Can someone please give me advice? I am in a frustrating situation.
I am a 36 year old woman, my story goes pretty far back. Okay, my story goes back to when I was a small child. This was back in the 90s. I had a tick embedded in my scalp, and my parents struggled getting it out. I don't know when I saw this, but I remember at some point seeing a bullseye rash on my leg. I forgot how old I was, or how I learned about lyme disease(Keep in mind, this was the 90s.), but I had a strong feeling it was lyme disease.
I started getting sick over and over again. I asked my parents to get me tested for lyme disease, and they told me I was just fine. I REALLY wanted to go to the doctor. I begged them to take me to the doctor. They really didn't care much about me(That is an entire different story I probably should talk to a therapist about.).
The sicknesses went away for a few years, until at some point when I was a teenager. When I was a teenager, I got sick so often. Over and over again, it was about every other week. My joints started getting stiff and was achy. My knees hurt more than any other joints. When I flared up, it was painful to walk. It got worse each time. I continued to beg my parents to go to the doctor and get tested for lyme. My dad being the narcissist that he is just gaslighted me. He was very big into gaslighting.
He always told me I was "high maintenance", and said I was being a hypochondriac. My mom just got exasperated, and said lyme disease was rare and I would be dead by then if I had it. It was maddening. I really argued with them.
After enough begging and yelling, I finally got tested. Once. It came back negative, and my narcissist dad just used that against me when I told him I should get tested again since the tests aren't that accurate(This was in the 2000s, so the tests were probably less accurate then than it is now.). My parents just simply didn't listen to me. I missed so much school because of this. I started getting dizzy and had brain fog that came and went.
Thankfully, when the condition is obvious enough, and I mean REALLY obvious, they take me to the doctor. I had terrible bronchitis. I had a very hard time breathing. After begging my parents to take me to the doctor, I went to the doctor. Since I am allergic to penicillin, they gave me other antibiotics. I had one round of antibiotics after another. The bronchitis just didn't go away. Finally the doctor gave up and said it was a viral infection.
The bronchitis did go away, and what also went away were the regular sicknesses. Sometimes I wondered if I accidentally cured my lyme disease or if they just went into dormancy. I absolutely loved not getting sick every other month to every other week.
HOWEVER, I still have doubts. Even though I now get sick about as often as a normal person, I still get headaches and the brain fog still comes back from time to time. When they come back, they make suffer and it gets in the way of my job and classes. They last for week, occasionally months. I am afraid of getting tested because I am so poor. My dad threw me away at the homeless shelter in my early 20s. I have been living in poverty since. I would like to mention, it has gotten a lot better since moving to a city with decent public transportation and have been taking college courses after getting out of default on my student loans(I took college courses before going into the homeless shelter and couldn't continue taking college courses or pay them back so I went into default with my student loans.). However, I am still very poor despite being in an okay position.
I can't afford to get tested 10 times to see if I still have it, and even if I did have it, would antibiotics work? What treatments could someone like me afford? The low income clinics only offer so much, not to mention, I don't know why, but even though the appointments are covered by my insurance(I got my insurance at the Marketplace.), they won't allow me to add the doctor as my primary care doctor.
I don't know what to do.