Brenda Sterling-Goodwin types at her computer on a Sunday afternoon. She’s writing a summary of the church service at Trinity United Church.
In truth she didn’t set foot in the church that day, but received a tape of the message along with the bulletin, which she uses to complete her weekly summary for the newspaper.
Sterling-Goodwin has Lyme disease and is wheelchair bound these days. She believes she contracted the disease in 1997 while working at a vet clinic. Her symptoms subsided for a while after that, but flared up again about eight years ago and got so bad that at one point she lay in bed almost the entire day.
But getting diagnosed has not been an easy task for the New Glasgow resident. At first doctors in Nova Scotia told her she had multiple sclerosis, but she was sure that wasn’t the case.
“I knew what I had, but no one would listen to me,” she said.
Since that time she has travelled to the U.S. where she has been clinically diagnosed with Lyme disease. She’s also had blood work done to indicate the same.
She said the problem is in Canada they only test for one strain of Lyme disease when in fact there are hundreds.
This month is Lyme Disease Awareness Month and Sterling-Goodwin has been travelling throughout the area to raise awareness about the illness. She’s talked in Antigonish and at the New Glasgow and Pictou libraries where she’s shown the film “Under Your Skin.”
“I’m on a mission,” she says. “I want to help people.”
Lyme is a disease that if left untreated can spread throughout a person’s body and cause brain and nervous system problems as well as joint pain and a host of other symptoms.
The main thing to realize is that it affects different people in different ways, Sterling-Goodwin said, and it often mimics other diseases, which is why it’s so hard to diagnose.
It often frustrates her that the medical community in Nova Scotia is so reluctant to recognize that Lyme disease exists here when it’s already been proven that Pictou County and other areas of the province have black-legged ticks which are the carriers of the disease. The number of people in Pictou County with Lyme disease has now reached double digits and she recently talked with a man in Pictou who had pet test positive.
While she certainly wishes she had never contracted the disease, Sterling-Goodwin is thankful that through her own experience she has been able to help others. There’s hardly a week that passes that she doesn’t get a call from someone looking for more information about Lyme disease.
“I’ve helped a lot of people just by bringing awareness,” she said.
She has helped several people get properly diagnosed and treated for the disease and hopes to continue to help others. She said it saddens her to hear stories about children in particular who have the disease.
“It breaks my heart to see little people get hurt,” she said. “I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.”
But she is sure that with proper awareness, fewer people will have to suffer. She is confident too that she will get better. She makes it clear, she doesn’t want sympathy, she wants to fight this disease.
“I want to be able to walk to church again,” she said. “I want to dance down the aisle.”
