Comment by Kenji | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Kenji | Hacker News Reader

I had Lyme disease and I started having symptoms (but no rash) roughly after 1-2 weeks after the tick bite (feeling unwell, shivering, joint pains, swollen lymph nodes). I then took antibiotics for almost 2 weeks. I continued to have severe joint pain for a couple of months. Now, more than a year later, I am feeling well, but sometimes I still feel a very slight joint pain in those affected joints near that tick bite. The most important thing is that you act on it quickly and your chances are very good. The longer you wait - or haven't noticed it - the more difficult it gets to treat.

"Kaleigh switched doctors and began a course of antibiotics that lasted eight more months." that is not only dangerous but, sorry about the harsh word, stupid. It is likely that opportunistic fungi will destroy your body if you take antibiotics for that long, and there are even cases where this has led to the death of the patient.

"It takes the tick at least thirty-six hours to transmit borrelia." Also, this is wrong. Mine was in there for at most a day and I discovered it in the evening while showering and then removed it. Why should there be a magical barrier that stops bacteria from being transmitted during 36 hours?

I have Lyme disease. Tick bite when I was 10 years old, finally discovered I have Lyme at age 26, after years of suffering and getting more symptoms year after year. I'm now at the beginning of a long term antibiotics course. After 2 months of antibiotics, my foggy brain is starting to clear up again... for one or two hours a day in the evening I can think & focus again. The rest of the day I'm useless.

So it seems 2 months isn't enough to get rid of all the nasty bacteria, let alone two weeks! Yes, long term antibiotics has it risks but I wouldn't call it stupid when there's no other choice.

Furthermore, every 2 months the doctor switches the antibiotics, prescribes refrigerated probiotics with trillions of living cells & does regular blood checks (also for yeasts).

My mom was bitten by a tick in Colorado and given a 2 week course of antibiotics when she started to feel ill. She got better then promptly got worse as soon as they ran out. Over the next six months she progressively worsened until she could only get out of bed for a couple hours a day. Finally she found out about Lyme disease - many doctors do not believe that it even occurs in Colorado so she didn't know what was wrong for the longest time. She found a doctor out of state that insurance would cover who would treat her. She was on heavy doses of oral antibiotics for four years and has never had a relapse, some 20 years later.

Good luck on your treatment.

Did they test her for Lyme disease? Did she have the active anti-bodies?

Just saw this reply, a couple weeks late, but:

Yes, and no, at least not initially. I believe they repeated the test and it came back positive at a later date. So it seems likely that she got something from the tick, probably in part Lyme. The Lyme test is reputed to have a high false negative rate, not sure to what extent this is true.

I found a deer tick on myself earlier this summer. Even though it is "not possible" that I was infected in the 12-24 hours it was attached, I insisted on treatment. Three weeks of amoxicillin is not that bad. Chronic Lyme is. I had to advocate for myself in this matter, and I recommend anyone in my position do the same.

I was also treated for initial-stage Lyme about ten years ago, quite successfully, although I developed Bell's Palsy and lost the use of half my face for a few days. That was interesting. Lyme is garbage.

I'm sitting here with an angry-looking bulls-eye from a tick (scapularis) that was attached for less than 12 hours. (It wasn't there when I went to bed and was there when I woke up.)

With a previous infection I was eventually unable to walk without crutches and had such intense jaw pain that I couldn't sleep without a mouth guard. This is a nasty bug and not to be trifled with.

I tested positive for Lyme a couple of months after noticing what I thought was a spider bite. It didn't have the distinctive bullseye, but it gave me a sunburn-like rash over my entire upper arm. I took three weeks of doxycycline.

I can't definitively point to Lyme as the cause, but my knees were a little worse than usual for a while, and my hearing got worse in one ear (not yet recovered).

On the plus side, I discovered probiotics, which seem to be good for my, er, digestion.

It's funny, even though I had just seen Daryl Hall talk about his struggle with Lyme disease on Live from Daryl's House, it didn't occur to me that the bite on my arm might be from a tick.

The complication with such short doses, and the discussion of them, is that they provide a short bout of relief, and then the infectee stops taking them - then the bacteria can reinfect them. It often isn't mentioned which specific antibiotic was used. It is typically azithromycin - known as Zithromax. Could you verify this?

There is no magical barrier. Some young children have been infected with extremely virulent Lyme after only 15 minutes of nymph tick attachment. More (experimental, not rhetorical) research is definitely necessary.

The comment about fungal infection destroying one's body badly needs a citation.

I took Doxycycline which is the recommended antibiotic against Lyme disease. There is no empirical evidence that taking antibiotics for longer than two weeks helps against Lyme.

Citation needed... THERE, I finally found it http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/31/4/1107.long Okay, this was an extreme case. I was mistaken, the woman took the antibiotics for a longer time and intravenously. However, it's still true that the risk of fungal infection is increased by a substantial amount.

Here is another case displaying the dangerous effects of long-term administration of antibiotics which resulted in death http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/51/3/369.full (but not because of fungi)

This way of treating Lyme Disease literally kills people, I am not exaggerating.

I was on antibiotics for a year - in retrospect it may have been a tad stupid, but I had felt so terrible for so long I was prepared to take the risk - given the opportunity, I think most people in the same position would do likewise.

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