How getting bitten on a hiking trip turned into an acclaimed solo show
'The wild thing is that I saw it, the tick,' says Snelling. 'It was in my left armpit, but I didn't realise it was a tick at the time … because I have bushy armpits, it kinda got lost in the hair. To me, it looked like a mole or something.'
A bizarre constellation of symptoms derailed Snelling's life over the ensuing years.
Transient arthritis. Constant fatigue. Heart palpitations. Major gastrointestinal problems. Neurological and cognitive difficulties: memory loss, seizures, and the onset of what appeared to be dyslexia that Snelling, an avid diarist, noticed in her writing.
'My body started changing in the way it was functioning,' she says. 'I started getting sick in a variety of mysterious ways. It was like these disconnected dots that nobody could put together to form one picture … it was very elusive, very hard to pin down.'
So began a medical odyssey in which Snelling recalls encountering confusion, misdiagnosis, and Kafka-like bureaucratic hurdles to accessing treatment.
'Being gaslit was a feature of the whole fricken medical journey that I went on,' she says. 'I saw so many different doctors, and they all said different things … fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome … even after a correct diagnosis, the terminology used about Lyme disease in Australia, and treatment for it, is a politically sensitive issue.'
'I started getting sick in a variety of mysterious ways.'
Andi Snelling
That's because there's no scientific evidence that the specific species of bacteria causing Lyme, Borrelia burgdorferi, exists in Australia, although related species have been found in ticks here, and locally acquired cases of tick-borne disease were recently aired in a Senate inquiry into the matter.
Snelling made a public submission detailing her gruelling experiences, but it's her artistic contribution that's made a bigger splash. Happy-Go-Wrong is not your typical autobiographical solo performance. It combines raw reflection on the exhausting lows of being struck down by ill health with clowning of astonishing physicality.
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