..wait, what? Yes you heard right, today's post is not about a new Greek island, but instead it is about Lyme disease! It turns out, I have it! About two weeks ago, Chris and I were tromping around Liberty reservoir. About two days later we both noticed each of us had a tiny tick on our bodies. Chris is fine, but now two weeks later, I've got a really angry rash, of the typical sort for Lyme disease, and the center of it correlates exactly with where that tick had bitten me. So I managed to find a local private clinic dermatologist and got a prescription for doxycylcline, which I am now taking, enthusiastically. So, needless to say I am totally freaked out, having met more than a few people now who have been diagnosed with late-stage Lyme disease. I've caught it early, so I hope to hell I will be among "most cases of Lyme disease [in which] symptoms can be eliminated with antibiotics". Wish me luck.
Opa?
4 comments:
So I was talking to my boss about this whole Lyme disease thing. It turns out his wife is the first diagnosed case of Lyme disease. EVER. She's from Old Lyme, CT. So if there's anything that you want to know just holla :)
Ya, I was all kinds of freaked out. But just reading around on the good old intarweb, I think that I should be a-ok after these antibiotics are done. I just need to pay close attention to myself for the rest of my life. If I do get any, I'll need to try and avoid lazy docs who just give the symptoms a fancy name (like , like fibromyalgia, or congestive heart disease, or lupus) and treat the symptoms alone without ever fully exploring the underlying cause(s). Most docs only treat symptoms, and lyme disease causes a whole host of them _if the bacterium doesn't die during the initial antibiotc treatment_. There's a woman at work who had chronic late-stage Lyme for ten years and no one knew, they just kept treating her for everything from arthritis to lupus (all of which were auto-immune disorders for which the treatment is to supress the immune system, invariably making her so much worse by giving the bacteria free reign). I just need to make sure I don't fall into one of those traps. Anyway, I'd still be really interested to hear your boss' wife's story. I expect she got the late-stage form of the disease and it took doctors decades to figure it out? If it is anything like I'm expecting, she should sell her story to a book publisher. I'd buy it.
Ask her what she knows about people who take a course of doxycycline 2 days after the first appearance of the rash. I've been trying to find figures on how many cases like mine might pass on to the late stage disease. As I had said, wikipedia says that most people who take antibiotics at the early stage never show symptoms again, but I'd like harder numbers than "most people".
So I found this article, which seems to indicate an antibiotic failure rate of about 16% if I'm interpreting it correctly. It sounds as though I can't be nature boy anymore though, as "People experiencing recurrent episodes tended to have frequent contact with vector ticks." The good news from the abstract follows in the next sentence, "Prompt administration of standard antibiotic therapy for early Lyme disease reliably eliminates persistent infection and prevents relapse."
Of course I will still have to worry about the true auto-immune disease that Lyme may trigger.
Fuck.
The more I learn about this disease the more I hate it.
You said "relapse"...
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