I have always heard about lyme disease and the effects of it but I never thought that I would become a victim of it. Living in central Pennsylvania, I didn’t think that I could get lyme disease because at the time Pennsylvania wasn’t at a high risk for it but the risk grew in a short period of time it seems. About 6 months after hearing that Pennsylvania had increased risks for lyme disease, I was diagnosed with lyme disease but being diagnosed wasn’t easy at all. It took a year of doctor’s appointments and feeling completely terrible in every crevice of my body to finally get the final diagnosis from my doctors. The only way to obtain lyme disease is being bit by a deer tick, a person cannot get lyme disease through sexual contact, saliva, blood contact, or anything else. Once being bit by a tick the person may see the red dot where they were bit plus a red circle around that which makes the spot look like a target. If the target appears, that means that the person has lyme disease but only about half of lyme disease patients have actually had the target. Most symptoms of lyme disease are like other diseases which makes lyme hard to diagnose because most doctors do not think of checking for it right away, they think of the other diseases first. The early symptoms include fatigue, muscle and joint stiffness, headache, and swollen lymph nodes which mostly resemble a viral infection.
Without treatment in the early stages of lyme, the symptoms will grow worse as the lyme progresses into its next stage. Stage two of lyme disease causes heart and nerve damage to the body and the last stage adds brain damage and paralysis to the list. A person can die from lyme disease because it will slowly start shutting down your body if it isn’t treated. The only treatment available for lyme disease is antibiotics. The antibiotics, however, do cause stomach pain, nausea, and headaches for most people but the antibiotics have to be a little harsh and intense to counteract the persistent disease.
With lyme disease, you not only get the disease, you can get co-infections which vary from person to person. Co-infections are side infections that you can also get from the disease trying to grow and increase. Some co-infections are arthritis, lupus, other heart conditions, and infections in other organ systems. Arthritis is usually the first symptom to appear though and can last anywhere between a few days to a few months and usually only affects around the knee area and, very rarely, the knuckles of the hand. The nervous system gets infected with the disease when the disease goes untreated for a matter weeks to years, depending on how fast it spreads through the body.