In June of 2010, I was fishing the Canal and I just didn’t feel ‘right’. I was out of it and I was just so tired, which was not normal for me. I remember I was about to leave and I saw some fish pushing mackerel near the herring run. The ‘me’ that lives inside my brain was all about taking a shot at those fish and I fired a glidebait at the action and hooked up almost immediately. The other half of me, you know, the physical being…was not happy that I had to battle this high 30-pound fish while feeling like someone poured sugar into my gas tank. I landed the fish and was so wiped out that I had to sit down and breathe for several minutes before I could even consider standing up again!
The short version of the story is that I had Lyme disease and medication eradicated any signs of the disease after the third dose. But I can’t remember a time when I felt worse. The worst part is, that the symptoms were very similar to any nasty flu, high fever, dizzying headache, sore muscles and fatigue. There were two clues that made me test for Lyme. The night after the Canal experience, I fell asleep shivering with a high fever and I had this really weird dream where I was suspended in a gray nothingness, no sound, no sense of up or down, but in that dream I pulled a tiny tick off myself, that was the only action in the dream. The next morning I walked by a mirror with no shirt on and saw a tiny red spot, maybe the size of a nickel. I called my mom, she’s a nurse, and she forcibly exclaimed, “Circle it with a pen!” Within hours it had grown to the diameter of a softball and was hot to the touch. It didn’t resemble the classic bullseye, but I felt that it couldn’t be a coincidence.
As a devoted lover of the outdoors, I became obsessed with Lyme and wanted to learn as much as I could about the disease and how it manifests in people, how long a tick can be attached before transmission, how important early detection is…and I have learned a lot.
The weather we’re having this summer is like the perfect storm for tick procreation, it’s been warm but – save for a few days – not insanely hot. It’s been wet, but not too wet and the results are bearing themselves out. I recently took a fence down in my yard which has become a passageway for the local deer herd. Just over the past month, I have pulled three embedded deer ticks off myself and my wife has found five and contracted her second case of Lyme in the last four years!
Lyme disease is not something to be toiled with. I have a close friend who ignored the initial symptoms and now has chronic Lyme disease which has permanently damaged his heart, he’s in his late 30s. And I have known many others whose symptoms have varied so wildly that I would suggest asking your doctor to test for Lyme if you have any unexplained and prolonged flu-like symptoms, any prolonged joint or muscle pain that doesn’t respond to treatment and especially if you have any weird swelling in a joint or joints or strange allergic reactions like rashes or even out-of-the-blue swelling in your lips. These are all confirmed symptoms from friends who tested for Lyme on a hunch after experiencing some of these odd symptoms. And, not one of them experienced the bullseye rash, so don’t rely on that supposedly ‘classic’ symptom.
This fall has all the ingredients to be a really bad one for ticks and my doctor told me that they treat for Lyme disease 365 days per year because our winters rarely get cold enough to kill them off anymore. Take my advice, look extra closely, check your kids, and check yourself twice. Use a lint roller on your clothes to lift unseen ticks off your clothes after walking in the woods or even just watering the garden. And trust me when I tell you that these things are TINY, sometimes no larger than the period at the end of this sentence. I’ve had to use a field microscope twice to confirm that the black dot I found was actually a tick. And if you experience odd symptoms advocate for yourself at the doctor, insist that they test you, because the longer Lyme goes untreated the worse it gets. You’ve been warned.
