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Church shooting suspect has mental illness from Lyme disease
St. Louis Post-Dispatch ^ | 8 March 2009 | Joel Currier, Jeremy Kohler and Nicholas J.C. Pistor

Posted on 03/08/2009 11:03:33 PM PDT by RightOnTheLeftCoast

Church shooting suspect has mental illness from Lyme disease By Joel Currier, Jeremy Kohler and Nicholas J.C. Pistor ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH 03/09/2009 MARYVILLE — A man suspected of killing the Rev. Fred Winters during a church service in Maryville on Sunday morning had developed mental illness from a tick bite, his family has said. Police did not release the name of the suspect, who was seriously injured in a struggle with members of the congregation after the shooting of Winters at the First Baptist Church. But a source close to the case confirmed late Sunday that it is Terry Joe Sedlacek, 27, who was the subject of a Post-Dispatch story in August about how Lyme disease had attacked his brain.

(Excerpt) Read more at stltoday.com ...


TOPICS: Breaking News; News/Current Events; US: Illinois
KEYWORDS: banglist; churchshooting; fredwinters; maryville; mentalillness; sedlacek
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To: RightOnTheLeftCoast

Okay, so terrorists and murderers can infect themselves with Lyme Disease and go on a killing spree?


21 posted on 03/08/2009 11:21:49 PM PDT by trumandogz (The Democrats are driving us to Socialism at I00 MPH -The GOP is driving us to Socialism at 97.5 MPH)
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To: RightOnTheLeftCoast
you never saw west side story?

22 posted on 03/08/2009 11:22:25 PM PDT by ari-freedom (Hail to the Dork!)
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To: JustaDumbBlonde

They caught my Lyme early only because I hounded my doctor.

Having just returned to Silicon Valley from Munich, I presented with the classical bulls-eye rash. “But we don’t have Lyme here,” the doc protested. I had to talk very slowly and carefully to get him to understand that I’d been bitten nine time zones away. I showed him a fax from a family friend who is a doctor in Munich, saying that Lyme is endemic there and how they treat it immediately if the bulls-eye is present. My doc grudgingly agreed to the blood test—but wouldn’t prescribe the doxycycline until the resulots were known—then was dumbfounded when it came back positive. “But we don’t have Lyme here!” he marveled.

SIGH.


23 posted on 03/08/2009 11:22:42 PM PDT by RightOnTheLeftCoast (1st call: Abbas. 1st interview: Al Arabiya. 1st energy decision: halt drilling in UT. Arabs 1st!)
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To: ari-freedom

Saw it eons ago, but fail to see the relevance here. Enlighten us, please.


24 posted on 03/08/2009 11:23:54 PM PDT by RightOnTheLeftCoast (1st call: Abbas. 1st interview: Al Arabiya. 1st energy decision: halt drilling in UT. Arabs 1st!)
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To: RightOnTheLeftCoast
I've had it too, and got a six month course of doxycycline for the pleasure. It is a far more common disease than the medical profession understands. They don't like to do the testing necessary to prove whether or not you have it.
25 posted on 03/08/2009 11:26:10 PM PDT by Carry_Okie (The environment is too complex and too important to manage by central planning.)
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To: RightOnTheLeftCoast

the idea that people aren’t responsible for their own actions because they found an excuse.


26 posted on 03/08/2009 11:26:59 PM PDT by ari-freedom (Hail to the Dork!)
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To: ari-freedom
"too bad it conveniently missed the part of the brain that came up with the idea to kill a pastor and effectively carry out the plan."

I'm not sure "conveniently" is the correct word. Lyme can cause paralysis, phantom sensations, visions, voices, all sorts of stuff-- a whole spectrum of brain disease. I haven't dug up the previous story mentioned in the article to see what the shooter's symptoms were, but in the months since that story it could have gone in any direction. Schizophrenia, for example, is possible. I knew a guy who'd gone about six months before a Lyme diagnosis, and he'd undergone personality changes and a really bad case of manic-depression, just huge swings, along with really bad arthritis as the result of the spirochete. Nothing would surprise me with Lyme. Again, it's quite similar to syphilis, to which it is related, and can have the same end result. My impression is that it attacks faster, though. It's quite a serious affair. Pray you never experience it.
27 posted on 03/08/2009 11:28:55 PM PDT by RightOnTheLeftCoast (1st call: Abbas. 1st interview: Al Arabiya. 1st energy decision: halt drilling in UT. Arabs 1st!)
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To: ari-freedom
"the idea that people aren’t responsible for their own actions because they found an excuse."

"Crazy" and "responsible" are mutually exclusive concepts.
28 posted on 03/08/2009 11:30:28 PM PDT by RightOnTheLeftCoast (1st call: Abbas. 1st interview: Al Arabiya. 1st energy decision: halt drilling in UT. Arabs 1st!)
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To: RightOnTheLeftCoast

The emergency room doc and my general practitioner chuckled and practically called me silly when I asked if it was possible that I had Lyme or maybe West Nile. I knew I had been in the woods and I had brushed off some ticks, but never knew I had a bite. It was a real stroke of luck and divine intervention that the wife of another Lyme sufferer in our town told my husband to get me to the specialist her husband sees. By that time I was in such bad shape that they began the antibiotics and anti-siezure meds that day, before the blood tests were even sent to the lab.


29 posted on 03/08/2009 11:31:06 PM PDT by JustaDumbBlonde (America: Home of the Free Because of the Brave)
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To: RightOnTheLeftCoast

“Pray you never experience it. “

my late grandfather’s second wife did...but she passed away peacefully. She didn’t murder anyone in front of everyone.


30 posted on 03/08/2009 11:31:28 PM PDT by ari-freedom (Hail to the Dork!)
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To: RightOnTheLeftCoast

“What the hell is that?”

It’s from West Side Story, a liberals’ Broadway musical about how juvenile delinquent kids in NYC are simply the product of the big bad establishment running NY that screwed up their lives, you know, the liberals themselves.


31 posted on 03/08/2009 11:31:29 PM PDT by Beowulf9
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To: RightOnTheLeftCoast; knittnmom

“Doxycycline works and is well tolerated and cheap, but you must be on it for at least two months to catch the spirochete throughout its life cycle. “

Will you please tell that to my doctor, he thinks 3 weeks is enough to kill anything.

As near as we can figure, I was infected the summer of 2004. I’ve tested negative for Lyme until this last December, when the neurological symptoms became so severe you’d swear I was drugged half the time. I never had the typical symptoms though (no rash, fever, or joint pain).

To be honest, I’m scared of this thing.


32 posted on 03/08/2009 11:31:40 PM PDT by Ellendra (Can't starve us out, and you can't make us run...Country folks CAN survive!!! -Hank Jr.)
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To: RightOnTheLeftCoast

As bad as the MD’s are, some of the people that get it are equally dense.

I told my mother that she probably got it from a tick off her horses, and that the whitetail deer in the area were likely the reserve hosts for ticks. I told her that if she really wanted to kill the ticks, she a) had to treat her horses at least once/week with a pesticide dust practically forever and b) start convincing the locals to undertake a slaughter of deer in the area.

Of course neither happened.


33 posted on 03/08/2009 11:34:16 PM PDT by NVDave
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To: Ellendra

You should be scared.

Especially if your doc thinks 3 weeks is enough to kill a parasite with a six week life cycle and an encysted larval stage.

Even 6 weeks wasn’t enough in my case. A few of the buggers survived and started a reinfection.

Fortunately, in my case the only neuro manifestation was a complete and utter intolerance to alcohol. A half glass of wine was enough to put me to sleep for twelve hours. That was the first clue that it was mounting a second attack.

Good luck— with a doc as dumb as yours, you’ll need it.


34 posted on 03/08/2009 11:36:57 PM PDT by RightOnTheLeftCoast (1st call: Abbas. 1st interview: Al Arabiya. 1st energy decision: halt drilling in UT. Arabs 1st!)
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To: Ellendra

You need a specialist or, at the very least, another doctor that understands the life cycle of Lyme and how to treat it. Please do not delay any further.


35 posted on 03/08/2009 11:39:05 PM PDT by JustaDumbBlonde (America: Home of the Free Because of the Brave)
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To: RightOnTheLeftCoast

I am trying to make a list of Lyme Disease sufferers who picked up a gun and shot people to death at point blank range for no reason. Anybody know, please ping me.

Lyme disease or lemon disease, this guy should hang.


36 posted on 03/08/2009 11:40:16 PM PDT by libh8er
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To: RightOnTheLeftCoast

JULY 12, 2008 TIME:10am-9pm

Terry Joe Sedlacek has been suffering from Lyme Disease and its co-infection Ehrlichiosis for the past several years. He nearly lost his life to this disease five years ago and battles the effects daily. His medications and doctor visits are costly. New test results revealed the return of this disease and left temporal lobe damage. He will begin a new & hopeful treatment in July;

http://www.stllymefoundation.org/

******

Lyme disease diagnosis can be difficult

Terry Joe Sedlacek
(Handout)By Greg Jonsson
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
08/06/2008

Terry Joe Sedlacek’s parents worried that he was getting into drugs or alcohol when he started acting strangely during his junior year at Edwardsville High School.

He dropped out of the activities that used to interest him. He seemed confused. He missed class, and one time when the school called his mother, Ruth Abernathy, to say he hadn’t shown up, she found him home on the couch, having forgotten he was supposed to be somewhere else.

“I said, ‘What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be at school,’” his mother remembers of the day in 1999. “And he said, ‘Oh.’”

They tried to check him into rehab, but tests showed caffeine was the strongest thing in his system. Doctors diagnosed him as mentally ill and for years he took medicine — up to 18 pills a day at one point. But the drugs that worked for others seemed to do little for him. His physical condition deteriorated, too, and in 2003 he was in the hospital, so sick he was given last rites.

Finally a desperate battery of tests for everything from West Nile to SARS pinpointed two tick-borne diseases: Lyme disease and ehrlichiosis.

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/sciencemedicine/story/4C02265C2982C7458625749D0012D670?OpenDocument


37 posted on 03/08/2009 11:41:28 PM PDT by kcvl
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To: RightOnTheLeftCoast

For Sedlacek, who was put in a medically induced coma and given intravenous antibiotics to combat the Lyme disease and ehrlichiosis, the diagnosis came late. For a few months he did very well.

“We had our son back,” Abernathy said.

But Sedlacek’s rebound didn’t last for long. After he got out of the hospital, oral antibiotics didn’t seem to work as well. His family sought out experts and tried alternative treatments, with mixed success.

These days, Sedlacek, now 26 and living in Troy, Ill., with Abernathy, has difficulty speaking. He’s got lesions on his brain. He’s taking several drugs, including anti-seizure medication.

“He takes enough medicine at night to knock a cow out, but he only sleeps two or three hours a night,” Abernathy said.


38 posted on 03/08/2009 11:44:17 PM PDT by kcvl
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To: libh8er
"I am trying to make a list of Lyme Disease sufferers who picked up a gun and shot people to death at point blank range for no reason. Anybody know, please ping me."

How about delusional paranoid schizophrenics? Because that is a possible outcome of Lyme. What part of it-rots-your-brain don't you understand? Because sometimes it does.

Having said that, there's much we don't know about this situation. We have one single news report stating the guy had brain issues from Lyme. There might have been much more going on. The shooting might have been totally unrelated to his Lyme. We just don't know yet. But it is a fascinating and tragic possibility, because sometimes it-rots-your-brain.
39 posted on 03/08/2009 11:44:38 PM PDT by RightOnTheLeftCoast (1st call: Abbas. 1st interview: Al Arabiya. 1st energy decision: halt drilling in UT. Arabs 1st!)
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To: JustaDumbBlonde

The nearest specialist is 4 hours away, and with a waiting list that stretches into August.

I am on that waiting list, but in the mean time my doc keeps trying things. The only reason I was even diagnosed was because my doc was willing to do a phone consultation with that same specialist, who recommended a special lab. I’ve had docs who, if they didn’t know what was wrong within the first 30 seconds, it must all be in your head. This one at least tries.

I think its funny that the neurologist found that when I’m having one of my “episodes” (the room spins and my brain goes numb) my IQ is average. When I’m not having an episode its even higher :p

Speakking of spiningg, I need to go wehere I can’t fall now


40 posted on 03/08/2009 11:47:39 PM PDT by Ellendra (Can't starve us out, and you can't make us run...Country folks CAN survive!!! -Hank Jr.)
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