Life with Lyme Series: Carol — Plans Change

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Welcome to the first installment of a new series to the blog: Life with Lyme, featuring guest posts written by friends and fellow Lyme disease fighters + survivors — sharing snapshots from within their world — living with Lyme and chronic illness.

The following is a re-post (with permission) of a heartfelt post made recently to social media by a sweet friend, Carole (known by the Instsa community as carole.lymesince95).

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Carole is a wife, mother, rancher, friend to many, Lyme and tick-borne disease fighter + survivor… and one strong, resilient, bad-booty woman!

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Plans Change

Story by Carole Will Nelson

Do you know how you make plans… and then you have to change those plans?

Changing plans on the fly couldn’t be truer than on a ranch, when every plan is subject to ever-changing weather and daily needs of livestock.

Our mantra — “plans change”.

Short version: [today] we sold our ranch… a huge change in our plans and future.

The following is the long, very long, version:

In 2012, this girl from suburban Baltimore uprooted herself and moved to Montana to be a cattle rancher with Carroll, who worked his whole life to be a cowboy. Such a huge change you might think? Well you would be right! But I’ve always loved animals, and after all cows and horses are just a little bigger than dogs. (lol) Carroll will tell you that I took to the cows like a duck takes to water… and he’s right… I fell in love with all 200+ of them!!

Our new plan was to retire from our computer business and grow old together as ranchers… but plans change…

In 2014, we finally figured out what was wrong with my health / body — why I had daily migraines and extreme pain, why I couldn’t get out of bed some days and other days I was fine, etc. I had chronic lyme disease. Plus 5 lovely co-infections: Epstein Bar Virus (mono), Bartonella (cat scratch fever), Babesia (similar to malaria), Anaplasmosis and Ehrlichiosis.

These diseases had been ravaging my body since 1995, when I was bitten by a tick that my dogs brought into my house in suburbia MD. I was never treated properly for these diseases (and totally dismissed by the doc that I saw at the time). I thought that having a diagnosis meant that I could now be cured.

NOPE!

Lyme disease is NOT curable!

All the thousands of pills and treatments (and $$!!) that I’ve tried since then really haven’t helped much. In fact, some of them made me much worse.

Well, when your cowgirl lifestyle has livestock depending on you to get up every day and tend to their needs before your own, my plans and life became very difficult.

Plans had to change.

In 2017, we made the extremely hard decision to sell our cowherd and put the ranch up for sale. That fall I created a sales brochure of some of the many, many pictures of our beautiful ranch — and we handed it over to a realtor. December 30, 2017 was the very last time that I ever got to feed the whole herd. It was a gloomy snowy day… I cried… and I cried some more.

I went to Maryland to visit my family for Christmas, and Carroll stayed behind that year, all by himself, to ship the cows off to their new owner. I cried from afar… cowgirls aren’t supposed to cry… but plans changed.

In the spring of 2018 we found a new, downsized ranch. I guess you’d call it a hobby ranch now, and we moved by that fall. For 3 years we’ve been trying to sell the ranch. It wore us out. Taking care of 2 properties and 3 houses with the properties being an hour away from each other was tough. We were always worried about the ranch, especially when we couldn’t lay eyes on it every day. We traveled back and forth… A LOT. We know every mud hole and rut on the roads between home and the ranch by heart. We couldn’t really focus on our new place because the ranch still had so much of our attention. It seemed like there was always something breaking down: well pumps died, floats in water tanks screwed up, fences always needed repairing, houses needed upkeep, grass needed mowed, hay needed put up, etc, etc. Did I mention we got worn out?? (and we did have help — awesome neighbors/friends were around to help us keep an eye on things!)

[Today] October 21, 2020, the ranch was sold. The final papers were signed at 10:00am. The story of how the sale all came together is convoluted, and crazy, and looonnnggg and ultimately started with dinosaur bones (check out Dino Hunters on Discovery) — but that’s a story for another time. This is a bittersweet day. We are numb right now. I’m still not done crying. We know in our heads that this was the right move for us. I know that plans needed to change, but I can’t help but feel guilty that it’s my fault. Well it’s lyme disease’s fault. My head knows this, but it’s still trying to tell my heart.

We drove away from the ranch [that] last night (after making, yet again, another repair), in the worse sleet, fog and mud ever. The driving conditions were as worse as Carroll had seen in his 20+ years of living out there. How ironic, almost laughable, that our sendoff was so horrible.

Maybe it was mother nature telling us to look forward and out of the fog… because, you know… plans change.

Now to wait for the numbness and tears to lift, and to get on with our hobby ranch here in Big Timber — because we will. Ranchers never wallow for long. We intend to bring our 10 cows to our new place soon. We held them back from the sale of the large herd “just in case”.

Yup, that’s most of them in this picture [above].

I have a gazillion beautiful photos of the ranch, and cows, and wildlife… all to remember it by, but just this one picture kind of sums up the sentiment. A piece of my heart will always remain with that land… those fields.. those rims. The cows don’t know it yet, but their plans are changing too…

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Please feel free to leave a message for Carole in the comments and follow along with her journey and beautiful photos on Instagram @carole.lymesince95.

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If you would like to be a part of the Life with Lyme series, please share your story with me via ‘Contact’ (located under the menu section), send a direct message through one of my social media accounts (links: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter), or leave a comment below this post.

Sharing the real and raw parts of life with illness is important… and healing. Everyone’s journey is unique, yes, but there are so many parallels when coping with disease. Knowing you/we are not alone is comforting and uniting. Share your journey. Share the triumphant and powerful moments. Share the resilience and perseverance. Share the sorrow and the joy… let the world hear your voice.

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As always, thank you, lovelies, for taking the time out of your day to read my reflections and peruse the blog. For anyone facing health challenges and/or unwelcome change within well thought out plans, may you find the strength needed to keep moving forward… even if it feels like taking steps backward… may we all keep moving… one step at a time.

Until my next Reflection…

Blessings, love and light.
—Terry xx

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