Ticks and Lyme Disease

[Daisy]

It's that time of year again when ticks are doing their worst, which in some case can be life shattering.

Lyme Disease UK is a charity started by victims of Lyme disease to raise awareness of the importance of recognising the symptoms and getting the correct antibiotic treatment before the the victim suffers irrepairable damage.

This particular link gives very good examples of the ways erythema migrans (EM) - the rash sometimes associated with an infected tick bite - looks. Any of us, or our family, could get a tick bite.

We live in an area where ticks are very common but I have only ever seen one friend with an EM (very similar to the EM number 7 in the link) and it took a long while for it to be diagnosed and her GP at the time said it was the first time he'd seen one!

Even if you're a bit squeamish, please do have a look at the link because a quick diagnosis is so important.

https://lymediseaseuk.com/lyme-rash/

[Oma]

Can’t see it Daisy it’s coming up with the 404 error .

A friends DD has Lymedisease and she can be quite poorly with it , she’s 51 and sometimes can’t get out of bed when she’s really sick , It effects her joints badly all due to a little thing like a tick that wasn’t treated when she was bitten , they thought it was a mosquito bite at the time .

To be truthful when she was diagnosed many years ago now,I hadn’t heard of it before either that or I had just taken no notice.

[Daisy]

Oma, sorry about the link. I'll try again.

https://lymediseaseuk.com/lyme-disease/

This is a different link. It points out that UK testing for Lyme disease isn't very accurate. The US and Germany have much better testing facilities, I believe

[Gemini]

That one works Daisy, thank you.
A friend of mine had this and it took her very long time to get a diagnosis.

[Grauntie Mag]

Hmmm… I think I’ll stick to walking in muck boots. We walk in different areas with the dog, all of them grassy. Thanks for the info Daisy.

[Daisy]

Grauntie, I keep promising myself some Muck boots. Are they comfortable?

It's the same here with walking the dog - everywhere is a tick hazard in the Forest! Eva doesn't get ticks very often, but we're always checking for them.

Gem, it sounds as though NHS tests for Lymes aren't very accurate, which is a worry. Did your friend make a full recovery?

Oma, how awful for your friend's DD. It really is a nasty condition, and something GPs can be specially trained for, but I don't think many of them are.

[Oma]

Daisy she contracted this many years ago Im not sure they had the same understanding of it then ,plus they didn’t know what it was ,
It took years before they would even test her for it ,although she had told them she had been researching and suspected it was that .
It was a case of go away and stop looking things up f

[Nanto2girls]

I don't know anyone who has had this,but i know it is a very nasty illness.

[Daisy]

Oma, it wasn't something I was very aware of until we came to live here, same with adders!

[Enfys]

Many years ago P’s uncle was staying with his daughter in the US when he unfortunately contracted a Lyme Disease. This was the first time I heard of it. He came home, very poorly indeed. Whilst he was being treated for it they discovered he had lung cancer so we were never really sure if the two things together made matters so much worse as he sadly passed away within a few months.

[Daisy]

Enfys, how awful for P's uncle to be taken so ill such a long way from home. The friend of mine who had Lyme disease wasn't diagnosed very quickly. She was in remission from cancer but sadly it returned and she passed away. It was raised as a possibility that the Lyme disease was implicated in some way.