Living with Lyme Disease

When viewers of the ABC affiliate KGTV tune in to find out what’s happening on San Diego roads, they get their news from Brooke Landau ’94, the station’s apparently healthy and energetic traffic anchor.

But looks can be deceiving.

“Every day viewers see me on the air, I’m in pain,” Landau says. She recalls many times when she’s had to give herself injections of anti-inflammatory medication during commercial breaks to keep going. And last summer marked the first time in 12 years that Landau was not being treated with antibiotics.

In 1995, just one year after graduating from the University, Landau contracted Lyme disease. She has been battling it ever since.

“I went to bed one night absolutely fine and woke up the next morning unable to move from the neck up or the waist down,” Landau says of the sudden onset of the disease.

Doctors first diagnosed her with spinal meningitis, not realizing that the meningitis was actually being caused by her then-undetected Lyme disease.

Bed-ridden for a year and a half, Landau’s case worsened. She lost hearing in her left ear and began to lose sight in both eyes. She developed colitis, gallstones, heart arrhythmia and palpitations, short-term memory loss, and more.

“It affected just about every organ in my body,” she says.

Meanwhile, Landau and her physicians were at a loss for an explanation. “I had no idea what this was. Every time they tested me for Lyme disease, the test came back negative,” she says, results she attributes to what she calls a high inaccuracy rate in blood tests for Lyme. Without a positive test, doctors suggested multiple sclerosis and lupus as possible diagnoses.

A tick-born bacterial infection, Lyme disease can cause of a host of symptoms persisting long after the original infection has cleared. While antibiotics can treat the infection if administered promptly, the disease can create serious and long-lasting health problems if left untreated. Landau recalls removing a tick from her leg about a year before her first symptoms appeared, but she gave it no thought at the time.

Finally Landau’s doctor, afraid that her life was in danger, took drastic measures. He gave Landau an experimental treatment: intravenous antibiotics administered through an artery leading to her heart and 30 days in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber. She was the first patient ever to receive the unapproved treatment.

“It saved my life,” Landau says of the treatment, “but it didn’t cure me.”

Determined not to let the disease rule her life, Landau returned to work as soon as she was physically able. She no longer had the stamina for full-time corporate life, but she began to earn money as a runway model; the loss of a quarter of her body weight due to illness, she notes wryly, was a professional advantage for high-end modeling. She eventually turned to a career in broadcasting, working as an anchor for KSWT/CBS in Yuma, Ariz.; a producer for the E! True Hollywood Story; and a freelance reporter for ESPN before taking on her current job at KGTV.

She says her Lyme disease is at last “in remission,” although she continues to live with symptoms such as chronic headache and chronic fatigue.

“When people ask me if I’m feeling normal again—I don’t have the perspective to know what’s normal,” Landau says. “I think back to when I was at the University of Rochester. That’s the last time I felt fine.”

Today, with her own health improving, Landau is still fighting Lyme disease. She works with New York–based Turn the Corner and other Lyme disease advocacy groups to raise money for research and build public awareness of a disease that Landau describes as “the fastest growing infectious disease in the country.”

Her experience with Lyme disease has changed the way she approaches things, she says. “I don’t sweat the small stuff. People who knew me in college know I was a complete Type A.” But she credits that determination and drive for the fact that she found treatment when many doctors told her nothing was really wrong with her—a problem many Lyme disease patients encounter, she says.

“I think it’s important for people to trust their instincts about their health,” Landau says. “That’s what I did.”

—Kathleen McGarvey