As we shot the final scenes in UNDER OUR SKIN I was trying to live without antibiotic therapy. My doctors and I had attempted this before but within a couple of weeks of quitting, each time, I quickly got worse—the memory loss, the feeling of drunkenness, the disorientation, the arthritis in my hands, feet, shoulders, and knees. The fatigue. The loud ringing in my ears. The terrible sleeplessness. The excruciating discomfort and pressure in my face and head from the sound of my own voice as I spoke. The difficulty and frustration communicating with others, in finding the right words. The exaggerated emotions. The numbness in my feet that would turn to burning pain and pins and needles, the stabbing pains in my legs and feet, and so on. But as Andy Abrahams Wilson and his crew recorded my narration for the film in late 2007 I was making it. I wasn’t getting worse. In fact I felt pretty darned good. Today, in January of 2009 I’m still off antibiotics and I’m doing well. I have so much to be thankful for. But I’ve also suffered damage to my life that cannot be undone. At the end of the movie, I say: “I still have my family.” And that didn’t turn out to be true. Prophetically, when the Open Eye Pictures crew first visited my home in 2005, my wife didn’t want to be filmed, and you don’t see her in the movie. My illness was hard for my wife. She had never taken care of a person who was sick and we both found out she wasn’t cut out for it. Lyme patients with brain problems—people who can’t sleep, people who are suffering terrible pain and discomfort, irritable people who are having trouble finding the words to express themselves—are hard to take care of, even for someone who has experience in caregiving. But the problems go farther than the individual caregiver. If someone in your neighborhood gets cancer, people show up with casseroles. Neighbors organize to support the affected family. Family members come from all over to visit and sit by the bedside of the affected person. But when someone gets Lyme, often none of this happens, and the Lyme family is terribly alone. My wife didn’t have that support, not from neighbors or friends or even our own families. Her life had not given her an opportunity to learn how to behave in an emergency, or when something difficult happened. She wasn’t going to the doctor with me, didn’t know the names or dosages of the drugs I was on. She liked being out of the house when possible. She seemed distant and out of touch. But given the terrible ignorance about Lyme around her, it’s hard to blame her for what happened. When things really got bad we went to a therapist. There I was, sitting in that therapist’s office with my central catheter taped to my chest. I’d been infusing myself with intravenous Rocephin every day. I told the therapist I had Lyme disease. But remarkably, he didn’t ask me questions about the disease and for the next two years what my wife and I got was regular marriage counseling. The illness didn’t really come up much. The therapist never spoke with my doctors to discuss the nature of my illness, never read the extensive reports on my brain problems or even asked to read them, and the result was, he didn’t know anything about Lyme or how it might affect our family life. I knew I had to get better or our family would fall apart. So I kept flying to New York for five years to see Dr. Burrascano. And in the end I got better, and it seemed like our lives were getting better too. But then, in the summer of 2008 my wife fell in love with someone else and in the fall of 2008 she left me for her new lover. Now we’re going through a divorce. I hear about this often from Lyme families. The tragedy is larger than the thousands of Lyme victims themselves. Lyme is also destroying families, and the really sad thing is, a serious illness is when people need their families the most. In December, ten years after my tick bite on duty as a ranger, State Compensation Insurance Fund (the insurance company you see in the movie sending me to one of their doctors) finally settled my worker’s compensation case. I thought now I’d get taken care of, no matter what happened. But this month they cut off all of my prescriptions, saying my doctor hadn’t turned in the right paperwork. We’re trying to get the prescriptions back, but to this day the insurance company has never reimbursed me for ten thousand dollars of medical bills and travel expenses I incurred during my last couple of years of seeing Dr. Burrascano. These problems with medical insurance and worker’s compensation are larger than Lyme. They are the failures of a system of medicine where giant corporations call the shots on your health care, telling your doctor what he or she can or cannot do for you. Let’s hope the Obama administration and the new Congress can do something about this perverse situation. But I’m still here, I’m better, and I still have my children, James and Emma, whom you see running up the rocks with me at the end of the movie. My book Nature Noir got fabulous reviews and even was briefly on the national bestseller list. Now I’m working on an exciting new book about American wilderness for Random House. I do some work for magazines from time to time and also lecture in various parts of the country on the outdoors, environment, national parks, wilderness, and, you guessed it: Lyme. Through the movie I have met Mandy, Dana, Elise, and Kris and we have shared our stories, and not without a few tears and a good many hugs. I have met Dr. Jemsek, Dr. Jones, and Dr. MacDonald. And I have had the pleasure of watching the young ballet dancer Marlena Connors—whom you see in the movie taking her first halting steps out of her wheelchair toward Dr. Jones—walk gracefully across a stage in high heels to a standing ovation from one of our New York audiences. Working on UNDER OUR SKIN has been one of the great experiences of my life. Thanks to Open Eye Pictures and Turn the Corner Foundation—a Lyme-related charity that supported production and distribution of UNDER OUR SKIN—we who appeared in the movie have been given a way to help others face the terror of tick-borne disease, to help prevent future cases, and perhaps, if we’re really lucky, to transform the politics around Lyme disease.