When I first moved to Canada, I had to orient myself with the sun, literally.

I didn’t come from a place where we paid much attention to east, west, north, south. Maybe it was the Green Mountains or Lake Champlain—if you knew where they were, you were good. Directions were just left and right.

Part 14 of My Lyme Story is about Epic’s arrival in Canada, the first barn that felt wrong, a winter that hit hard (just like 2026), depression creeping in, and the dawn escape on Epic—bareback, blanket still on, crawling through snowbanks to get free. It was the winter of 2001. Lyme was fresh, the culture shock in Canada was real, and the barn drama pushed me to my limit.

But Epic and the snow gave me back some power…

If you’re following along with “My Lyme Story,” you might be thinking, “Holy… she’s still in 2001.”

But that’s not really the case.

Where am I going with this?

It’s true that I’m covering roughly 25 years, but I don’t come from nowhere.

Like many things in life, I have to go back a bit before I can move forward again...

Thanks for listening!

This chapter is about road trips, a trusty old trailer, teaching someone how to pump gas (and check oil!), and the woman who changed everything by teaching me how to connect with people when I was too stubborn or proud or in pain to do it on my own.

LK (Linda Kelliher) was one of the reasons I slowed down enough to say yes to Derek… and without that yes, I wouldn’t have ended up in Canada for 25 years, navigating a new culture and a relentless illness.

The next time “door trouble” struck was late fall of 2000. I was 29, newly married, pulling up to the Canadian border in my black Chevy half-ton—with my horse Epic in the tag-along trailer—when, as I reached to hand my paperwork to the border guard, the driver’s side window mysteriously refused to power down…

Lyme is a chameleon of chaos. That’s what I started to learn in the fall of 2000.

As a U.S. citizen, I have no idea how I even got care at that hospital. Maybe we paid cash. Maybe travel insurance kicked in. I can’t remember.

What I do remember is the “preexisting conditions” question on the form. I wrote: Lyme, ehrlichiosis, and babesiosis.

The young blonde ER doc struggled to read two out of three aloud from her clipboard.

*Fuck me,* I thought.

There is something about feeling like you might die that can really push you to start living…

This is where the story changes voice.

Because this horse girl isn’t the same one who leaned her forehead against those iron bars.

I’m older now. I’ve had time to look back and see things a little more clearly, and I’m still sorting through what it all means.

And I have a few things I want to say—straight to you.

Vertigo, relentless rain, and saying good-bye.