Santa Barbara–Born Author Caroline DeLoreto Releases New Book, ‘From Lyme to Light’

Inspirational author Caroline DeLoreto has just released her new book, From Lyme to Light: A Spiritual Journey and Guide to Healing from Lyme Disease, which details her story of physically and spiritually 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 dragging her back into her physical form. The rest of the book details her physical, mental, and spiritual journey as she tries to find her “new normal,” reassessing how she spends her energy, navigates relationships, and prioritizes her own health in the wake of chronic illness.

We sat down to speak 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 who are struggling with chronic illness who might 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 that deal with chronic illness, chronic fatigue, and out to as many doctor’s offices in the country as I can. I also want to make it either so that the profits go to a health nonprofit for people with chronic illness, or just make the price of the Kindle edition of the book 99 cents so it can get out to as many people as possible, because you don’t have as much money when you have illness.

Santa Barbara’s my big in-person launch, then I have a whole list of places I’m gonna be hitting up this summer in the New England area and hopefully Colorado. I’m applying to a bunch of conferences to talk at them as well — I just really wanna get the book out. I don’t like being in the spotlight doing stuff, but I really feel like this is the way I can get the message to the people that need it.

You mentioned dispersing to doctors offices — I like the fact that you worked so much on this book with doctors. Did you have a lot of previous experience with doctors or with medicine yourself? Yes; I’m a functional diagnostic nutrition practitioner, and I’m in homeopathic medicine school right now in Toronto, Canada, and I’m a licensed nursing assistant, 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 started just calling me and being like, “I don’t know what to do with this patient,” and we would talk about it. It became so clear after the Lyme that that’s what I was supposed to be putting my time into: helping people find healing when they were stuck.

I know you mentioned you have more books in the works; what are they? So I’m co-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 get stuck once they get to what it looks like to be cured. What does it look like to heal? Once you’ve had chronic illness or Lyme or whatever it is, for a little while, it can become part of your identity and that can actually stop you from fully getting better. Because if I get better, who am I at this point? It’s something I’ve seen with a lot of people that I’ve talked to, and I had to go through it myself to figure it out. So this next book is gonna be a guide, guiding someone that has illness and is in that place, and teaching them how to question things and reform your identity so that you can then choose to make that next step: not identifying as your illness, but instead having this thing that happened.

And the other book is called Limiting Factors of Treating Lyme Disease. Whereas the other books are more spiritual, this one is about the physical body side of it, and it’s helping people understand all the ways that you can have blocks in your treatment for chronic Lyme, also for other chronic diseases. So that one’s almost done too, and then I have the outline for yet another one next year.

DeLoreto will be hosting two local book signing events this month: the first on Sunday, March 19, at 2 p.m. at Paradise Found Bookstore, and the second on March 21 at 6 p.m. at Chaucer’s Books. From Lyme to Light is out now in bookstores nationwide. It is also available for purchase on Amazon or Barnes and Noble. For additional information, visit carolinedeloreto.com.