and no I'm not talking about a shot of tiquilla... oh wait, I think you follow the tequilla with the lime not the other way around
Today was the Kiddo's annual eye doctor appointment. Three hours... I think it's a little ridiculous that they can't schedule any better then that. There are quite a few things I'd rather be doing then sitting in a waiting room waiting around for hours on end. In the end though the doc said the Kiddo's eyes are really close to what they were last year, he gave us a new glasses prescription but said it was not necessary to fill it unless we really wanted to get him new glasses. That's great news since his insurance only covers the doc visit and not the specs themselves.
While sitting around in the waiting room I started wondering if maybe I should do a little more research on Lymes distease. Yeah, the more research I do the more I think he DOES have that. The lack of itching and pain to it is important (I'd think a bug bite would be owie and itchier n heck) and the pictures match (if you keep in mind that all the articles say that sometimes the target looking red area will not have the white center).
Two "funny" facts here, most articles say that the percentage chance of getting Lymes from a tick bite is 1%-3% (so VERY low) AND the chance of ending up with it in UTAH is even less. Leave it to the Kiddo to find probably the only tick in the state that is carrying the stupid disease and let the sucker bite him. *sigh*
If you're interested I'll link you to the article I liked the best at KidsHealth.org
5 comments:
Huh? Lyme disease's main symptom is an arthritis-like joint stiffness and body ache. It is caused by the bite of a carrier tick, but I've never heard of the tick bite itself being different in appearance from a normal tick bite ... and a normal tick bite looks like a tick with its head stuck in your skin. If the tick bites you in a hard-to-see place (like your scalp or on your back) it may get engorged enough to drop off before you notice it, but other than that it isn't going to leave its host without being pulled off. You said the bump on Kiddo's leg was in a place where he could put on long pants instead of shorts to deter himself from scratching at it. That doesn't sound like an area where a tick could stay hidden until it was full enough to drop off on its own. Possible, of course, but I'm thinking the odds are so against this that you ought to put it out of your mind unless some other symptom shows up.
Addendum: Tick bites also sometimes look like an infection, with an infection's swelling &/or redness, if someone pulled (or perhaps accidentally rubbed) off the tick's body and its head broke off to stay in the person's skin. But usually it takes a bit of pulling to break a tick, and if you do it's the foreign matter (head left behind) in the skin causing the infection, not some disease that the critter spit into the bloodstream.
THANK you for saying that!! I honestly don't know which I'd be more worried about and the Lymes stuff is so confusing it's scarier!! I'm hoping to see a really nice improvement in the area by Monday, then I'll breath a sigh of relief and finally relax about it.
Gawd, I hope not. That's one more thing we have to worry about.
At any rate, through the researching that I did, and comparing the information I have (along with the pictures I've seen - with what I've seen on him)... It's entirely possible.
Pretty much his "rash" is doing, consistently, what the CDC, ALDF, and the Mayo Clinic, have all said it would do... although, a bit faster (maybe because we've already started medicating him for it *shrug*). For that reason, it's possible.
The absence of the other symptoms doesn't rule it out, unfortunately, because A) They don't typically show up this early, and B) he wouldn't complain about them anyway. *sigh*
All we can do is hope it isn't (or that we medicated him early enough to "cure" it, and see what happens.
Leave it up to the boy to find a way to beat all odds.... *chuckle*
shoulda researched before instead of after posting ... turns out that in the years since I last looked into lyme there's been a lot of stuff learned about it ... hard to keep track of that much time passing :-(
okay, so a lyme tick bite looks different from a normal one ... I can buy that ... what is harder to accept is that there are ticks that bite and leave without staying around long enough to be noticed ... my sensible side says I have to believe it because they say it happens, but that means that for all the ticks we found when I was a kid (on us and the dogs) there were others we never knew were there, and that is something my emotional side rejects
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