Meredith Hodnock
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
When I was learning how to make radio, I had a day job in the file room at my aunt's family medicine practice, just outside of San Francisco.
They were old school and didn't really do computers.
So there was just a pile of paper, taller than I was, of faxes, doctor's notes, checkups, prescriptions, just everything.
And as I filed that mountain of paper, I saw the community that they had built at that doctor's office.
The generations of families, visit after visit, living their lives, trusting their health and their loved ones with my aunt's care.
So it resonates with me when Vijay Sikand describes his work as a family physician.
Vijay has been a family doctor in a little town in Connecticut ever since he first drove up there with his wife in the 1980s.
the center of a newly uncovered disease that Vijay had only really read about in textbooks.
The story of Lyme disease is long and winding.
It's an old disease that's spread across much of the northern hemisphere.
But in 1976, a Yale professor, Dr. Alan Steer, was the first to pin it down to ticks in Lyme, Connecticut, and give it its name.
Over the last 50 years, Lyme disease has impacted millions of lives and has become one of the fastest-growing insect-spread diseases in the United States.
This is Vijay's story of how a disease and the search for answers can become a career, a community, a life.
I'm Meredith Hodnot, and this is Unexplainable.
So when did Lyme disease tip from like something that was kind of theoretical to becoming a part of your everyday life and your practice as a doctor?
How did it feel for you to be a family practice doctor, like you said, treating everybody from the infant to the grandma in the household and also be at this epicenter of Lyme disease in this country?
Yeah, yeah, I feel like it would be a lot less fun if you couldn't cure it.
As Vijay saw more and more patients come into his office with Lyme disease, he realized it wasn't always easy to recognize.