- So if you don't know how you get Lyme disease,
a tick bites you, sucks a little bit of your blood,
and then it spits out their blood into you.
So, I have Lyme disease and now that tick has HPV.
(intense music)
I'm Tori Piskin.
I do stand-up, I make videos, I have a podcast.
I have Lyme disease.
In my Senior year of college, I was having blurry vision,
I was sleeping like 14 hours a day.
It felt like "The Exorcist,"
like the devil was inside of me.
Something was just off, I just felt it.
I remember getting the diagnosis,
telling my friend across the street, "It's Lyme disease!"
And then she was like, "Oh, my dad had it four times.
"You're gonna be fine."
And I just keep playing that in my head over and over again
because it just really was never fine again.
Lyme disease has been one word, hell.
I really thought it was just gonna be
like a flu or something.
I had no idea it was just gonna be this long health journey.
I feel like Lyme disease is kind of like that guy,
you're not in a serious relationship with,
but will come in and out of your life
when he just feels needy,
like "Ah, it's been a month, he texted me.
He's tired, he's having headaches."
The analogy's going nowhere,
but you guys get what I'm saying.
'Cause I feel like it just comes up out of nowhere
and I have no idea when it's gonna happen.
I would say fatigue is the biggest symptom
I still deal with, but it's not like,
"Oh, okay I'm getting tired."
It literally feels like rocks are on you.
When I used to have a nine to five job,
I would go to the bathroom and put my head
on the toilet and then take a nap.
It also has these awful headaches.
It literally feel like someone's in your brain
with a hammer like eeh, eeh, eeh,
numbness in the legs, blurry vision.
You know when you wake up in the middle of the night
and your eyes take a little while to adjust,
I was having that throughout the whole day.
I think the hardest thing to treat
is if you have neurological symptoms
and you don't really know how to describe
and you don't know why.
When it was really bad, it felt
like I was in a scary movie, walking around the city.
At any moment, you feel like something's gonna jump out.
That was just another very weird specific symptom
that I was having that I was like,
"This isn't me, I don't know what the hell's going on."
But I think with any autoimmune or anxiety,
it's always a constant struggle
and you learn how to deal with it.
I started making a lot of videos
'cause I got a port put in my arm.
And then for the next eight to nine months
I did IV antibiotics.
I was bedridden and that's when I started editing
and making all my own videos.
I would say it really helped me
find another part of my comedy
that maybe I would have not found before the Lyme.
And then he leaned in, "It's not contagious, is it?"
(audience laughs)
And I was like, "Only for the ones
"that don't text me back."
(audience laughs)
So he has Lyme disease now.
(audience laughs)
No, I've never experienced
the symptoms while performing.
Even if I'm feeling symptoms
before the moment I get on stage, it all goes away.
I've had shows where I do my Lyme disease jokes
and then people will come up to me
and they'll be like, "Oh, I actually have Lyme.
"I've struggled with that.
"It's really nice to hear someone else talk about that."
They do call it an invisible disease
because you don't look sick.
I feel like when I had the PICC line,
it was the one time people believed me that I was sick
because it was like, "Oh, this is serious.
"She has an IV hanging from her arm."
Unfortunately, Lyme disease is very hard to detect.
People literally go years thinking it's MS,
thinking its Lupus.
So I feel so lucky that I got to get the treatment.
I'm now freelancing, I'm doing videos,
I do comedy, which is great
'cause I really can make my own schedule.
If I need to close my eyes at four o'clock, I can.
Everyone has something they deal with,
it's okay to say your struggles.
I feel like the best way to sign off,
as someone with Lyme disease,
is to just be like, "Signing off."
(laughs)
That was me going to sleep.
All right, let me do it again, take two.