Editor’s note: I got sick from a tick. Like, really, really sick.

Not the tick in question, but an associate.

by niki@hvny.info

It happened on a Monday, just like today, shortly after sending the newsletter.

I unfurled from the office chair to change for our evening softball game. It was then, I saw it. A tick, a nymph tick, the ones that are the size of sesame seeds, and this one was engorged, puffed up with my own blood and still attached to my upper thigh. 

But I thought nothing of it, and plucked it off easily, tiny head and all, and flushed it unceremoniously down the toilet. I was pretty unfazed; it wasn’t the first tick I’ve pulled off myself this year.

Ticks are a part of our every day: we live in central Dutchess County, an area well-known for its high tick density, and find ticks of all stages, attached and crawling on us and the dogs, almost daily. 

We tick check after all our walks – I even made a video touting the importance, and the upstate-chic fashion trend, of tucking your pants into your socks. 

I even talked to the preeminent tick expert, Rick Ostfeld of the Cary Institute, earlier this season, who told me it was going to be a bad year … He literally said: “This is going to be a particularly bad season for infected nymphs and the reason for that is we saw a good acorn year in the fall of 2021 and as expected, we saw high populations of rodents – great for the ticks, not so much for us.” And then I told all of you the same things he told me in the weekly newsletter: hvny.info/info/ticks-q-a.

But then, three days later I had this weird, swollen lymph node; the size of a golf ball in my abdomen, about two inches above where the tick bit me. And it was tender and sore. Googling symptoms is never smart, I know, so I said if it lasts through the weekend, I’ll call the doctor. 

At the end of the day on Saturday, I turned to my wife and said, I feel really hot, like, really hot. She took my temperature and I had one: over 101-degrees. And then it kept going up and up, and I resigned myself to tossing and turning on the couch with fever dreams for the remainder of the weekend.

On Monday, I still had a fever, accompanied by chills, a stiff neck, a headache, that swollen lymph node, an all around garbage-like feeling, and a call into my doctor’s office. After the appointment, I started antibiotics, doxycycline, and took them twice daily for the better part of a month. I didn’t have the tell-tale Lyme disease bullseye rash, but a blood test confirmed that it was in fact an active case of Lymes disease, results that returned even quicker than the nurse practitioner thought possible.

Between the actual Lyme disease and the treatment via antibiotics, my body was a wreck for the more than four weeks. As a former collegiate athlete, current gardener, and novice home renovator who also helps take care of animals at a farm every day, being active is part of my being. But I couldn’t do any of those things; I had no energy. I physically was not the same. I had a softball game and just watched (if you know me, you know how hard that is!), yet while I sat there, I was still dripping in sweat from the reoccurring fevers, and because I was covered head-to-toe to shield from the sun in 90-plus-degree heat since the doxycycline can make your skin burn. I could barely walk my dogs. And if I did, I was short on breath, soaked with sweat, with no help from the stifling summer air temps. 

And writing – what I am doing right now and do every week for the HVNY newsletter – was frustrating and almost impossible thanks to a heavy dose of brain fog. Words did not make sense, sometimes they switched around: “dinner” became “lunch,” names were forgotten, and single sentences were read aloud to an obsessive degree because they simply sounded like gobbledygook. 

While I was starting to feel mildly better on the antibiotics, the fevers and chills subsided, but the overall exhaustion and brain fog was still getting in the way of my day-to-days. I thought that was it, that this is what I would have to live with as a result of that little tick.

Last week though, I received a note from one of our HVNY Marketplace artists, Genevieve, who has been suffering with chronic Lyme disease for several years. In addition to more testing from a LLMD, a Lyme literate medical doctor, Gen recommended: “getting into a sauna and sweating out the toxins! When Lyme cells die they release an endotoxin that builds up and that’s what’s making you feel so crappy!”

Arm twisted. And an appointment was promptly made (at Hudson Valley Healing Center, thanks Eliza!). For forty glorious minutes, I baked in an infrared sauna in temps that ranged from 118- to 130-degrees, spending my last day of doxycycline sweating through every pore in my body, coaxing this little tick disease to be physically released from my fingertips. Three days after completing the antibiotics and sauna, coupled with some less-than-desirable tasting supplements (glutathione, oof!), and I am ready to take the field once again – socks tucked in to my pants, of course.

Read more about this year’s tick season from my interview with Rick from the Cary Institute at hvny.info/info/ticks-q-a  

Thank you again to Genevieve Goetz for reaching out, and for your support. Please be sure to check out her art on the HVNY Marketplace.

Below are some of the links Genevieve shared with me, if you’re interested in reading more:
https://projectlyme.org/resource/detoxing-from-lyme-disease/
https://www.focusonlyme.org/post/how-to-detox-on-the-daily
https://lymewarrior.us/detoxing-methods 

BTW: I am not a doctor, this is a personal account and is no way intended to provide medical advice in place of a certified professional. There are many LLMDs in the Hudson Valley to talk to and get testing, Doctor Richard Horowitz in Hyde Park (insurance not accepted) was one recommendation.  

Published July 17, 2023