Cpnhelp.org - Chlamydia Pneumoniae Treatment

 As owner/editor of www.cpnhelp.org I'm supposed to have some pithy, inspiring, or important thoughts for the New Year with the "big view" of this task of dealing with Chlamydia pneumoniae. I find myself, uncharacteristically, at a loss for words as I reflect on the past year here at Cpnhelp, and try to look ahead. I will write anyway, and hope that the process of writing itself will call forth what lies in the murk of shaded reflection.

Of course, we have grown here, and grown in many ways. The site itself has grown, with so much more information available, and greater understanding evolving from those of us in treatment, intelligently observing our treatment and that of each other over these two years. Of course this growth of knowledge brings to a sprawling website, sprawling being the term David so accurately coined for us a while back, the "problems of plenty:" we have more and more information with less and less organization! I look at the Cpn Treatment Handbook, for example, and shake my head, as all I can see is how it desperately it needs to be rewritten and reorganized.

We have also grown in membership, 581 current (a smaller number active) as well as the more elusive but more numerous lurking observers. Last year we generated 249,931 visits and 7,050,628 page hits. This is something to be celebrated! Word is getting out.

I also know for a fact that we now have 5-10+ physicians regularly using the site, and presumably  also treating patients with the CAPi. A kind of a secret society of medical practitioners who, fortunately, are more interested in helping their patients than in religious compliance with the accepted and enforced medical dogma. They are brave souls, and we will protect their anonymity until they wish to become more pubic. I encourage them to post here, so as to contribute their questions and observations to our ongoing learning process.

Still, as I reflect on this New Year's day, I find myself feeling more aware of tasks yet undone than of tasks accomplished. I know as a psychologist that this is strongly colored by the phase of my own experience in healing from Cpn disease. I am perhaps 60% recovered from 25 years of an encroaching disability that stole much time from me. So many projects undone, books unwritten, so many contributions I wished to make that my health constantly became a barrier to making. There is something about a certain phase of improvement in long-term illness when there is a right and proper mourning for things lost that can never be regained. It floods the natural optimism and buoyancy of an improvement that comes with healing something that is not supposed to get better.

I notice, too, that my tolerance for feeling bad has lessened! Each set-back or strong reaction to a pulse, angers me more now, despite having had clear experience of the trend of improvement over time. I simply cannot abide feeling bad now, not when I have so much backlog of life to live and things to do, and I even have had brief but true periods of feeling clear headed enough to actually do them!

Perhaps this is my perennial nature coming back in the healing process, even more vigorously. The same restless, constantly dissatisfied, seeking mind and heart that plagued me with unwarranted perfectionism when I was younger, and yet drove my survival through CFSi and FMSi and fueled my always seeking to find answers to these health dilemmas, now makes it's appearance at full steam as the potential for that same restless focus in areas other than illness call to me.

I hope my readers will forgive the blog-like personal nature of these reflections, but perhaps there is a wider point here somewhere. Perhaps, my own phase of development could be taken as a metaphor for the stage we are at as a community and as a field: we have some things accomplished here, but this only makes us aware of how many things are undone. More awareness of how many diseasesi and disorders could be helped, and more frustration that these GFL disorders (Generally Feeling Lousy) present great difficulty in finding proof or support for their infectious origins. Seeing huge improvements in "untreatable" diseases, and yet wanting to know what more can be done to make it faster and less onerous. Hearing Red's story of vast improvement of devastating rosaceai, something none of us imagined was even Cpn related, and yet knowing only one or two of his compatriots have found their way here to Cpnhelp.

There is much for us to do, and we are trying to deal with treatment at the same time. But who else but the wounded healers are motivated enough to wade through such challenges?

So, as I bring these reflections to a close, I realize how grateful I am to be well enough to be frustrated! Like many of you, not too long ago (two years for me) I was looking ahead at a bedridden endpoint. Mine from fatigue, others of you from paralysis or other disability. And almost all of us have improved or stopped our decline in it's tracks. That is something quite real to be grateful for. I wish for us all that our restless "monkey-mind," as one spiritual teacher termed it, will continue to seek, seek, seek for answers, and never settle for less than complete healing.

May you all be Blessed with healing in this New Year.
And may you all be blessed with stubbornness you need to get it.