This Is How I Save My Life: Searching the World for a Cure - A Lyme Disease Memoir

When doctors have all but given up, when a diagnosis eludes you, and when every test result raises more questions than answers, how do you save yourself?

By the time Amy B. Scher was twenty-eight-years-old, she had lived through almost a decade of misdiagnoses, excruciating pain, brain lesions, bone marrow biopsies, blood transfusions, and multiple hospital stays to treat her late-stage, chronic Lyme disease.

Taking forty-four pills a day and deteriorating rapidly, she consulted with more than sixty doctors, including the top experts in Los Angeles, the world-renowned Mayo Clinic in Minneapolis, and a state-of-the-art hospital in Chicago. When the best physicians in America labeled her condition incurable and potentially terminal, it was up to Amy to blaze her own path forward.

Then, in a stroke of serendipity, she heard about an experimental treatment only available in India—human embryonic stem cell therapy—which had as much probability of killing her as it did of curing her. She boarded a plane with no idea of what awaited her: culture shock, radical medical treatment, and most surprising of all, life-affirming love.

With warmth and humor, Amy’s powerful and uplifting story of sheer determination is for anyone who believes in—or doubts—the existence of miracles. It is for anyone who wants desperately to believe in the power of the human spirit when it seems that all hope is lost. For everyone who has suffered from chronic pain, grappled with an autoimmune condition, fought for a diagnosis, or trusted their gut and their body when no one else did, Amy is a living example of how our instinct to survive can propel us onward.