For the past several weeks, we’ve been playing tag with being sick. First Michaela came down with something like a bad cold, and she passed it to Denisa, who passed it to me, and then Daniela was feeling sick for a bit, and at last Denisa got sick again. It felt like our family had turned into some sort of petri dish, but Denisa’s latest bout seemed much worse somehow. She rested in bed, and we figured she’d get better soon, but she didn’t. Her muscles started really aching, and she spiked a fever, and she finally decided to go to the doctor’s.
While talking to them, they asked her if she’d had any tick bites recently. She’d actually had one a few weeks ago, but it hadn’t been on her for longer than a few hours, and it hadn’t resulted in any bull’s eye rash, so we hadn’t thought much of it. The doctors agreed: probably not tick related, so they tested her for the flu, COVID, and RSV, but told her that if those all came back negative, she probably ought to get tested, just to be sure.
They were negative, so she got tested and (you guessed it) it turned out to be Anaplasmosis. Thankfully, it’s very treatable with antibiotics, and she was feeling better about a day after starting treatment, but it’s also something that can be very serious if left untreated. (Like, if she hadn’t started antibiotics when she did, she’d likely have ended up in the hospital a few days later.)
She’s good to go now, but I wanted to blog about this mainly to raise awareness. Somehow in all my years of hearing about ticks and the yuck they can spread, I always thought if you got them off of you faster than 24 hours, you were pretty much good to go. Even then, as long as you kept an eye out for the rash of Lyme’s Disease, everything was okay.
Not so.
So the next time you have a tick, keep an eye on your health, and remember you had that tick if things turn south. These aren’t things you want to mess around with. Yay for modern medicine.