ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) – Lisa Najarian sipped her chamomile tea in the sunny kitchen of her Grant home on a recent Monday and sighed.
“September’s a bad month for me,” she said.
The symptoms of the Lyme disease she has suffered for 19 years were affecting her. She acknowledged them – fatigue and brain fog – and then pushed them aside to keep talking about her project, Twin Cities Lyme Foundation, and the $148,000 raised at its first gala this month.
The foundation uses an assessment tool to help folks experiencing poor health find out if they have Lyme disease. The foundation donates $1,000 per person toward getting a diagnosis and connects people with doctors who have been certified by the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society, the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported.
“My mission is to help people get better,” Najarian said. “I wish I’d had somebody like me to take me under their wing and say, ‘Let me get you to somebody who can help you.’”
Najarian doesn’t know when she contracted Lyme. She never had the telltale bulls-eye rash. Her symptoms started in July 1999 while living in Illinois. She woke up one morning and her left ear was plugged and ringing – a symptom she still has today. After that came terrible vertigo, heart palpitations and migraine headaches.
She was misdiagnosed with Meniere’s disease, something historians believed Vincent van Gogh may have had when he cut off his ear.
In the days and weeks after a person is bitten by a tick, bacteria spreads through the bloodstream. Lyme is often called “the great imitator” because it can appear to be something else, such as Meniere’s disease, fibromyalgia, ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) or others.
Najarian is married to Pete Najarian, a former Gophers and Vikings linebacker, and they have two children, Lex and Kole. In 2007, the family moved to Connecticut, about an hour from Old Lyme, where the disease was first diagnosed in 1975.
While in Connecticut, she had a series of symptoms that sent her to specialists as she tried to understand what was happening to her body.
In September 2010, she was hosting friends for dinner when she suddenly felt ill. She excused herself and went to her room, where she was overcome by vertigo and a terrible migraine.
“I said, ‘I think I’m going to die,’ “ she said. After a trip to the emergency room that required morphine to mask the pain, she was bedridden for two weeks.
“The kids were pretty worried,” Pete Najarian said. “The answer part of it is the most frustrating. She saw so many doctors.”
While in Connecticut, she even took a Lyme disease test, but it was negative. She learned later that blood tests are not reliable because the disease pulses, which means it flares up and then appears to go dormant.
Najarian said the foundation’s assessment test lists 109 symptoms for Lyme, some of them neurological such as claustrophobia.
In 2014, Pete’s brother Paul died and the family moved back to Minnesota to be close to Pete’s parents. His father is John Najarian, the well-known University of Minnesota transplant surgeon.
When they bought their house in Grant, they were disturbed to find its 13 acres infested with ticks. They spray the grounds monthly with permethrin to keep them away. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Minnesota had 1,304 confirmed cases of Lyme in 2016.
In 2015, Najarian took the Lyme test again and got a positive. She called that moment “a silver lining.”
She’s on a regimen of diuretics every two weeks to keep inflammation down. She also uses natural medicine such as Monolaurin and oil of oregano. But the bacteria has been in her system so long that it has caused irreversible damage, such as the hearing in her left ear and the chronic fatigue.
She got the idea to start a foundation to help others after talking with Brant Rooney, who maintained the Koi pond on their property. He spoke at the gala, relating how his wife had Lyme.
Lisa Najarian
