Lyme Disease Demolition Crew

May is Lyme Disease Awareness month! I've done this Lyme Disease Challenge multiple ways so this year I opted for something other than my boring mugshot with a lime in it. Here my Lyme Disease Demolition Crew Take a Bite out of Lyme. 

To the left, the chainsaw hacks away the biofilm. The two-man saw team are anti-microbial herbs hacking away at the now unprotected spirochete, Borrelia Burgdorferi.

The two-man ax crew are antibiotics also hacking away at Borrelia. The wheelbarrow is the detox used to carry the dead endotoxins out of the body.

Here's a Lyme Disease Fact:

Borrelia Burgdorferi (Bb), the pathogen that causes Lyme disease is persistent and designed to survive multiple environments and assaults from the host's immune system and antibiotics.

There are 3 forms of Bb:

1. Spirochete that does not like oxygen-rich blood, so it drills into tissues like joints, muscles, organs & brain.
2. A Cyst Form, spirochete rolls up into a ball where it can avoid antibiotics & immune system,
3. L-form with no cell wall to avoid some antibiotics that kill by breaking cell walls.

Bb also creates a biofilm, a polysaccharide-based environment that protects it from antibiotics and the immune system. The biofilm is also known to host a variety of other pathogens as well, helping them survive under the radar of the immune system.

Take the Lyme Disease Challenge!

1. Take a bite out of a lime.
2. Take a photo or video of your sourpuss (or it didn’t happen) & post it on Social Networks (Twitter, Instagram or FB set to public share). Tag it with #lymediseasechallenge #takeabiteoutoflyme
3. Find & post a fact from Lyme Disease Challenge Fact page with your photo.
4. Challenge others to Take a Bite out of Lyme Disease!
5.  Donate $10 or more to ILADS, the organization who for decades have been fighting for patient’s lives.

###

Dear faithful readers: I will let you in on a little secret about this project that I didn't make known on social media. Because I'm honest and real with you here. And I like you all best. Are you ready?

This silly shoot was freaking HARD! First, it took me two months to convince Mr. Wild Dingo to let me purchase little people. You see, though he like idea of this project, when Mr. Wild Dingo was a pre-teen, he won many competitions in diorama, he painted lead figures and even hand molded some for uniqueness. He is such a geek very snobby about how figures should be painted using shades and shadows. So for two months he gave me sass about buying pre-painted figures.  Finally he realized I would never be able to paint something that small with the amount of shakiness in my hands, so he gave in. But it took him two weeks to help me pick the figures he approved of. No cheap stuff for this project. After all my figures came in the mail (some from Germany!) I was finally able to buy limes and do the shoot. First Mr. Wild Dingo did the very important super-gluing of the 2-man saw crew because I can't be trusted with super glue. For reals, Internet. Super glue and I have bad history! The shoot itself was also less than easy! One full week of shooting, test shots, composition arrangements and lighting arrangements. I tried my best to get the shots done with a square composition, but it was not to be for many reasons, mainly because I wanted all the figures in focus and making the lime trees any taller just looked goofy and too far away from the figures. I didn't have enough limes to do another taller row in back to fill out the negative space for a square shot.  I suppose I could have had the figures at various focal lengths then took shots at those focal lengths, then stacked the photos for sharpness, but that was not something I wanted to do so I lined them out horizontally for sharpest focus. Finally it took another week to go thorough over 500 shots deciding which ones would be the final. Seriously. When you shoot this small, everything and every flaw is noticeable. One set of shots had a dirty and rusty lime cut. Others had melting wax. Oh the wax, I had to fight the damn wax against the heat of the sun.  Every time I developed my shots in lightroom, I noticed the glaring flaws that I couldn't repair in Lightroom or Photoshop. I had to give up on the wax because it was too hard to make it invisible.  And some things had to be photoshopped and brushed up but that's common. I think I did at least 4 shoots over one week.

I swear Internet, shooting these motionless figures is much harder than shooting a butterfly, a moth in the dark, a bumblebee or a hoverfly. I cannot believe how hard this type of shoot was. And now you know my dirty little secret!

And since you know how hard it was for a Lymie to make this art piece, will it inspire you to either donate to ILADS or take the Lyme Disease Challenge? Or at least spread the word about the growing epidemic of Lyme Disease? It would mean the world to me!