Battling Lyme Disease

Last month my husband, who’s always the hale and hearty one who never gets sick, came down with Lyme disease. He found a small bump that looked like a mosquito bite, and two days later it was a reddened area the size of his hand with a dark ring around it. One of those surefire markers. He had chills and a “fever that wasn’t a fever” that broke into a sweat. That happened over and over again, along with fatigue. He barely got out of bed for four days.

Fortunately, we suspected Lyme and started him on antibiotics right away, so he recovered pretty well in a few days. Other than his energy not being what it used to be, he seems none the worse for wear. He sleeps a bit more than he did before, but he’s back to a fairly normal routine.

The curious thing is that once we told friends and neighbors he had lyme, we were amazed at the numbers of other people who have been diagnosed with it in the last few months. Dozens of people in our circle of friends and acquaintances. Young, old, it was impacting someone in every family we knew.

This has made most of us rather paranoid about ticks, particularly the tiny (almost microscopic) deer ticks you can hardly see. There are chickens and guineas patrolling the yards around our houses now. Everyone gets a spritz of arnica oil or skin-so-soft before they leave the house for outdoors to repel bugs. Clothing gets tossed into the laundry immediately at shower time, and we are always watching for “the creepy crawlies”. It’s changed all of us.