It was the first week of April and I was busy.  Busy with a flooded basement, a job, two teenagers, and the what-nots of life.   On this particular evening, I was going up and down the basement stairs dumping buckets of water I had sucked up with the shop-vac.  I noticed I had an unusual pain in my right thigh, the kind of pain that made me think, “that’s weird, did I pull a muscle or something”, but not the kind of pain that stopped me from what I was doing.  That night I had a fitful sleep interrupted by the itching and pain in my right thigh, but I was too exhausted and never conscious enough to sit up and investigate.  I wouldn’t find the tick until the next morning when I was getting dressed and my hand brushed against the little parasite attached to the back of my thigh as I distractedly scratched at the itchy area.

Let me interrupt this story to tell you what torture is.  Torture is knowing that something is attached to you that doesn’t belong there and having to put your pants on OVER that parasitic something and DRIVE to the pharmacy with that thing STILL attached underneath your clothing to buy tweezers and tea tree oil and then STAND IN LINE behind all the elderlies who are the only people at the pharmacy at such an early hour.  Yes, if you want to make me confess to any crime then just HINT at making me repeat this scenario.  No way in hell I would make it through intact a second time round.

I applied the tea tree oil, waited several secons, and then pulled the tick off without too much event.  I placed the tick on a tissue and carefully inspected it, not unlike a new mother, counting legs and ensuring all parts were there and in order.  Once satisfied, I wrapped it up in the tissue and put the tissue in a Ziploc.

My whole right leg was sore from just below the knee up to my upper thigh.  The back of my leg was on fire and punctuated visually by a sizable fiery red circle surrounding where the tick had been.  I couldn’t help wonder at how something so tiny could wreak such havoc on an organism thousands of times its size.  I also couldn’t help being petrified.  It was terrifyingly clear that my body was reacting in a big way to a very small invasion.

I was later sufficiently calmed down by a talk with someone who had experience with Lyme, so I flushed the tick and went on with my day.  And the next day, and the day after that I went on with life, by which time the swelling in my leg had diminished.  I mostly forgot about the tick bite until a few days later when I came down with a fever out of the blue and with virtually no other symptoms except a weird fatigue that was more like weakness than tiredness.  I also had a bit of a sore neck, and a sore throat.  I was burning up, and by coincidence had lunch with a friend and his brother. The brother had been diagnosed with Lyme two years prior and spent a long, expensive and exhausting battle fighting his Lyme.  He told me I needed to go to the doc stat, and he made no apologies for being harsh with me in his recommendations.

I didn’t have a doctor of my own since I hadn’t needed one in years and I was starting to feel so sick I decided to go to the ER.  The doctor I saw didn’t feel a Lyme test would show anything conclusive since it was so early, but the symptoms were sufficient enough that he wanted to put me on antibiotics.  He prescribed two weeks of Doxycycline.  Over the next few days before the antibiotic kicked in I woud spike sudden fevers that left me extremely weak.  Then the antibiotic seemed to start taking effect…

…to be continued…

With love,