My Brush with Lyme’s Disease
We are outdoorsy people. I work in the yard, the garden and pick blackberries in the woods around our house. We go camping and off-roading on atv’s and go boating. We enjoy getting out in nature. The thought of scary creepy crawling things is always in the back of my mind. I hate spiders and chiggers and ticks and most other bugs in general. But I give the girls flea and tick medicine and take basic precautions when we are out and go on, enjoying the good things about nature. That no to say they we haven’t both had the occasional scary bite show up (have assumed they were spiders and tried not to think about it) and tick (yuck) but nothing that really made us sit up and take notice until my brush with a Tick Borne illness this spring.
My husband and I were in South-Central Kentucky at our new little piece of land near the lake we boat. It was the first Saturday in April. Still barely warm most days. It had snowed just the weekend before. The day before I had dozed the dogs with their first monthly flea and tick medicine of the spring. We were dressed in long pants and tall socks and boots knowing the grass and weeds would be tall. We spent the day walking the property and making plans and headed back home that evening. As usual when we got home we tossed our clothes straight in the washer, checked each other over while singing Brad Pasley, took a quick shower and went to bed.
The next afternoon I realized I had been scratching my left arm all day and finally decided I to pull off my long sleeve shirt and take a look. Sure enough there was s tick. I’m still not sure how we missed it the night before, perhaps it was on the dogs or in my hair. I promptly pulled it off and flushed it down the toilet while I did the yucky-creepy-thing-dance. I cleaned the spot with alcohol and didn’t think anything more about it until I changed my clothes for bed that I noticed the half-dollar size welt on my arm with a larger ring around it. My husband took one look at it and said, “I think you best go to the doctor tomorrow and have that looked at”.
The next morning it was worse. Like, a lot worse. I hate going to the doctor but that morning I got dressed and drove straight to the closest Urgent Care. The nurse didn’t seem overly concerned but the doctor did. She ordered several blood tests and started me immediately on Doxycycline for 10 days.
From Urgent Care I drove straight to my Functional Medicine Doctor to explain what has happened so far and what I was prescribed. He immediately changed the anti-viral I was taking for something unrelated to one specifically for targeting Lyme and changed my daily probiotic to one for use during and after the use of antibiotics.
Over the next week the rash continued to get worse, eventually becoming a huge bruise covering my entire upper arm. And when my blood tests came back indicating an infection but inconclusive on Lyme, the doctor extended the Doxycycline prescription to an entire 28 days and asked me to come back for follow up tests at the end of the treatment. I’m still not sure if the extreme fatigue and severe headaches I experienced during that month was from the medicine or the infection but it was a stressful month. I also suffered from terrible nausea during that time as well.
In the end, the second round of tests showed no infection or Lyme that goodness but my doctor suspects that I did indeed have Lyme given my symptoms and rash. Thankfully due to her quick action with antibiotics we will never know.
The moral of this story is to stay diligent. Don’t stop going outside and enjoying nature but respect the dangers that are lurking in the smallest of places. If you find a tick, remove it immediately. If you can, save it in a plastic baggie or small container so that it can be tested if you develops symptoms. Get familiar with symptoms of tick-borne illnesses. Most cases don’t produce the telltale rash.