing skills made me write up. On those thigh deep snow clad nights we brewed together in syncopation as I birthed these chapters and you insisted I keep working, though my confidence was shaky. Thank you, elegant friends, for your love and devotion to the magic of words and our shared acceptance of intuitive forces plus discipline.

Ann Stokes, the pristine magic of Welcome Hill Studios is a precious balm to any artist at work. The many weeks I spent on your sacred land and in your studio cottage opened my channel to higher source. The richest pieces of this book were created in that hallowed vortex. Thank you for the encouragement and such amiable friendship.

The incredible guests on my program Lyme Light Radio with Katina educated me on so many salient pieces of what occurs within our body when tick borne organism infections set up camp inside us. I can not list you all, but let me offer you thanks for your tireless clinical work, lab studies, frontier edge thinking, and willingness to come on air with me and educate the world on an exploding public health care crisis called Lyme disease and its cross-over ramifications to autoimmune disorders. How honored I am to be in connection with so many great individuals and organizations.

Extra thanks to the three patient cases in this book; Gregg Kirk from Ticked Off Music Fests, Bethany, and Bonnie Huntsinger. You are very courageous individuals who have battled illnesses for way too longdecades in some casesbecause our world did not understand or accept tick borne diseases as real or how devastating they can be to our bodily systems. Thank you for being honest enough to share your journeys with the world, you give depth and meaning to my messages here.