me take 64 pills a day.
Sixty-four pills: That’s 25 before breakfast, another 20 after breakfast, another 10 before dinner and another 9 before bed.
I take 64 pills a day, and I feel like it’s slowly killing me. Or if it’s not killing me directly, then at least I know one thing for sure: it’s really bad for me. In the long run, taking so much medicine on that regular regimen is simply bad for you. It is literally an elaborate trick that you play with yourself, a lie that you tell your body to keep thinking that everything is fine.
It is an endless, exhausting and miserable cycle.
But I do it anyway.
I do it anyway because I have Lyme disease. (Since I am not a doctor, I say I have “chronic Lyme”. It is a shorter way for me to say that this disease is still affecting me after more than a decade; I prefer the alternative, which is “Post-Treatment Syndrome of the disease Lyme with a current active infection with a different strain of borrelia and bartonella, as well as other co-infections. “) Taking 64 pills a day is the only way to keep my condition under some form of control. It is the only way to stay healthy enough to play the game I love, healthy enough to do my job and earn the wages that support my family.
Healthy enough to live something akin to a normal life.
I regret not having done more in the past to talk about Lyme disease. It’s a scary thing to live with, however, not many people know much about it, and I take my share of the responsibility for that. I could have been using my platform to help raise awareness and to improve understanding. He could have been helping a lot more.
I know that I I need help much more.
I know I need to help us get to a place with Lyme disease where what happened to me last week never happens to anyone else.
Here is the essence of what happened.
When the COVID news started to spread, I immediately took it seriously. That is not my boast; Those are just the instincts that I have developed after almost a decade of living with Lyme disease. I’ve been told over and over the years that my condition makes me immunocompromised That part of what Lyme does is weaken my immune system. I had a common cold that caused my immune system to drop into a serious relapse. I have relapsed from a simple flu shot. There have been many cases where I have contracted something that should not have been a big problem, but my immune system exploded and became terrifying.
It’s a scary thing to live with, however, not many people know much about it, and I take my share of the responsibility for that.
That is something I am dealing with. And so when I read that immunocompromised people are at increased risk with COVID, I took every possible precaution. (Which, by the way, I realize is a great privilege that I have that most people don’t have.) I treated COVID as any high-risk person should: as a matter of life and death.
So when the WNBA started the process of organizing the bubble, I paid close attention to the measures they were implementing to make it safe. me to know how much work went into this, and I know that many people in the league spent crazy hours protecting players and making it as safe as possible. But the fact is, I was told that, ultimately, it would be impossible to keep COVID-19 out of the bubble entirely. And then Florida cases started to increase. And even if the bubble is the safest place in Florida … if you had to go to a hospital, and the hospital was overwhelmed, then what?
I still wanted to play, but I was scared. I spoke to my personal doctor about what the league planned to do, and he felt it was still too risky.
When the league started reviewing player cases to see who should receive a bubble health waiver (meaning the league excuses you from playing, but you don’t have to give up your salary), I didn’t even think it was a question whether or not he would be exempt. I didn’t need a panel of league doctors to tell me that my immune system was high risk. I played my whole career with a high risk immune system !!!
I LIVE with a high-risk immune system.
Todd Rosenberg / The Players’ Tribune
But I made sure to follow the protocol.
The doctor treating my Lyme disease wrote a full report, detailing my medical history and confirming my high-risk status. The Mystics team doctor (which is amazing, but has never treated my Lyme disease) wrote a report that essentially differentiates my doctor from Lyme disease and agrees with my high risk profile. File both reports with the league, as needed, along with a signed form that waives my right to an appeal.
A few days later, the league panel of doctors, without even talking to me or any of my doctors, informed me that they were denying my request for a health exemption.
Now I have two options left: I can risk my life … or lose my salary.
Honestly? That it hurt.
It hurts much. And maybe being hurt just makes me naive. And I know that as athletes we are not supposed to talk about our feelings. But feelings are all I have left right now. I have no money for NBA players. I don’t feel like going to war with the league over this. And I can’t appeal.
So really all I have left is how much does this hurt. How much it hurts that the W, a place that has been my only big dream in life for as long as I can remember, and that has given my blood, sweat and tears for seven seasons and eight seasons, has basically told me that I am wrong about what what happens in my own body. What I hear in your decision is that I’m a fool for believing my doctor. That I’m faking a disability. That I’m trying to “get out” of work and still get paid.
I have no money for NBA players. I don’t feel like going to war with the league over this. And I can’t appeal.
Yes … they caught me.
That is why I played in the final last year with THREE HERNADO DISCS ON MY BACK.
That is why I exercise during the seven months of the year when we are not in season, when nobody is watching me, when I am not collecting my player’s salary.
That is why I have stuffed my 6’5 “body on so many economy class flights that I almost forgot what it’s like to have legs and feet that are not dangerously bloated
That is why I take 64 pills a day.
Because I’m the type of player who invents a condition to avoid playing basketball.
I was discovered.
For the record: I am not writing this letter to announce my plans. I am still thinking very carefully and weighing my options.
But I wanted to write this for three main reasons.
First, as I said: I know it is time for me to take a more public role in the battle against Lyme disease, a battle that I have been fighting primarily in private for years. I really regret not having done more before. But I have this platform and I want to help. I hope this is a start.
Second, I know that the decision I am facing, risking my life or losing my salary, is far from unique. I know that millions of Americans right now, in situations that are much worse than mine, face similar decisions. And, of course, many are dealing with something worse than that: Millions more are completely out of work. Many of them, especially black and brown people, and especially black and brown LGBTQ people, are dealing with food insecurity and homelessness. I want to express my deepest solidarity with them.
And then the last thing I wanted to say here, and probably the best lesson I learned through my experience with Lyme disease, is this: There is so much in the world that we don’t know.
It’s something I started thinking about when I started showing Lyme symptoms. I had these migraines and these night sweats. She had extreme fatigue and body aches. I felt horrible the whole time. But we still had no idea what it was. For a while we had no idea. One doctor would look and think it was one thing, another doctor would look and think it was something else, and so on. Even when I went to the right doctor, finally, a literate Lyme doctor, who correctly diagnosed me, even then There was still so much we had no idea about. There were a million different treatments; there were many trials and errors; There was a little bit of everything.
It is high time I took a more public role in the battle against Lyme disease, a battle that I have been fighting primarily in private for years.
And in a weird way, going through that became this kind of realization for me.
I think when you are younger and you grow up, if you are relatively healthy, you think the world is very black and white, very solution oriented: When this happens we do that and then it is fixed. OR: When I feel sick, I go to the doctor and then I recover. This was more or less how he saw things. But then all the uncertainty occurred with my Lyme diagnosis, and I went on that whole journey … and it really started hitting me, I guess, how much is out there that we don’t know.
Now, 12 years on that journey, it is still hitting me how much we don’t know.
And whether it’s in these last pandemic months we’ve been dealing with and doing our best to adapt to, or it’s these past few weeks of activism that have inspired the rethinking of many of our old power structures, or it’s anything else. .. I feel that all this year, in some way, has been a long example of that same type of trip: of people who discover things they did not know about the world and realize how much they still have to learn.
And that can be quite intimidating, for sure. It can be stressful to think about that.
But I also think there is a valuable idea, just in terms of how we treat other people.
I think the idea is something like: we can never fully understand what someone else is going through, or what they have been through, in the same way that no one else can fully understand what we are going through, or what we have passed by
There is so much in the world that we don’t know.
Which means that the best we can do is listen and learn from each other, with the greatest possible humility.
I hope that in the future the WNBA can hope to do the same.
Thank you,
Elena
