It's been a cold hard winter here in central New York but the ticks don't seem to mind. If you think snow on the ground keeps them away, think again. If your out in the woods, you'd be wise to look things over when you get home. I was looking for sheds on March 17th and brought home an unwanted quest.
We got a break in the weather and the snow melted in some of the open areas but still hung on in the woods. My dog needed a run so we hit the woods. The next morning I felt an itch on my leg and @%$& there was a deer tick. I would never have thought they'd be out this early. The snow hadn't even melted in most areas.
Anyway, I'm just finishing the antibiotics and waiting to see the lab results to see if the tick was infected with lyme disease.
Just thought I'd post this as a heads up. I live in the country and in the winter I'm in the woods cutting fire wood, etc. daily. I never thought ticks would be a problem during the winter. Well, I've been wrong all my life or the buggers have mutated.
THANKS,GOOD LUCK
Hope all is well. I know what you mean about ticks, I'm over in Washington/Warren county near the Vermont Border and Lake George. We've seen ticks up the Adirondacks despite the cold weather.
I was bitten once, although that's when I was young and my parents were living in the city of all places. Not a big city, but I remember seeing the Tick crawling up my arm, I went to grab it and it bit me. So close! Had to go through the antibiotic routine. Stupid little creatures, but they serve some purpose... right?
Good luck, hope you make out well! G'nite!
What is the antibiotic routine your speaking of?
Is it a special antibiotic or a specific regimine that the Dr. puts you on? Just curious.
Thanks
Doxicycline(sp)? 21 days of treatment. I was bit a few years ago and went untreated. I ended up in the hospital for five days on a IV. I thought I was a done for. It was no fun! If you do get bit see you doctor and demand the full treatment of 21 days. Don't let them give you the three day mini dose. The tests stink and are very ineffective. Take this from someone that has been there.
The ticks never really went dorment here all winter; but I'm only seeing small immature dog ticks, not deer ticks this early. PITA, but not Lyme carriers.
Are you guys taking 21 days of tetracycline (Doxicycline) any time you get bit by a tick?
I began having symptoms last March and hadn't been bitten by a tick since the previous fall. These symptoms have gotten worse for an entire year and sometimes less severe and other times almost unbearable. I had no idea what it was and my Dr. was stumped also. Well after talking to a few different guys who either have Lyme disease or have had Lyme disease I decided to look it up on CDC's website.
Guess what.......my symptoms are an exact duplicate of those for Lyme disease. I was floored and my mouth nearly hanging open as I read each symptom and I have or have had every single one on the list.
I was relieved to see the treatment was a 4 week recommended course of antibiotics by the CDC.
I saw my Dr. yesterday and he immediately prescribed Doxycycline and I'm on it right now.
I hope and pray that this takes care of it because having chronic pain and fatigue for a year really sucks, especially when you don't know what is causing it.
I suspect that I got bit by a tick in late fall and had no immediate symptoms. The bacteria laid dormant in my system until it reared it's ugly head the following March. It started with about 3 nights of bad fever, chills, night sweats, and body aches. Then it just went away.
After that the muscle aches, pains, fatigue, heart palpitations, numbness in my hands, feet, and face started. It's been a year full of uncertainty and panic at times because I thought it might be my heart or worse maybe even cancer of some kind.
I've had lots of episodes and check ups to rule out the heart related issues, so I am almost sure that's not the case here.
I really hope this antibiotic treatment takes care of it.
Thanks for putting up with my long winded story, but I thought it may help someone else out there that could find themselves in the same boat as me.
Ticks can lay dormant for months. In warmer weather they can stay on a blade of grass for an eternity waiting for a host to wander by. Usually a deep long freeze will kill them off, but from what you guys are saying, that didn't happen. The best prevention is just that PREVENTION. Use the sprays with premithin, make sure all cuffs are tight around your ankles and wrists, wear light colored clothing underneath to facilitate a check, check armpits, behind the knees, and your crotch. Ticks like warmth, and they will gravitate to those areas if not found.
If you have a tick that has clamped on, do not tug on it or pull it. Cover it with a layer of either vaseline or dishwashing detergent. LEt it sit for a bit. The tick cannot breathe and will release. Save the tick and get to doctor's ASAP. Same goes for a dog as well, although they now sell the tick removers, it's a bit of a chore if you have a dog that gets annoyed.
Doxycyline is a powerful drug, it is the go-to AB of choice when you need a full frontal attack on what germ is harming you. Drink lots of fluids and take some probiotics as this can wreak havoc on your stomach. Hope you get better soon.
I once appraoched my deer kill and it looked like it was covered with green/brown coffee beans. They were ticks that were engorged on the deer blood. Literally hundreds were on this animal. I left it for a while, giving them the time to jump off of their buffet before field dressing. As a side note, the skull plate still had some hair on it, so I placed it in a plastic bag. I forgot about it for a few weeks, and when I went to take the antlers out, there must have been some ticks on it and the ticks were still alive after weeks of being in a sealed plastic bag.
I don't know what positive purpose they serve, they carry disease is all that I am concerned with.
QuoteOriginally posted by Lost Arra:
Are you guys taking 21 days of tetracycline (Doxicycline) any time you get bit by a tick?
Thats what I was wondering. On an average year I'll take at LEAST 6 or 7 out of me and at least another 3 dozen or so crawling on me. I have already pulled 2 out of me and 3 out of my fiance this spring. A few weeks back I pulled 17 out of my dog and he had only been in the yard, he's back on frontline for the rest of the year.
There is no point in taking antibiotics every time. It has to be a deer tick, must be an adult, must be in you for at least 24 hours and must have lyme's to transmit it to you. I've had it 4 times and it's no joke, but to take doxy every time is overboard
Skipmaster1 that's a lot of thick!!! would you guys have pics or link of this pest?
Having been born and raised in Missouri all my life and living in the country for 90% of that time, I've been bitten by ticks since I was a child. It's just common around here and for country people to get ticks on them, even out of our yard. I honestly have never had to worry about Lyme disease on my whole 42 years, but I guess the odds finally caught up with me. 41 years of tick bites and finally in year 42 one of them got me.
I've always taken precautions by treating my clothes and showering after I return home from hunting, but I never freaked out if I got bit from a tick.
Having this Lyme disease has changed all that. I'll take even more precautions and shower immediately when I get home.
If I get over this and ever get back to normal, I'll look at tick bites in an entirely different way from here on out. I would seriously consider taking the antibiotic course of treatment the next time I get bit by a deer tick.
What Probiotics can a person take to counter act the Doxicycline? It says on the back of the bottle of my meds that I shouldn't take Vitamins, Iron, or dairy products within 2 hours of taking this medication.
Ticks are going to be bad this year. I took my hound out into the woods out back for fifteen minutes and the next day it had twenty ticks on it. That was a month ago after a good hard freeze, I could not believe it.
I'm still traumatized from being held down naked with my legs spread on the porch at my grandpas. Neighbors or whoever happened to be passing by would show up and there I was in my birthday suit getting chiggers and ticks pulled off, privacy? naked tick pulling was like the county fair, they let everyone get involved.
So far this year I have killed a dozen brown recluse and spent one day at the ER for a suspect spider bite. The bite was on a kid under the hair and the skin broke open and now there is a hard little knot under the skin three weeks later. Its also possible it was a tick bite but the doctor said we had to wait, no symptoms, no medicine.
Around here there are horror stories every year about tick fever and lime disease. One guy built a house out in the middle of a old 20 acre dairy pasture and started cutting the grass with a riding lawn mower. I was told he got sick three times last year and had some time in the hospital.
If I took antibiotics for three or four weeks every time I pulled off a tick, I would rarely stop taking the drugs. Ticks are a way of life in the South, and getting bitten is routine if you spend any time outside. I use a lot of low-strength DEET spray for chiggers and skeeters during the spring, summer, and fall (under $5 for two cans at Dollar General), which seems to help against the ticks, too, but the only thing that I've found to give real protection from ticks is treating my clothes with permethrin spray. Even that's not foolproof, and I can't afford to treat every item of clothing in my closet! I've picked up ticks between the car and the door. Occasionally I find them inside the house.
I have been fighting chronic fatigue and joint pain for nearly 10 years . About 8-9 years ago I went to a doc and I suspected Lyme . Test was inconclusive , not enough for the insurance to pay for IV antibiotics ....I have read that oral antibiotics wont cut it for a long term lyme infection..... My fatigue and joint pain have continued ever since . I have been to several docs and no one wants to put much into the lyme idea , but they have no answers for me .
Last month I had an appointment with a rheumatologst(sp ? ) and he p'd me off from the minute he walked into the room . He was plain arrogant and rude and told me that lyme , fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue were not even real worries ( in fact he said chronic fatigue doesnt even exist )and I walked out of his office . I have an appointment with another one next month . I have been living at about half speed for 10 years and no one seems to know why .
Its nasty stuff...I have a cousin who lives in Westchester County NY....absolutely loaded with ticks...he's got it bad...had to wear the IV pump for months. I spray every article of clothing with permanone...wont go inthe woods without it. GOt bit myself 15 years ago but found the tick the same day and started the treatment immediately...
Was out in North Jersey stumping with my brother and nephew in March...COLD...didn't stop the ticks though..my brother had one on his pants when we got out of the woods..
Rick, We have a couple docs down here that specialize in treating Lyme Disease. Around here everyone knows somebody thats been hit hard with it. I have no idea about long term and how it effects but the people I know that did have it were serious messed up and on the verge of death.
Its possible that it could be active over years but i would like to learn more about that. Having lived in Asia the big one over there is Dengue. Kids get sick with fever, fever goes away, parents think its over then the kid bleeds to death. Nobody over there uses a thermometer outside of a hospital setting, most have no idea whats even going on with fever. A family uncle was bitten by a cobra and refused to go to the doc, shockingly he lived.
QuoteOriginally posted by Al Dente:
If you have a tick that has clamped on, do not tug on it or pull it. Cover it with a layer of either vaseline or dishwashing detergent. LEt it sit for a bit. The tick cannot breathe and will release
NO NO NO NO and NO That's been proven to be one of the
worst things you can do!
Grab it by the head with a pair of tweezers or a tick removal tool and pull it out in a steady motion. Doing anything else (covering it with something, burning it, etc) causes the tick to regurgitate the contents of its stomach, increasing the chances of you getting Lyme or one of the other nasties they can carry
exponentially!!
If the tick has been attached for less than 24 hrs the chances of you contracting Lyme disease is remote. Standard protocol is for 2-3 days of antibiotics, if you're doctor is paranoid and you're in an area with a high rate of the disease. The full course of drugs is only given if there are signs of infection (bulls eye rash etc). The rash presents in 3-30days after infection in only about 75% of cases.
The initial lab test to detect the bacteria relies on detecting antibody levels; by the time your antibody titer is high enough to be detected you've had the disease for a while and are well on your way to clearing your body of the infection.
Chronic symptoms occur in a small percentage of cases, and most of those are patients who didn't get treatment early on (ie no bulls eye so they didn't know it was LD or other reason for a misdiagnosis). Causes of chronic LD aren't well understood. There's good evidence that there is a strong autoimmune component to it, but small active infections can't be ruled out. The basic premise is that the initial infection was screwing with your body so much that your immune system went into overdrive to try to clear your body of the infection. In the process it ended up making antibodies toward something that, while they presumably helped with the bacteria, they're not
specific for the bacteria. If something triggers the production of those antibodies again you get a flare up.
Seriously folks, educate yourselves about the facts of the disease.
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvbid/lyme/
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v212/fliksr/Random/LDIncidenceByCntyMap_06.gif)
I'm right in that dark blue section... about 5 miles from Lyme, CT
I'm sure glad to see that north MS is blank on the map. Thanks for that, Jeremy! However, it isn't complete, because I know that it is more widespread in GA from my personal experiences there in the '80's when some of my friends, including Dan Quillian, contracted it. Dan showed me the red rash around his tick bite when I joined him for a hunt on our club in south GA, but his doc refused to test him because the CDC had not yet recognized it in GA. His joints got so bad he couldn't shoot his bow, which was understandably tough for him. Not long after, he was treated for a diabetes-related infection, and it apparently took care of his Lyme disease too. After the antibiotic treatment his Lyme symptoms disappeared and he could shoot again.
They are not just bad for humans. They are doing a number on our moose in the winter. We had a bull in the back yard this winter that was going threw the finale stages of life. It wasn't pretty.
Don, those are the reported and confirmed cases. Only a fraction of cases are confirmed by testing and only a small percentage of those are reported. My last doc didn't bother reporting anything :rolleyes:
The map is best used when viewed as a risk assessment. The black legged tick is in MS, as well as a bunch of other ticks. And all of them can carry a bunch of different nasties (and more than one at a time too)
Here's a neat series of maps showing the various tick distributions:
http://www.cdc.gov/ticks/geographic_distribution.html
If you click on the disease links you can get info on reported cases around the US
QuoteOriginally posted by Rick Perry:
I have been fighting chronic fatigue and joint pain for nearly 10 years . About 8-9 years ago I went to a doc and I suspected Lyme . Test was inconclusive , not enough for the insurance to pay for IV antibiotics ....I have read that oral antibiotics wont cut it for a long term lyme infection..... My fatigue and joint pain have continued ever since . I have been to several docs and no one wants to put much into the lyme idea , but they have no answers for me .
Last month I had an appointment with a rheumatologst(sp ? ) and he p'd me off from the minute he walked into the room . He was plain arrogant and rude and told me that lyme , fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue were not even real worries ( in fact he said chronic fatigue doesnt even exist )and I walked out of his office . I have an appointment with another one next month . I have been living at about half speed for 10 years and no one seems to know why .
I literally feel your pain Rick. Although I have only had these symptoms for a year now, I cannot imagine how unbearable 10 years could be.
Stay after your Dr. to persue this further and demand that he listen to what your telling him, or find another Dr. I brought this up long ago with my Dr. like 6 months ago and he prescribed a pain killer. I even mentioned Lyme disease and he told me that if I didn't have the rash then it could not be Lyme. Well it wasn't until I went to the CDC's website that I learned that the rash only shows up in 70-80% of Lyme cases and even if you were bitten by a tick months prior your symptoms can show up at any time.
My last Dr. appointment I "Educated" him by quoting facts that I had memorized from the CDC website then demanded that he give me the scrip for treatment. He didn't even argue with me.
Any Dr. that would scoff at your symptoms or disregard them like it's all in your head should have his license to practice medicine taken away.
I would have walked out too, but not until he had gotten an earfull from me in a voice loud enough that the entire waiting room would know what is going on.
Anybody who doubts the presence of or the severity of Lyme disease has obviously never had it or known someone who does. It's a debilitating condition and pure hell to go through.
Hang in there buddy and I hope you get treatment soon. I'll be fighting my own battle on this end.
Thanks again, Jeremy. In my area we have the lone star tick and dog ticks for sure. I've never identified the black-legged tick here, but they're probably in my area. I've heard reports that the gulf coast tick is spreading northward, too.
In my experience, the more deer that inhabit an area, the more likely that tick-borne diseases are prevalent.
I just pulled two ticks off my rear end and waistline after the long weekend hunt down in south Texas. Get em quick with surgical forceps or blunt tweezers, grab as close to the skin as possible and gently detach. Closely inspect bite for any mouthparts remaining. Clean area thoroughly.
Get the doc to take some x-rays, degenerative disc disease and degenerative joint disease with osteoarthritis can be the culprit if the Lyme tests are negative. Then again all tests are not as accurate as one might think. Thank you for the links Jeremy. Had removed so many ticks that were swollen at the end of a day (worse on property in the U.P., need the frost and freeze to put ticks to bed)and only 1 doc prescribed antibiotics over the years. Body in pain to move but docs say nothing to worry about. Now had to send the bow to the hospital for a weight reduction must have caught it from me. Good luck and healing for those suffering painful movement and degeneration.
QuoteOriginally posted by GMASIUK:
Doxicycline(sp)? 21 days of treatment. I was bit a few years ago and went untreated. I ended up in the hospital for five days on a IV. I thought I was a done for. It was no fun! If you do get bit see you doctor and demand the full treatment of 21 days. Don't let them give you the three day mini dose. The tests stink and are very ineffective. Take this from someone that has been there.
this is correct went thru same thing myself
someone in my family did not treat in time went thru IV treatment then very bad stuff
thanks for link and info :thumbsup:
I stand corrected. After always doing it this way, and using a pair of forceps to grab the head, I used the vaseline or soap to help the tick release. Now, they say not to do this. OK, I'll listen when I find another tick.
Two pro-biotics are L-Reuteri (lactobacillus reuteri), made by BioGaia and Culturelle. Culturelle has a dairy free version. I have found that they help your GI tract when taking AB's, and Doxycycline for three-four weeks is going to be tough going for your system.
Well, I just finished the antibiotics today. They gave me 28 capsules @ 100mg of Doxycycline Hyclate. I was told to take two a day for 14 days. It's a rough antibiotic and I felt hung over for about 2-3 hours about 30% of the time after taking the capsule.
One thing that seemed to bother me was drinking coffee after taking the capsule in the morning. It took me a week to figure that out. Anyway it's over and it wasn't that bad.
Several years back I took a CPR course through the Red Cross. Included was a presentaion on Lymes Disease. Like someone said, the test for detecting it is VERY inaccurate. Another bad danger is you can get infected and the symptoms remain undetected for years. When they finally do show up, you can be in for a real rough deal and in some cases a real long range fight for life.
This tick was on me for about 5-8 hours, I think. The doctor told me I was at low risk because a Deer Tick needs to bite for 24 to 48 hours to transfer the bacteria. However, since it is a Deer Tick, she said, "lets do the meds" and I agreed.
Like someone else said, I've lived with woods right up to my back yard for close to 60 years. I see deer and turkey in the lawn often and I've had a Wood Tick or two on me in the past. However, there seem to be way more ticks around now and the dead of winter doesn't kill them.
If you find one on you, research the web. There's loads of excellent information on tick identification and Lymes Disease
Ticks are not too bad here in N. Oklahoma -- yet --. My friend is an entomologist with the USDA and says that some species of tick is active all year. I didn't say that very well. Ticks are active all year -- not always the same ones, but they're out there. I think we see them less in winter because there is less vegetation for them to climb and rub off on our clothes.
I also get bitten all the time. For me the signal is itching in a specific spot. Pay attention to that.
Richard