I visited NH and all I got was this lousy tick bite. Tell me about Lyme Disease

[slowzuki]

It can come back yes, it is a combined infection and part of it can hide deep in muscle tissue.  Some people get in cycles of it feeling good for a while after treatment then plunging back in again.

My dad and I both got lyme desease 3 or 4 years ago, luckily we had the tattle tail red rash around the tick bite and knew what we had from reading about it.

The doctor didn't want to do anything even with the rash as an indicator but after 8 months my dad started feeling really bad and I was having joint pains in my ancles and felt generally lathargic, We went back to the doctor and basically complaining until  he started us on a 4 month treatment with heavy antibiotics and we got better. We've had no problems since but I've heard that lyme never truely goes away and requires further treatments (I'm unsure if this is correct or not, please correct me if you know otherwise)

[Tam-i-am]

Lyme is nasty stuff.  Most tick bites do not result in a bullseye that is why so many people can go undiagnosed.  The problem with lyme is that it mimics so many other diseases.  The list of symptoms is about four pages long.  headache, hair loss, twitching, facial paralysis,  vision problems, buzzing in ears, nausea, joint pain, cramping, shortness of breath, chest pains, hear palpitations, numbness in body, tingling, lightheadedness, mood swings, depression, insomnia, memory loss, confusion, speech difficulty, stammering speech, forgetting how to perform simple tasks, sexual dysfunction, unexplained changes in weight, fatigue, and best of all the symptoms change and come and go.

The best thing to do is use lots of deet and check yourself every day.  If you should get bitten go on the antibiotics.  It is much easier to get rid of if you treat it right away.  Ask your doctor for a Western Blot test it is normally the second test they do if the first one shows you are positive for lyme.  However the first test is not very reliable.

I never new I had been bit, never had flu like symptoms.  Then the left side of my face started feeling numb.  I was tested for stroke, brain tumor, and countless other things.  I had a doctor so much as tell me I was nuts that there was nothing wrong with me because he had no quantitative evidence of my symptoms.  He had no way to measure my numbness it was subjective.  By the time I found a doctor who believed me and tested me for lyme my entire left side of my body was numb.  It took 8 months of doxy to finally get rid of my symptoms.

I can't urge you enough to seek treatment right away.
Tammy

[Raphael]

  They say that the tick needs to be attached for over 24hrs so people don't panic and inject themselves with the disease trying to remove the tick.  Reality is that it takes as much time as it takes the tick to feed, nymphs may have to dig a bit before they get blood but they don't take long to fill up once they get there.

  Also Lymes can be completely cured if you treat it soon enough, I'm fortunate in that I'm one of those people that tends to exhibit the rash.

  My first case of Lymes the tick hitched a ride into my house on something I was wearing or carrying and bit me while I was sleeping.  I found it ~12 hours later when I went to take a shower before going into my part time job...
  In my part time life I'm a Medical Laboratory Technologist so I had a small advantage, though at that time there wasn't any direct testing of the tick and spirochetes are notoriously difficult to culture.  I brought it into work for what little testing we did do which amounts to sticking it on a slide and checking it under the microscope.  My tick was still alive and had all it's mouth parts so my extraction was flawless, at that point my choices were to wait and see or go on antibiotics, just in case.  Serology tests won't come up positive until the disease is established and by that time you usually have some symptoms no matter how vague.
  It was a friday afternoon so I decided to wait until monday and see what my own Dr. suggested.  Sunday afternoon I was in the ER with bright ring around the bite, 104° fever, pain in all my joints & major muscles, and a headache from somewhere slightly worse than Hell.

  My second case I wasn't quite as lucky (never saw the tick) although I did have the rash it wasn't as pronounced and I mistook it for a spider bite because I didn't see it in good light until it had been there almost a week.  I had a completely different set of symptoms, that developed slowly rather than hitting me like a truck, including exhaustion and an inability to think rationally...  Spider bites are usually going down after 24hrs. not getting worse.  :

  I suggest anyone with persistant symptoms that can't be pinned on a known cause get the Western Blot, you might need to go to an infectious disease specialist to get it ordered...  That has little to do with the physician, it's the insurance companies and their payment policies that dictate what kind of medical care you can get from who.  In some cases a GP looking at an ekg of a classic MI (major heart attack) that has "Myocardial Infarction/Tachycardia" clearly printed in the interpretation box has to pick up the phone and call in a cardiologist to tell you the result.
-- Sorry my soap box is showing --

  Our Lyme screening test is very good but it only detects the 'igg' form of the antibody which not all people develop strongly enough to generate a positive result and doesn't hang around a long time so it's a bit of a crap shoot where you hit it in the disease cycle.

[Phorester]

And then there's this story:

"His wife was so ugly he made his neighbor check her for ticks."

[jkj]

An article in our morning paper (Knoxville News Sentinel) told the story of a local man, Michael Culver, who tested just barely negative for Lyme disease in 2002, then got progressively worse until he was wheelchair bound, lost use of his major muscles, lost 60% of his ability to breath, and had prepared himself for death.  The neurologist was convinced he had ALS (Lou Greg's Disease).  Finally, as he was about to go on a respirator and have a feeding tube inserted, someone told him about a similar case that turned out to be Lyme disease.   Evidently the mindset around here (East TN) is that Lyme disease is so rare in this area that doctors are unfamiliar with and afraid of making the diagnosis for fear of criticism, and insurance companies will not cover the treatment.

To make a long story short, he finally got treatment for Lyme's disease from specialists in Philadelphia and New Jersey and is no longer under a death sentance.  He had to pay for the treatment himself since the insurance would not cover it.  It turns out that during the treatment, the patient's symptoms typically first get worse (which they did, a LOT worse) since the the bacteria begin giving off toxins as they die from the antibiotic treatment.  At this point, the Lyme disease test finally showed positive so the insurance company was forced to cover the treatment. 

After lengthy treatment, the guy is now out of the wheelchair, and has regained the use of his hands.  Four years after the tick bite he still has some effects of the disease, including cognative (memory) problems and pain in soft tissue and joints, but he has hope for further improvement and most of all, is just happy to be alive.

Some people think that many cases of neuromuscular diseases might actually be misdiagnosed Lyme disease.

The article did suggest to remove a tick as soon as possible with tweezers (don't use a match or other method that can cause the  tick to regurgitate harmful bacteria into the skin), and put it in a small jar of alcohol labeled with date and location in case of future illness.

JKJ