Excerpt from the blog, Hidden Illness: Our Story of Recovery from PANS/PANDAS/LYME. 

STRENGTH      HOPE      LOVE
Over the years we got a lot of well-meaning, really bad advice. In the beginning, one organization told me it wasn't Sensory Processing Disorder if it didn’t last all day. Our pediatrician said the UTI symptoms of frequency, accidents, and obsessive wiping, might be due to constipation even though I assured them she was perfectly regular. The sudden separation anxiety was a phase. The emotional outbursts that I could not console were typical developmental behaviors. No one knew what to make of it so when the symptoms subsided after a few weeks, we simply moved on. 

Melatonin didn’t help. Reward charts brought her crushing disappointment when she couldn’t achieve her goals; dangling a carrot just out of reach is cruel. A psychologist, who couldn't get my daughter to look at him never mind talk to him, decided it was purely behavioral. I was instructed to tell her that these outbursts were "simply not allowed". He told me to take away something of great importance every time she didn't comply.  "She will learn" he said, and me, desperate to bring her some relief, tried it. Desperate times. It only took me a few days to come to my senses and realize she could not help herself, but the mama guilt from a few of those nights is raw in my heart when I remember.
 
This child didn't need to learn these things; she had already learned all of it. She had hit every one of her developmental milestones on time but had somehow lost these abilities that had once come so naturally to her. This child, tortured from the inside, could not simply comply; she was sick and no one knew. I had always parented with a gentle guiding hand, setting boundaries and letting natural consequences aid our children in making better choices. Now I found myself reaching for straws, tough love, rewards, strong consequences, and some ABA therapy techniques. Nothing helped.

When the dark of night quieted my mind, my heart silently screamed out, "HOW could this have happened? Why? What happened to my child?" There had been no major life changes, no trauma. Nothing to warrant such a change in my child. She had been fine. I could remember her being a sensitive but pretty typical child in the not so distant past. What could have gone wrong?

I remember the first day that I really knew something was wrong with Catherine.
 
Prior to that, she was a difficult baby. She had difficulty hitting her milestones, was constantly constipated where she would be up all night screaming. No amount of miralax or pear juice seemed to cure it. It was truly hell on earth.
 
In November of 2015, when Catherine was 1.5 years old, she started with the ear infections. They were constant, and after only a few months, we were referred for tubes. Upon meeting with the ENT, I brought up her speech difficulties, as she was only saying four words, which all sounded the same. She also had a chronic runny nose that would not go away. He suggested Zyrtec and made an appointment for tubes.
 
Once Catherine had her tubes in, we thought her speech would take off, but the ear infections persisted and she seemed to get worse.
 
The day I realized there was something wrong with Catherine, she was pushing her baby doll in her baby stroller. Up and down the sidewalk, she would walk her baby. Occasionally, the stroller would get caught up on an uneven part of the sidewalk and Catherine would throw an all-out temper tantrum because she couldn’t get the stroller to move. I would calmly move the stroller for her, and she would be on her way again. But the fact that she did this, at the age of 2, for more than an hour, was alarming to me. Combined with the fact that she would throw these temper tantrums over something as simple as getting caught up in a part of uneven sidewalk alarmed me even more.