Before It Had a Name, Affliction Was Familiar Part of Artist’s Life
Before the disease was discovered, Polly Murray came down with it. Before it became the scourge of suburbia, it was simply a family calamity.
Murray was a young newlywed living in the forest on the banks of the Connecticut River in the 1950s. She was carrying her first child when she felt the fever, headaches and aching joints. For the next two decades, she and her husband and their four young children fell victim to the same confoundedly recurring series of maladies, often at the same time, until at one point the whole family was sick, including the dogs. Two boys hobbled on crutches, their knees too sore and swollen to stand.
After years of visits to mystified or dismissive or misdiagnosing doctors, she and another local woman each made calls to the state health department within a week of each other in 1975. Their messages found their way to the right researcher, who was intrigued by the patterns. Murray, who’d kept meticulous records of her ailments and observations and personal research, became a key figure in the ultimate recognition of Lyme disease.
Her obsession with finding the source of the symptoms that continually felled her and her family eventually cost her her marriage and her privacy, a high price for a shy woman who paints portraits and still lives in the woods, in the same house.
“I like Lyme,” said Murray, referring to the town. “I’m an artist. I like it here. You can’t run away. People have to learn how to deal with it.”
Scientists still come by to drag for ticks, to study the rodent populations and the deer movements. Murray knows where the hot spots are: the stone wall by the driveway, the pachysandra plants on the edge of the low-cut lawn. She still gardens, but she wears white pants and uses a white pad to kneel on so she can better see the tiny ticks that creep inexorably toward her. She uses a heavy-duty tick repellent that must be applied to clothing before it’s worn. Much of the brush that ticks favor as habitat has been cut back from her yard.
Astoundingly, she said she still gets Lyme disease almost every summer. “For some reason, I know when a tick has bitten me,” said Murray, 64. “I know the symptoms.”
Murray believes a fresh bite triggers a fresh reaction in chronic sufferers that some scientists continue to question. Murray says she’s used to skepticism about a disease some people once doubted existed. Things she suspected decades ago have been demonstrated. She figures she’ll be proved right eventually.
She wrote a book called “The Widening Circle,” (1996, St. Martin’s Press, 321 pages), the title of which refers not just to the often circular rash that develops but to the range of symptoms that some associate with the disease and its expanding geography. The book is an intimate account of her family’s trials and her efforts to find the cause of the nagging sickness.
She interviewed some Lyme old-timers and is convinced that the disease has been around for generations. She keeps up with research and keeps in contact with scientists, doctors and the patient advocacy groups who, like Murray, believe the medical establishment still underestimates the disease’s debilitating nature and wide range of symptoms, including depression.
She believes the Lyme disease bacteria hide in the tissue and can avoid detection, which is why some people claim they have it while their doctors insist they don’t, she said.
“It’s a difficult disease,” she said. “A lot needs to be done. I don’t think the researchers understand how underreported it is.”
