u/awkward_throwaway321

So, it’s not as bad as it sounds. I think. I’m doing a lvl 3 business admin apprenticeship and our work-based project is a significant portion of our assessment.

When the time for my project came up, I was quite ill so my manager suggested I wfh for the project. The project was to create a booklet of instructional guides for the new system in time for the next staff meeting. Super, I can do that. I submitted the project on the Friday evening before the staff meeting (Thursday) to give us time to review the packs and make any adjustments.

Little did I know, on the Friday morning whilst I was away, my boss’s boss started writing up the same pamphlets, which he then revealed on the Wednesday evening, right before the staff meeting. And then his pamphlets were used for the staff meeting. I was told that this was because they weren’t sure that mine would be ready EoD on Friday, but it just feels weird that he decided to do the same thing? Like what was the point in us both doing it?

As part of the ‘review’ section of the project, I’m now ‘merging’ our leaflets. Which is really just me adding a few sentences and bullet points to his document, as there were a couple little bits he missed out, but overall his work was much more succinct than mine (one of the issues with my work was that it was too word-y) so I’m cutting down most of what I’ve done (1,500 word document with screenshots and diagrams) into just a few bullet points to add onto his work.

I’m not really sure what to do about this now, my manager says it’ll be fine for the project report, but I have to send out a survey to assess the project as well and I feel weird doing it? Like it’s not my project anymore, I’d be taking credit for someone else’s work? Do I say it was a communication error (It wasn’t, but I have no idea how else to spin this)?

Disclaimer: I recently had an acute lyme infection and I’m still recovering. I’ve had lingering PEM-like fatigue for about 3 months now with very little improvement. I’m out of work at the moment but I’m expected to be back soon. I am prefacing this by acknowledging that I am extremely privileged that I haven’t hit the 6-month mark yet, three months is realistically nothing, but I am still scared that this will not improve and I want to do everything I can to improve my chances as early as I can.

I spent half my paycheque to see a functional doctor that specialised in both lyme and cfs. I very badly need occupational advice and a vague idea of what I can do to help myself. My GP has been no help so I was very excited for this appointment.

The doctor I saw spent three quarters of the session trying to convince me to pay £2k out-of-pocket for blood tests to determine if I had a long-term infection, and then more money for months of treatment, and more for quarterly reviews, (and extra to pay the phlebotomist to take the blood in the first place). She was also dead-set that I definitely would have another infection, despite asking me very little about my symptoms.

In the last five minutes of this 1-hour appointment, I was able to ask for advice on treatment and symptom management in the case that I don’t do the blood tests, and I was recommended to take an extra vitamin D pill in the day and to keep pacing. Bearing in mind, she did not explain pacing at all and I’ve been totally guessing off of online NHS guidance and advice from the generous people on here.

If this chronic lyme stuff is real, I’m obviously fine with paying the 2k. I’d pay whatever to avoid any further limitation of my independence. BUT there’s so many contradictory anecdotes on here, and I can’t afford to lose 2k to snake oil if I’m at any risk of losing my job as well. I’ve wandered into the lyme subreddit a few times and EVERYONE is trying to diagnose me with a co-infection. I feel like I can’t trust anything?

TLDR: Post-viral fatigue after a lyme infection, I very much do not want this to develop into ME/CFS. Should I trust a very expensive private doctor and try out their ‘chronic lyme + co-infection’ treatment or is it likely a scam? I’ve heard mixed anecdotes

Hi, I’m currently recovering from a lyme infection and an iron deficiency that both hit me at the wrong time. I was on antibiotics for four weeks in June/July and I was off work for a week (plus a couple of odd days). I returned to work normally for two weeks after and have since gone very downhill from trying to get back to normal too fast. It’s difficult to tell if it is post-viral fatigue/PTLDS or iron-deficiency fatigue or both. I’m due to see a specialist soon.

I’ve spoken to my GP, who has recommended that I work from home for the next two weeks, and then do a phased return to work. I very much want to go ahead with this, as I’ve been resting constantly for the past two weeks and have only just gotten from bedbound to housebound. I currently need to take a lie-down break for every 2 hours or so of sitting, or the fatigue gets worse and rebounds the next day. Showering is difficult, I have to cook with a stool, I need to lie down after eating. I’m very physically limited at the moment, but I have been improving.

My workplace agreed to one week of wfh (week before last), and then I was on annual leave for a week, which I spent in bed with family around to help me. Now I’m back, they don’t want to move forward with wfh after today, and would rather I do reduced hours and then go home at lunch and wfh in the afternoon. This was surprising to me, as we’ve had to go long stretches with us all working from home due to issues with the site before. I did a half-day yesterday for an important meeting and it’s really knocked me on my ass again. I have a very long commute, and even with my hours reduced to half-days I can’t see myself getting better. The commute in the middle of the day would also cut my working hours, as it’s 2 hours one-way, and then I would have to crack open my laptop at home to do maybe 1.5 hours at the end of the day. My college has already agreed to do a break in learning if I ask for one.

I have my return to work meeting in a few days and I’m nervous. I know employers aren’t legally obliged to listen to doctor’s notes, but I’m very worried that if I go back to work now, I’ll end up sicker than I was before. My boss says she’ll talk to occupational health, but it sounds like I’m not going to be involved in that conversation.

What can I do here? I don’t think I’m allowed to demand sick leave/accommodations? My employers are disability confident committed and I applied with them because I have chronic migraine, though I’ve maybe used three sick days for my migraines in the past year, so I naively was expecting a bit more leeway for this.

I’m very early days - too early to know or diagnose ME - but since my lyme treatment I’ve been experiencing levels of fatigue that I’ve never experienced before. I’ve been trying to go to work as normal, and this has resulted in multiple sick days and spending all of my weekend lying on my sofa. My sleep is broken, my light sensitivity is near constant (hasn’t been this bad since I started propranolol for chronic migraine), my throat is sore and gets worse as the fatigue worsens. I’ve never felt anything like it before, it’s like my sleep does nothing at all, and the moment I think I’m having a ‘good day’ I pay for it immediately the day after.

The recurrent advice on here is to treat it as early as possible to prevent it from getting worse, but how is this done if it can’t be diagnosed until 6-months in? I am talking to my boss about wfh accommodations, I really can’t risk extended leave at the moment, my apprenticeship concludes in March and I very much do not want to fail it. I had a week of leave when the fatigue started during the lyme treatment, and I felt well enough to work the week after, but all of my symptoms nose-dived the week after that. Some days I genuinely thought I was going to somehow collapse from exhaustion just lying in bed.

Has anyone on here managed to treat it early? And what does treatment even look like? Even if I manage to wfh, I’ll still be working.

Currently what I’m going is:
- Resting as much as I can 3 days a week (I have a four-day work week with one day reserved for college work, I am fast with my college assignments and do not have to work the full day) and not taking on any additional activities after work
- Taking vitamins B12, C, D3, K2, folic, iron, and a probiotic
- Hydrating a lot
- Eating little and often, easy meals that I don’t have to cook, and aren’t draining to eat. Trying to fit in as much nutrients as I can

TLDR: potential ME triggered by lyme, not sure how to go about early treatment/prevention without a diagnosis or specialist. any and all anecdotes and advice is very very welcome

So I finished my 4-week doxy course a week ago after we caught it early (in first two weeks, but had multiple EM rashes). I got bit in a pine forest in lithuania. in sandals. and bare legs. because I’m the smartest person alive. I was on here whining a week ago that I don’t feel much better.

It’s so much worse now. I can barely walk on my feet because they’re so sensitive, but weirdly theyre worse when I’m lying down. I’m so tired. I’ve never been so tired in my life, it feels like my body is about to just give up on itself. I can’t do shit without having to lie down for a while, I’ve been trying to resume work and I’ve just been completely wiped. I hid in the bathroom for 15 minutes today just to sit on the floor and breathe.

I’ve been slowly getting worse over the course of this week and idk what to do. I’m in the UK, there are no urgent-appointment llmds here. I had a lyme blood test done after ten days of antibiotics and it came back negative, but I’m taking this with a hefty pinch of salt because we were still within one month of the bite, AND had been treated for ten days. BUT I think my doctor is going to take this at face value. I will call her tomorrow anyway, but I’m fully expecting to be turned away or retested before they give me anything.

I’m scared, I don’t want this to get worse. I’ve only been back in work for a year after I developed chronic migraine, I can’t take serious time off. I have my apprenticeship work-based project coming up, I finally had everything back on track

I’m beginning to get mad. My throat is still sore, I’m so fatigued I don’t eat in the evenings, I was only just able to go back to work after a week off and now it looks like I’m going to need to be off again. The brain fog admittedly is a lot better than week 2 of doxy, but my feet are too sore to stand and I’m so tired and I can’t sleep and my body wakes me up at 4am every morning. I keep thinking I’m getting better and then it’s like I get hit by a truck.

I know continuing symptoms are normal for chronic cases but I thought early antibiotics would nip this in the bud? I’m worried I’ve taken the antibiotics wrong somehow? Id usually have them with a vegan cereal bar (made with soya rather than milk chocolate), but maybe it had added calcium and reduced the effectiveness?

I really need this to not turn into something chronic. I have chronic migraines, I have chronic gastritis, I am 24 years old I cannot be developing chronic fatigue I only just got back into the workforce. It doesn’t make any sense, I got on doxy exactly two weeks after the bite, as soon as the rash appeared.

Hi, I was diagnosed with lyme during the early disseminated stage and I’m currently on a 4-week course of antibiotics. I know that even though I feel really crumby, I’ve been super lucky that we’ve caught it early.

I was bitten in lithuania, which I know is an endemic zone for lots of tick-borne illnesses, so I wanted to get checked for other diseases to be on the safe side. However, all of the tick clinics I can find in the UK seem to specialise in long-term care rather than screening for acute infections. They’re all also Very expensive and I’m nervous about shelling out £400+ on a service that might not be specialised in early testing and have more of a chronic-focus. I just impulsively cancelled an appointment I had booked for next Wednesday because I didn’t know if it would be worth the money, their upfront cost is £400, then extra for testing, and their specialisation is on chronic lyme, and I’m on an apprenticeship wage.

Now I’m anxious because I am thinking I’m going to end up missing some underlying disease that’ll only rear its head later, and I’m running out of time to treat it early. The online information is so contradictory. Some people say to look out for xyz co-infection, other sources say humans cant get that specific co-infection from ticks. I imagine this will send me into some sort of health anxiety relapse.

Does anyone know anywhere that specialises in the early presentations? Or does anyone have an estimate on what kind of money these tests cost? No website shows the testing cost and I really really don’t want to spend £400 on a consult, when all I want are the tests really, and then get charged another £100 for tests, or for me to only get a letter of recommendation of tests to be sent to my GP.

I’m currently on a business admin lvl 3 apprenticeship, coming up to the start of my portfolio and project (9ish months in?) and I have become really really disappointed with the whole thing. I was genuinely quite excited to be taken back to basics with this whole apprenticeship thing and taught how to do admin tasks but I feel like all I’ve been doing is working badly. I’ve had little to no oversight, I’ve just been left to do a job and ask questions along the way, but my role responsibilities have expanded to take on some of my more experienced colleagues’ workloads and I’ve been consistently feeling out of my depth.

Initially, my employer said they put a ‘training plan’ in place but I’ve not seen any of it. I have been shown how to operate their specific ui but I’ve had to mostly guess how to appropriately do everything else. Instead of showing me how to do things, they just throw me in the deep end ‘we need xyz done by abc date, organise this for it’. I do ask a lot of questions and they do answer them, but this is the extent of the training. I had my first quarterly catch up missed, so when I voiced that I wanted a bit more oversight in my 6-month-ly catch up, we implemented ‘weekly’ catch-ups to monitor my progress and talk projects, and then we removed my quarterlies. We then did not have weekly catch ups. I initiate our weekly chats at my boss’ desk where I let him know what I’m doing that week, and that’s the extent of our talks. I don’t have a private space to voice any issues that I might be having or talk about my project, my boss never seems to want to commit to anything that’ll take him out of the room for more than ten minutes.

I eventually stopped initiating the catch ups because I get nothing from them and they never happened again. I sent an email a month ago (around the same time everyone else was having their quarterlies) that I need to have a chat with my boss to go over the next quarter, as a lot is happening and we’re having extra people in to take on some of the workload, and I still don’t know exactly what my role responsibilities are, as they’ve expanded a lot since I started. He sent me a thumbs up emoji in response and we’ve penciled nothing in. He’s always out of the office and very busy so I don’t like to push or just presumptuously send a calendar invite.

Idk, maybe this is normal and I’m being too whiney. I’m just a little disappointed that I didn’t even get a performative ‘this is how you manage the emails’ or ‘this is how document production works’. It’s just ‘try out doing this thing you’ve never done before and we will be using whatever you come up with because we’re all too busy to do it right now’. I was really genuinely excited to be trained, I still feel like I haven’t learnt anything, it’s just a very cheap ordinary job. And I genuinely adore my colleagues and my boss, I think they’re lovely, I just also feel like they can’t be bothered with me.

Super foggy atm so not sure if this is going to make much sense. I’m on day 9 of my treatment (2xDoxy a day) and I feel worse than I did before I started treatment.

We caught it super early, I had a bite at the beginning of June whilst we were in a forest in lithuania, and I started doxycycline on last Saturday (two weeks after suspected tick bite) after my leg swelled and got red and hot and developed a bullseye rash. The rashes started appearing over my other bites right before I started treatment, so I thought it was an allergic thing, but as the bites had been fine for the first two weeks and then suddenly flared up, my doctor said that it might be a sign of the infection spreading.

I had a little bit of fatigue before the treatment but nothing crazy. I went generally bad in the first few days of antibiotics, but by Tuesday I felt back to normal. On Thursday I felt abruptly worse, brain fog and fatigue, muscle pains in my neck, shoulders, and elbows. Doctor said maybe my body’s still getting used to the medication, but she sounded super unsure about it. I end up with a bit of a temperature and a headache and a sore throat + ear but it goes down by Saturday, I was initially worried about co-infection, but then I found out my dad has a virus so I think I just picked something up from him.

Today (Monday after) I feel dead on my feet. I want to lie down all the time, I’m so foggy and forgetful it feels like I’m drunk. I can’t sleep through the night for no reason in particular. I’m currently commuting to work out of guilt that I took two days off last week, but I doubt I’ll be there long. It feels like I can’t get enough air in, I’m so tired. Yesterday I was sneezy, but no more fever and no more sore throat. The symptoms have been changing so fast I have no idea what’s going on.

Is this normal? Would it be a waste of money to contact the TBD clinic to ask about co-infections? I don’t know why I’ve gotten worse after catching it early and starting treatment, it’s so weird to me, and I need something to tell my boss. We have a rly busy season coming up and I want to be able to put in as much as possible, it’s like the worse time to fall behind on my tasks, and I have no idea when I’m going to feel better?

I (24f) had a cystoscopy today just to make sure everything’s ruled out before my doctor settles on IC as a diagnosis. I didn’t want to be a baby about it but in hindsight I don’t think my nurse waited for the numbing gel to kick in? And when I was in pain during the exam I felt like I was ignored? I was really positive going into this procedure and now I feel like I’ve had my expectations flipped

It was an all-female team, and they were all lovely and friendly, but the patient before me had taken a long time (I was booked in the early morning and was seen 45 minutes late, which is unusual for this hospital) so I think they just needed to get through things quickly, which I understand, but the whole experience felt quite humiliating?

They gave me a brief overview of the procedure and I stripped and they got me onto the table, but after that it was like I wasn’t even in the room with them. I swear it was less than a minute between them putting the gel on and inserting the saline + camera. They also didn’t warn me before going in, they just sorta dove straight in there and told me ‘It’s going in now’ after they were already inside.

It felt sharp and painful going in, and as they continued moving it forwards, the sharp pains kept up and I nearly sat up from the shock of them and I was audibly in pain. One of the assistant nurses just told me to relax and breathe and another one put her hand on my shoulder, but the lady moving the camera did not stop at all. Whenever I tensed up or jerked forward from the pain they were there immediately telling me to relax. I wanted to say that I was in pain and that I’d like to take a break, but I got the impression that they all probably knew I was in pain and they just didn’t care. That’s probably an unfair assessment, I get very caught up in trying to not look like a hysterical woman when I’m at the doctors so I was probably downplaying my reaction a bit too. I was trying to gauge how much pain is ‘normal’ for this exam and I didn’t want to be whiney. The pain did then subside once they were in and looking around, but I was so frazzled by everything up until that point I wasn’t paying much attention.

So genuinely weird, I’m not sure if I’m being a total baby about this. It’s an invasive procedure, I was expecting that, I just feel a little bit overwhelmed. This was my first one so I could be completely wrong, and this pain might be standard for this procedure.

I have no idea, I was wondering if anyone had similar experiences with these exams, and how much discomfort is normal? They’re part of the diagnostic process on the NHS I think