Make some lymeade
Where to begin… ah yes, where all lyme disease starts… the tick bite. Or, in my case tick bites. But, I’ll start with the most recent, easiest and clearest to recall. It was either Spring or late Summer 2016. I happened to notice a small dark spec on my upper chest which didn’t just brush off. It looked suspiciously like an insect of some sort, so I got my magnifying mirror to get a closer look. I recognized it immediately as a tick and got my tweezers out. Not knowing at the time how to properly remove a tick I just grabbed the body with the tweezers and it squished. I did manage to get the thing pulled out and I set it aside so I could show it to my husband after he got home from work.
I wasn’t all that concerned about the tick, even though I was aware that ticks can carry Lyme disease and we were living in a high risk area of southwest Nova Scotia, Canada. The reason for that being I had a friend who had contracted Lyme and had assured me that you can barely see a Lyme-carrying tick, and I could see this one very clearly without a magnifying glass and assumed it was too big to worry about.
I’m not a lover of the outdoors, except for the beach, so since I’d heard that hiking in grassy or wooded areas was one of the high risk activities for getting Lyme, once again I was not alarmed.
When I showed the tick to Rich he said it probably rode home on his work clothes and agreed it was too large to be the Lyme-carrying type, so I discarded it. I recalled that I had done his laundry a couple of days earlier, so the tick could very well have been attached to me all that time. And, what we didn’t consider into the equation, was that the tick had grown considerably while attached to me as it became engorged with my blood!
Backing up a bit…In December of 2014 we had come home from ‘living the dream’ in Belize because I was very ill and needed to come back to Canada where we would have health care insurance to cover the cost of all the tests I was undergoing. My husband, because of his extensive background in the logging industry landed a job as a UTT (Utility Tree Trimmer). They keep the ‘vegetation’ from getting unruly under and around the power lines, so, a very high risk job for encountering ticks!
I recall noting that there was a round rash that spread out for some length of time which I can no longer remember. Within a month of that bite I remember one weekend I spent in bed with a fever, chills, extreme vertigo (room spinning) and vomiting. However, I did not relate this to the bite at the time, but just thought I had a bad flu, although the vertigo seemed odd as I had never experienced that with a flu before!
I started developing unusual headaches that seemed to radiate up from the base of my skull into my head like a slow electric shock that couldn’t be relieved with my usual migraine headache dose of two extra strength acetaminophen. I even went to the doctor because of these odd headaches. I remember they were unbearable whenever I had to prepare supper, especially when chopping veggies, etc. for the meal. I ordered an electric chopper to do the job more quickly without having to stand at the counter for long periods. This is also about the time I bought a neck pillow for the car because every little bump would trigger these headaches.
At the same time I had a marked increase in the number and intensity of my restless leg syndrome and foot cramps. I’d been having both for a couple of years, but when I became sick in Belize I had begun a regular regimen of high-dose Magnesium and that seemed to be helping with this, but now, not so much. Still, I never once pinned any of these symptoms on the Tick bite.
Oh yes, and did I mention the tinnitus? Again, this is something I noticed a couple of years ago, and it had been steadily increasing, but now, it was beginning to be a constant feature!
That fall we moved to Alberta for work. The symptoms continued and more were added. Feeling like my heart was sometimes racing and/or missing/adding a beat, usually just after going to bed, or in the middle of the night it would wake me up. Sudden excruciating pain in my sacroiliac joint… so bad one night that I could not get out of bed to go to the bathroom… I ended up dragging/crawling myself there with tears streaming down from the agonizing pain; Another bout of a three-day ‘flu’ with fever, chills, vomiting and uncontrolled shaking;
Did I mention I have had MCS (multiple chemical sensitivity) for as long as I can remember? Yup, but since the tick bite, the reaction to chemicals has greatly increased and even changed in some instances. For example I was standing at a door of a house with a friend when I was attacked by a wave of the householder’s air-freshener coming from the house. Normally, I would feel instant head-pain, which I did, but along with it I became very dizzy and within minutes my temples became numb, which spread to my whole forehead, then my fingertips as well. The ringing in my ears also increased with this assault. This is just one incident, which has since been repeated in various situations.
It was at about the time of that MCS incident that I started to wonder if perhaps all these symptoms were related. I ‘googled’ a bunch of these symptoms together, and came up with an article on a website of a reputable Lyme Disease organization. It had a link to a quiz to take if you suspect Lyme. I thought, what the heck, may as well. Well, I iwas blown away by how many of the questions I answered ‘Yes’ to.
Joint pain: Yes
Muscle aches: Yes
Twitching: Unsure
Memory loss: Yes
Cognitive impairment: Yes
Sleep impairment: No
Heart-related symptoms: Yes
Gastrointestinal symptoms (stomach/digestive): Yes
Neuropathy (nerve pain, numbness, hot/cold sensations, tingling): Yes
Psychiatric (e.g. depression, mood changes, etc.): Yes
So, one at a time, I will detail my symptoms:
Joint Pain
- Increased pain in my thumbs and wrists. (I was diagnosed with osteoarthritis a few years ago, but it took a sudden turn for the worse after the tick bite)
- Increased sacroiliac pain (and instances of occurance)
- Unexplained coccyx (tail bone) pain. All the time I had this symptom I thought it was from the time I rode the water taxi (about a year before) in Belize and hit a large wave that caused me to come down hard on the seat, although I had no pain at the time. It was the only explanation I could come up with since X-rays and MRI showed nothing wrong with the coccyx.
- Increased knee pain (and instances of occurance)
- Neck pain drastically increased with frequent severe headaches resulting from
Muscle Aches
- Increased pain in neck (and glands) and shoulder muscles
- Increased instances of severe cramping of feet and thigh muscles
Memory Loss:
- I think I have this, but I can’t remember…but seriously, the instances are increasing where I tell Rich, ‘I don’t remember that’.
Cognitive Impairment:
- Instances have drastically increased where I can’t come up with a simple every day word when saying a sentence.
- General ‘brain fog’ where frequently, for example, I find myself standing in the kitchen wondering what it is I want to do there.
- Decreased ability to concentrate
- Depersonalization (i.e., losing the emotional connection to life) Also referred to as feeling emotionally numb (wasn’t sure whether to put this here or in the Psychiatric section below)
Heart-related Symptoms:
- Feeling like my heart is racing and/or missing/adding a beat, usually just after going to bed, or in the middle of the night
- After a slight scare, (like when we hit a deer one night, or even less scary situations) I get a pain in the heart area that takes hours to go away
Gastrointestinal Symptoms:
- This is mostly under control now through diet i.e. reduced gluten, lactose, etc. but I was suffering from many food intolerances (pain and bloating mostly) and went on the GAPS diet for a year and a half which helped a lot.
Neuropathy:
- One of the symptoms of this category is the numbness I get in my temples, forehead, and fingers when encountering chemicals.
- Tingling in my fingers was one of the symptoms on the list when I first became sick in Belize, but more on that later.
- Ringing in the ears (tinnitus), vertigo (dizziness), or ataxia
- Morton’s neuroma, or a non-cancerous tumor in the ball of the foot started not long after the 2016 tick bite. I can’t walk on it without a padded insole.
Psychiatric:
- OCD behavior is increasing (just ask Rich)
- Paranoia…thinking I’m going crazy… thinking people don’t like me (well, maybe I just am… and, maybe they really don’t)
- Phobias increasing in severity (i.e. fear of driving in the car, spiders, talking on the phone)
- Panic attacks causing shortness of breath and pounding heart for next to no reason, like going to a gathering of friends.
- Depersonalization (i.e., losing the emotional connection to life) Also referred to as feeling emotionally numb
If I haven’t lost you by now, you might remember that at the beginning I said “Where to begin… ah yes, where all lyme disease starts… the tick bite. Or, in my case tick bites.” So, now we go back a couple of years before the 2016 tick bite.
(To Be Continued)