Seize the Reins with Cait Lynch

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.

Derek Lynch circles back into my life...Just in time.

Jennifer's farm and my new found family.

Freshly sick with Lyme and two other, tick-borne illnesses, babesiosis and ehrlichiosis, it was the end of May 2000.