1993, I spread a map across the living room of our apartment in Forest Hills, Queens, and marked a bull's-eye at Grand Central Station, where trains come in from the 'burbs. I drew a 50-mile radius around the mark, and spent the next three months searching, with my husband, Mark, for a house. We sought top-rated schools for our two boys, proximity to a train en route to Manhattan, and an ample yard. As chance would have it, we ended our hunt at the most devastatingly beautiful spot, a winding country road abutting a spruce forest in the tony suburban hamlet of Chappaqua, in Westchester County, New York.

It would be the biggest mistake of our lives. If only we'd known how infected we'd get living on that land and how much skepticism we would face as we sought treatment, if only we'd understood that we, ourselves, would be the bull's-eye. We never would have left Queens. It took years for us to understand that the vague headaches, joint pain, and bone-weariness we initially experienced were more than just symptoms of our busy suburban lives: Instead of receiving early diagnoses and treatment for what really ailed us—Lyme disease—our infections were allowed to smolder, eventually becoming neurological and eluding the simple cure that could have worked at the start.

It was all so gradual. In the fall of '93, I began to feel ill. Though I never took a day off work, I functioned for years through an avalanche of impediments. Migraines with nausea had become my steady companion. I had intermittently sore and swollen knees, and the buzzing in my left hand was so intense my fingers sometimes formed claws. My vision, at 20/20 for most my life, had begun a sudden, precipitous decline.

Mark, meanwhile, was teetering. An avid tennis player with great coordination, he began stumbling and bumping into walls. Formerly affable, he began exploding at offenses as slight as someone spilling water on the floor. He was an award-winning journalist with a love of literature and a vocabulary so vast he was our stand-in dictionary. But gradually he began struggling with memory and groping for words. He left his job as an editor after realizing, one day, that he'd spent hours trying to read a single, simple paragraph.

Our younger son, David, began to sleep—first so long that he could not do his homework or see friends; eventually, so much (15 hours a day) that he could not get to class. Violating the strict attendance policy at his prep school but without a medical diagnosis, he was asked to leave. Hardest hit was Jason, the elder, who suffered fatigue and shooting pains starting at age 9, the summer we took up residence in our fairy-tale house. The doctors called these growing pains normal, but by age 16 in the year 2000, Jason was essentially disabled. He couldn't think, walk, or tolerate sound and light. His joints ached all day. On medical leave from high school, he spent his days in the tub. As his condition worsened and doctors at the teaching hospitals of Manhattan eliminated one diagnosis after the next, I began to wonder about Lyme disease. Yet throughout most of Jason's decline, our pediatrician dismissed the notion out of hand.

"There are too many symptoms here and he's way too sick for Lyme disease," he said. Instead, the interpretation he came to favor was psychological: This great collapse could be in Jason's mind. How lucky we were when he referred us to a psychiatrist, who said there was no psychiatric illness that could do this to a child. No, he insisted, this had to be a physical illness, and the pediatrician had better go back to the drawing board.

The chastened pediatrician drew 14 vials of blood, testing for hormone imbalance, mineral deficiency, anemia, and a host of infections, including Lyme. A week later he contacted us, baffled. Just one test, a Western blot for antibodies against Lyme disease, had come back positive—in fact, so off-the-charts that almost every band was lit. Jason was quickly reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as an unequivocal case of Lyme. We had an explanation for Jason's illness and an inkling as to what might be wrong with the rest of us, at last.

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