[blam]

"It is not what lyme does in the beginning. It is what it will do to you over time. They did not even bother with the tests. It was a classic rash and I was put on antibiodics post haste."

Lyme is a very serious and scary disease...often, it's years later after the tick bite that things go terribly wrong.

I'm suprised that more isn't made of this disease by medical experts. Mostly, they want to deny it's present in a community.

[fella]

Lyme is a very serious and scary disease...often, it's years later after the tick bite that things go terribly wrong. I'm suprised that more isn't made of this disease by medical experts. Mostly, they want to deny it's present in a community. The last I heard the great writer Amy Tam was suffering from lyme disease.

[MD Expat in PA]

I’m severely allergic to poison ivy (and poison sumac, etc.) and each exposure to it is worse than the last. It’s not just the rash and itching at the exposure site, but I retain fluids, run a high fever and feel really sick and itch all over from it. The last few times I got poison ivy, I had to go on steroids to clear it up. I would also caution that even if the weed appears to be dead, the leaves appearing brown and dried, the oils that transmits the poison can still be present.

And bee, hornet and wasp stings are the same thing for me. The first one wasn’t so bad but each subsequent sting is worse than the last. The last time I was stung by a wasp on my finger a few years ago, my hand swelled up to over the size of a soft ball. My throat didn’t close up but I noticed that I was breathing more heavily after an hour or so and that my eye lids swelled and that I itched all over my body. The swelling and redness went from my finger and hand and all the way up past my elbow. The pain at the sting site was unbearable for over a well over a week – like there was acid burning under my skin.

As far as Lyme disease, a friend of mine contracted it but wasn’t diagnosed until long after the bite she didn’t know she had. She suffered for nearly a year with the debilitating symptoms until she was properly diagnosed due to a lab test and given treatment (anti-biotics) for it. But she now has arthritis in her joints that will probably never go away and she is only in her mid thirties.