13 doctors, 3 hospitals and $40K for a diagnosis

MINERAL RIDGE

How do you deal with symptoms of Lyme disease, being misdiagnosed for several years and watching your life and health slip away?

If you’re like Janet L. DeCesare, you share years of such trying circumstances in a memoir and title it, perhaps most befittingly, “Ticked Off.”

DeCesare, 54, spoke recently from her Austintown-Warren Road home about “Ticked Off” (Tate Publishing & Enterprises LLC of Mustang, Okla., $17.99), which chronicles her physical, psychological and financial struggles with the infectious tick-borne viral disease while providing hope to sufferers.

“I was slowly deteriorating,” recalled DeCesare, who saw the first signs of trouble in 1995, when a circular, scaly rash appeared on her right foot.

It took 13 doctors, three hospital visits and $40,000 before a physician one of her sisters got her in touch with came up with the correct diagnosis and unraveled a four-year mystery, she explains in Sunday's Vindicator and on Vindy.com..