My Encounter with a Tick
No Easy Answers for Lyme Disease
Chronic Lyme is not a Real Diagnosis
I almost failed my first class on wilderness medicine. Living in upstate New York, I signed up for a Wilderness First Responder class to be better prepared to care for people in the outdoors.
By the end of the week-long intensive training in wilderness medicine, I felt miserable, joints aching, fever, weak, tired with mild exertion. I almost quit.
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I didn’t know it at the time, but I had Lyme disease. During one of the last sessions, the instructor talked about ticks being the scariest bug in North America.
“Oh shit,” I thought.
Two weeks earlier, I went on a long hike in part of upstate New York. I didn’t notice the tick on the back of my arm until a couple of days later — just long enough for it to spread the nasty Lyme-causing spirochete.
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I had a vague awareness of Lyme at the time but didn’t really appreciate the consequences. Even after my oh shit moment in class, I figured surely I would get better.
I did pass my class but felt miserable — confident my classmates thought I was an antisocial pariah as I had no motivation…
