A few days ago I had a very peculiar dream.
Somehow I lived together with my parents again. Matt wasn’t there. All of a sudden a handful of burglars entered our house. The leader of the villains was someone familiar, a friend of mine in real life. But they didn’t just grab the computer and telly and ran for it. Instead they chose their loot carefully, pondering for hours what to take and what to leave behind. My dad and I started to negotiate with them in a weird and surreal way.
“How many CDs are you going to take?”
“Half a kilo of both of your collections.”
“Can we at least pick the ones you are going to take ourselves?”
“Hmm, well that’s okay…”
It was a long dream. I must have dreamed this story for at least 15 minutes. Then I woke up, confused, with only one thought. Why on earth didn’t I just call the police?! Why didn’t I think of making that call to stop them taking all my stuff?!
I opened my eyes, realised I felt an itch on my arm, looked at it, saw the red mark… There was a Doctor Who-ish voice in my head: “It has started…”
Thoughts started rushing. Flashbacks to our holiday two weeks ago. Norway. The same hill of the insane and frantic Scream of Edvard Munch. Tick bite. Tick removed. Tiny mark never disappeared. Tiny mark now surrounded by an inch of red skin. Should I be… Could it be… the first signs of the so feared Lyme disease?
In a whim of meant to be wisdom I put my dream and my red spot together and I realised this was no place or time for negotiation, denial or waiting. This was, totally against my personality concerning medical issues, time for action.
I went to my doctor and demanded antibiotics, which I received, even though the red spot was only very small and ambiguous. I turned out to have handled things wisely: today the red mark is about two inches wide and it has finally started to decolorize and shrink.
I have had an awful lot of thoughts in the past few days, though.
I’m disappointed in my immune system. Thought I could beat and scare away every illness using my own personal supreme health. Now I need medication that interferes with my contraceptives and won’t let me sit in the sun for too long …
On the other hand, what if these antibiotics didn’t exist? Or what if I’d never noticed that spot? I could have died… Or worse… In Lyme’s most severe cases people get problems with their joints and all kinds of scary neurological things. I’d turn into a mad cow, literally. I’d fall through my knees, fuming and foaming, yelping like a hyena… All because of one single, tiny, shitty, parasite…
I’m getting paranoid by all the information on the internet. People that have taken years to fully recover. People that have never recovered at all. As always, scary internet, scary info…
But in the end at least the odds are on my side. I did get medication in a very early stage, my immune system is very good and if at some point I would get strange symptoms then at least we’d know instantly it might have to do with Lyme. In fact, compared to other tick bitten or Lyme having people, I am quite privileged.
Yes. I handled things very well so far.
Still, I keep finding it intriguing that such a little, stupid, spidery, black dot with legs could make such a difference.
I had this discussion with Matt. I had always been taught that human kind has no natural enemies anymore. Apart from the occasional crocodile, shark or tiger we are pretty save. But now, with ticks being more and more infected with Lyme, but also with mosquitoes spreading malaria and other illnesses to more and more countries again, I think we’ve found our new natural enemy: the parasite.
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