Ok, so Lyme Disease to the best of my knowledge is transmitted only by tick bites. But I never found a tick on my body, so how did I get Lyme Disease?
My story, or at least my best guess as to how I got Lyme Disease is this:
In December of 2018 I went to Rhode Island to visit my family. While there I went to a cute little store in an outbuilding on someone's farm. I wandered around and then went outside to look at all the animals. They had donkeys, lamas, goats, chickens and an adorable farm dog.
Well, I played with the farm dog and petted him. And I'm fairly certain that this is where I got a tick bite and became infected with Lyme Disease and possibly other co-infections.
Why do I say that?
While I never found a tick or had a ring rash around a bite, I came home from this trip and start having flu-like symptoms a few weeks later. I felt like I was constantly on the verge of coming down with the flu, but I never did. My muscles ached, I had headaches, and I sort of expected to have the flu at any moment for about a month or maybe two. But I also explained away the headaches and muscle aches as barometric pressure swings, or because I'd been doing something that made me sore and stiff.
It wasn't until my hands started aching like I had suddenly developed arthritis that I knew something was really wrong. This happened sometime around Feb-March of 2019. I finally went into a doctor and we started the process of figuring out what was wrong.
It took from March until October, after running tests for auto-immune diseases, and every arthritis test imaginable to end up thinking about testing for Lyme Disease. Don't get me wrong I'm grateful he thought of it at all or I'd still not know what was wrong.
Unfortunately we are a long way from done. I'm waiting on test results from new blood tests to see if I have co-infections that I'm fighting too. I wish it were sooner rather than later, but I'm still fighting.
Do you have Lyme Disease? How long did it take you to diagnose it?
For Other Posts about Lyme Disease see the following:
How to Find the Right Doctor for Lyme Disease
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