The inspiring author Caroline DeLoreto has just published her new book, From Lyme to Light: A Spiritual Journey and Guide to Healing from Lyme Disease, which describes her story of physical and spiritual healing from Lyme disease. After developing neurological Lyme disease from a tick bite, doctors misdiagnosed DeLoreto’s symptoms as early-onset dementia, inadvertently delaying her treatment. This allowed the disease to progress to the point where she was hospitalized with a stroke – in the book she describes a transcendental experience as she begins to float away from her body before seeing a vision of her mentor pulling her back in her physical form. The rest of the book details her physical, mental, and spiritual journey as she tries to find her “new normal” and reevaluates how she uses her energy, navigates relationships, and prioritizes her own health in the wake of chronic illness.
We sat down to talk with DeLoreto about her book launch this month, as well as her plans for the next books in the series.
Do you have a plan to make this book available to the people who need it most? People struggling with chronic illness who may not have as much energy? I’m in the early rollout phase now, but my plan is to get it out to a lot of organizations dealing with chronic illness, chronic fatigue, and out to as many doctor’s offices around the country as I can. I also want to make it either so that the proceeds go to a healthcare nonprofit for people with chronic illness, or just make the price of the Kindle edition of the book 99 cents so that it can reach as many people as possible because you don’t have that much money when you’re sick.
Santa Barbara is my big launch personally, then I have a whole list of places I’m going this summer in the New England area and hopefully Colorado. I’m applying to a lot of conferences to speak at them too – I just really want to get the book out. I don’t like being in the limelight and doing things, but I really feel like this is the way I can get the message to the people who need it.
You mentioned spreading to doctor’s offices – I like that you worked so much on this book with doctors. Did you have much previous experience with doctors or even with medicine? Yes; I am a Functional Diagnostic Nutrition Practitioner and I am in homeopathic medical school right now in Toronto Canada and I am a registered nurse and an EMT of 15 years. I also worked as a health teacher at Santa Barbara Middle School for 15 years teaching life skills and health. And then with my own journey, a lot of doctors in Santa Barbara who were on my team just started calling me and saying, “I don’t know what to do with this patient,” and we’d talk about it. It became so clear after Lyme that this is what I should spend my time doing: helping people find healing when they were stuck.
I know you mentioned that you have several books in the works; what are they? So I’m writing with someone named Treya Palmer, who was a naturopathic doctor that I worked with in Vermont.
One of them is called Who am I without my illness? And it’s all about how people can be stuck when they get to what it looks like to be healed. What does healing look like? Once you’ve had chronic illness or Lyme disease or whatever it is for a little while, it can become a part of your identity and it can actually prevent you from ever getting better. Because if I get better, who am I at this point? It’s something I’ve seen with many people that I’ve talked to, and I had to go through it myself to find out. So this next book will be a guide that guides someone who has illness and is in that place and teaches them to question things and reform your identity so that you can then choose to take the next step: not identifying as your illness, but instead of having this thing that happened.
And the second book is called Limiting factors in the treatment of Lyme disease. While the other books are more spiritual, this one is about the physical body side of it and it helps people understand all the ways you can have blockages in your treatment of chronic Lyme disease, as well as other chronic diseases. So one is also almost finished, and then I have the outline for another one next year.
DeLoreto will host two local book signing events this month: the first Sunday, March 19 at 14.00 at Paradise Found Bookstore and the other on March 21 at 6pm in Chaucer’s Books. From Lyme to light out now in bookshops across the country. It can also be purchased on Amazon or Barnes and Noble. For further information, visit carolinedeloreto.com.