I don’t know anyone who hasn’t either been infected with Lyme disease or who doesn’t know someone who has.
For some, who find a tick bite and receive treatment quickly (within a couple of weeks of the bite) it can be a modest brush with the disease, requiring a short dose of antibiotics.
On the other extreme, there are some who have not directly noticed they had the tick bite, and who have suffered debilitating months or years of serious symptoms and deterioration of body function, including heart disease, arthritis and other organ failures.
When I was a kid, in the late 1950s and 1960s, I spent most of my waking summer hours in the outdoors. Every summer my family rented the same little cottage on Crystal Lake in Gilmanton Iron Works. From the age of about 8 until I graduated from college, I was either playing or working outdoors from June through September. There were many days when we hiked up local peaks in search of blueberries and views, and nights when I would grab a sleeping bag and climb up the little knoll of pine trees next to the cottage and sleep under the stars (at least until a raccoon or other creature would scare me back to the screened porch).
In my teens and early 20s, I spent summers working for a surveyor and a septic system designer whose clients were located all around the Lakes Region. My skills as a bird watcher were honed by hours of sitting on a 5-gallon water can, while periodically watching water percolate into the ground as part of testing for septic system designs in recreational home developments. I spent hours and hours in the woods and slogging through the brush.
In all those years, I never once saw, let alone was bitten, by a tick. Mosquitoes and deer flies, yes. I had no idea what a tick even looked like.
About the time I returned to New Hampshire after college in the mid-70s, I again found myself spending a lot of time outdoors. I got a job helping run an environmental education program at Boston University’s Sargent Camp in Peterborough. Again, lots of time spent in the woods, this time with groups of middle school kids. Still no ticks.
Then, in the 1980s, when I was married and my wife, Deb, and I built a house and a small farm in Weare, my first tick encounter occurred. No, not here in New Hampshire, but on a trip to a meeting in Colorado. One afternoon out there I took off on a solo hike up a little mountain near the conference center and the next morning got on a plane back home. Upon arrival, I found a tick attached to my leg. Not thinking much of it, I removed the tick and went on with my daily life.
A few weeks later, odd symptoms began to impede my routine. Achy knees and sore joints were among them. At the time, as a faculty member at New England College, I often had lunch with my colleagues in the science building and at one of those lunches we started chatting about my symptoms. A biology professor pulled out a book, told me he had served in the army in Colorado and we together diagnosed Rocky Mountain Spotted fever. My medical doctor, who had also served in the military in Colorado, confirmed the diagnosis. I’m told I was the only case of RMSF in New Hampshire that year.
Fast forward a few more years, and people were starting to report more and more ticks around New Hampshire. Not just the typical dog or wood ticks, but also the black legged or deer tick. And then Lyme disease, named for the little town in Connecticut where it was officially “discovered.” (Although historic records appear to document a very similar ailment rarely appearing back into the 1700s)
Since then, because of my outdoor work, I’ve had many ticks on me. Only occasionally have they been attached and only three times have I had the need for antibiotic treatment. Then, this spring the dreaded spirochete (the type of bacteria that is Lyme disease) hit my family hard.
In May, my wife got a bite and didn’t notice it. Less than a month later, while traveling out of state, she developed acute Lyme disease. Headache, neck ache, fever, chills, nausea, and weakness. A trip to an urgent care facility landed her in a hospital for five days, with the doctors eventually ruling out other diseases and concluding it was Lyme.
Six weeks later, she was feeling better, but struggled with chronic fatigue that is only gradually subsided after almost six months.
Where did this disease come from and why is it now at epidemic proportions in New Hampshire? Scientists seem to have no conclusive answers. Perhaps as our forests have aged and grown more mature the habitat now favors the mice who harbor the ticks.
It isn’t because we have more deer, because in fact we really don’t have that many more than 30 years ago, Is it climate change? Entomologists, (insect scientists) including UNH’s Alan Eaton, are not persuaded as the ticks most likely to carry the disease are capable of surviving even our most severe winter deep freeze.
One hypothesis is that the extinction of the passenger pigeon has contributed to the profusion of tick-harboring mice, because passenger pigeons once were so numerous (billions filled the skies of eastern North America) they consumed much of the “hard mast” (acorns, nuts, etc.) that fell from our once ubiquitous hardwood forests. No pigeons and the deer, mice and their like were left with a bonanza. But that wouldn’t explain why it took nearly three-quarters of a century for the ticks to spread into New Hampshire. Like most things in nature, the explanation may involve all of these changes and more. Perhaps we’ll never know.
But ticks are likely here to stay. Does that mean we should stay indoors? Heavens no. There are plenty of proven ways to keep ticks and their diseases from doing us harm, but we all need to adapt to this new reality and employ those methods. For our family, there is now a note on our bathroom mirror that says “Tick Check Today.” It stays there until snow covers the ground.
You can be sure that this family has never been more aware of this new danger, but we are most definitely not going to give up our outdoor work and play. Life is not risk free. Ticks are just another risk we need to manage and live with.
(Paul Doscher lives in Weare.)