Keith: "A" positive here, as is my wife. My ordeal was a 15-year tour through the tender mercies (not!) of our much-vaunted medical system, and well-before anybody had ever even heard of Lyme's Disease out here in Colorado. It effectively ended my career, almost destroyed my marriage, and nearly ended me. Sitting here, blessedly on the backside of all that, I'm still trying to process it all. It is not something I would wish on anyone (well, maybe a few politicians?), because you never know what is slowly killing you. Even the tests for it remain imprecise (they still commonly treat for it just because of the symptoms and the suspicion that you have it) and I'm even hearing of new variations of the diseases being transmitted by tick-bites. Some now ruin your ability to eat any red meat and others just kill you quickly (& look-up Lyme's psychosis sometime).
I spray permethrin on all my hunting cloths (socks, boots, hats, etc.) because that really seems to help and... I'm ever-vigilant about checking for the little bastards (as I'm not interested in going down that road again). If you do get bitten, one dose of doxycycline effectively kills the Bergdorfi bacterium (and the other components in the sewer of infections a tick bite transmits to you) but you have to kill it quickly. Left untreated, it becomes very difficult to get rid of it. In my case, it was 41-months of millitary grade anti-malarials combined with a brutal spectrum of antibiotics (& the antibiotics have left me intolerant of gluten). My physician told me that I was one of only about 20% of his patents that ever get fully-clear of the disease, for the rest they just manage the symptoms until end-of-life.
Last edited by Lloyd3; 08/11/23 11:10 AM.
