#i am just greatly frustrated with the medical system in regards to Lyme

[moonygryffin]

I just read about the Lyme disease. I knew that tick bites were bad, but not that bad! I saw many ticks in my village, but I never got bitten luckily. I hope you recover from this disease. Take care of yourself!

Thanks for your words and sorry if you don’t want a long explanation of Lyme disease, but I really like talking about it/my experience with it to help spread awareness! So uh, stop here if you don’t wanna read all that lol

Lyme is actually one of the least bad tick-borne diseases, in my opinion! Which is why ticks are so scary to me. They’re very important to the ecosystem, I would never wish them to be eradicated, but I do hate them and don’t want them anywhere near me lol

There’s basically two versions of Lyme. If your doctor catches it early and you don’t have other major health issues, it can be cured relatively easily with a month or so of strong antibiotics. A lot of people barely have any symptoms at all when its caught this early, usually just muscle and/or joint pain, some fatigue, maybe a fever. My mom actually got bit and caught Lyme somewhat recently and, even tho her immune system is still not 100% from her chemotherapy a few years ago, she completely recovered with only some mild fatigue that went away during treatment. One thing of note is that Lyme’s famous “bull’s eye rash” is not nearly as common as people say it is. You can absolutely still have Lyme disease even if you never developed the distinctive rash. I didn’t, my mom didn’t, and my doctor (who has had Lyme multiple times) has only had it once.

The other ‘version’ of Lyme is way more painful, dangerous, and stubborn. Basically, if your Lyme isn’t caught fast enough, not only can you develop way more symptoms, but it becomes much harder to cure. When I was finally getting diagnosed, I was given this huge like 10 page packet of some of (not all) the symptoms of Lyme disease. It’s very similar to the early days of Covid when it could seemingly cause thousands of different health issues. The most common are still joint and muscle pain, major fatigue, and other flu-like symptoms, but it can also cause sudden hair loss, random numb patches around your spine, burning skin, etc. I had to go to a specific psychologist to get diagnosed with autism, adhd, and ocd because Lyme can mimic adhd lol. Hell, IT GAVE ME OCD! Very crazy stuff. I’ve also heard it can induce way more deadly stuff with certain organs but I won’t go into depth with that here in case anyone has triggers related to that sort of thing.

I’ve gone way further into this than I planned but I think it’s important to put out there because Lyme is really not a well known or understood by both the public OR doctors, in my experience at least. I caught Lyme when I was around 7-ish? I was sick so often throughout elementary and middle school that I’ve been to basically ever doctor in the area and almost every time they said I just had some virus and that was it. It was only during high school, about 8 years later, that I finally went to a doctor (my current one) that even knew enough about Lyme disease to test me. And the only reason he knew was because he’d had it himself! The Lyme was deeply in my central nervous system that it took years of very large, very bad tasting antibiotics to cure. And, as I learned 2(?) years ago now, it’s made a resurgence. And I consider myself lucky because I truly believe if I didn’t get diagnosed for it when I did, I’d be dead by now with how it was attacking my cns

So, yeah, I think it’s important for people to learn at least the basics of Lyme disease just in case because it’s a very annoying and sometimes deadly disease that, at least in my experience, not many doctors actually know anything about

Also fun fact: Ötzi the Iceman, one of the oldest mummies in the world, had Lyme disease!