Interesting Predicament

[Jessdesk]

Bullseye spot can be used as a positive diagnosis of Lyme disease. If you get it, save the tick, and get to the doctor.

Spider bites can also cause a bullseye, just fyi.

 

[microchick]

Only 80 percent have the recognizable bulls eye rash. Mine actually presented with both a bulls eye and a solid round rash on my abdomen. I also had a bulls eye rash around a bite on back.

Definitely you would have had symptoms. Mine began with flu like symptoms, fever, fatigue and nerve pain that started in the left side of my back and my left shoulder. I would have painful spasms in my left arm and it would jerk as if seizing. My doctor was ready to do CT scans suspecting a spine injury when I remembered getting bit by more than one tick while cleaning out a ditch at our farm.

What you have to remember is that the testing for Lyme isn't always 100%. False negatives are common. I was lucky in that I was diagnosed within 6 months of being bit and had one 'bar' positive on my Elisa testing and that showed that I had been exposed to Lyme disease. They consider 3 positive bars to be a diagnosis of Lyme but given I had the rashes, had the symptoms, they considered my one bar to be a positive diagnosis.

 

[micstrachan]

Erythema migrans does not always occur with Lyme. It can totally devastate an entire family. I know a family where the kids got it from the father upon fertiliAtion. First documented case, I think. Chronic Lyme is very real.

 

[SueT]

What is the most popular disease you could get from ticks??

"Popular" lol. Here, it's Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. Our neighbor got erlichiosis, which the doctors had never seen, doesn't respond to the same antibiotics as the common tick borne illnesses, and took a week to finally diagnose. They suggested that in the future, if you get a tick, save it, tape it to a card with the date of the bite, and then if you get ill, they can test the tick. We did that for that year....but we've never become ill from ticks and kind of let it slide after that. We treat each bite with triple antibiotic ointment right after removing it, and keeping treating it until the spot disappears.