Nutmeg Creation Tour Notes

I’ve avoided tick bites for years and years–even though I show up at Silver Lake every summer!

I did not expect that I would get the Lyme Fever, but that appears to be just what happened.

I’ve just returned from a visit with Dave, the friendly nurse-practitioner at my doctor’s office. (You’d like him. A lot.) I had a fever that started early Saturday morning, but no other symptoms that made it look like the “summer flu” or other short-lived viruses. What I did have, though, is a localized rash.

It was on my left hip, where the hip meets the leg. And it didn’t really start to be noticeable until Sunday, when I spent the evening and night pushing 103°F (or 39.444°C, which oddly doesn’t offer me much comfort). That alternated with occasional cascades of drenching perspiration, which meant that the fever was down temporarily even as I tried to recall my swimming lessons. How they do it in Canada So, Dave thinks I got a tick bite somewhere along our route (and I’m guessing somewhere between New Milford and Sharon, but there’s no way to know).

Why I’m telling you this

If any of you have spent some similarly miserable time in the last few days, and it’s not an obvious virus, run (or crawl, if you’ve been feeling like me) to your doctor’s office. It’s not contagious, but it’s not going to get any better, and the later symptoms of Lyme’s includes arthritis-like stiffness and pain in the joints, muscle pain, and general ickiness. The fever goes away after a few days, but that’s the bacteria getting ready to move in and put a major hurt on you.

Here’s a link to the Centers for Disease Control subsite on Lyme’s.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 24th, 2006 at 5:09 pm and is filed under Community, Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.