Lyme Disease.

It is summer again and I am planning a trip to Massachusetts in August. I love the coast here in the Pacific Northwest, but damn, it is just too cold for me to swim in. So, the coast in New England has only a few months of great ocean swimming, but I mean, really, they are great swims. As soon as I think of the joys of frolicing in the water on the Vineyard, Nantucket or the North Shore, I do come crashing down a bit because the counter force comes to mind. Lyme Disease is a perpetual threat and a horrible expereince.

My parents lived in Ipswich, MA. There are streets where everyone has suffered from Lyme. (Arguilla Road is totally gorgeous and equally deadly.) I know people who summer on Nantucket and have had the disease repeatedly. Apparently you don't build up and immunity.

We used to love seeing the deer in my Dad's yard at the beach. One winter morning I noticed that there were little waist high smudges on my sliding glass door. A few days later, I saw the reason. There was a bunch (? herd? gang?) of deer trying to get to my house plants on the inside of the glass. At the time I thought it was cute. The next summer, the deer pretty much ate my mother's entire flower garden and half of the shrubs. The building of new homes around the marsh and the woods and the shore had reached a critical mass with the increasing deer population. They no longer had the space to roam and the land to support them.

That was one problem, but the shit really hit the fan one morning a few days after I had been gardening at that house. I awoke feeling fine, drank my coffee, went out to the garden and had a pain in my head that felt like a steel rod on fire passing through my brain. The pain was fleeting. Then it returned. As I was walking by the Yacht Club next door, I had such and acute pain in my knees that I fell to the ground. I could not walk. After a few minutes that subsided and I hobbled into the house.

I called Dad's doctor and told them I had Lyme Disease and I needed to come in. They said I could come the next week. I said I am on my way. I went, found the tiny, itty bitty tick in my thigh and the doctor said he would make the test and would have the results in a few weeks. I am not a pushy person, but I had seen enough people get sicker and sicker, so I stood tall and said, "You can enjoy the results, but I am starting the medicine this minute." He caved. I was very sick by that night with fever and pain, but within a few days I improved rapidly.

I was one of the lucky ones. Horror story after horror story gets passed around New England about undetected or rather very late detected cases where the people are sick for ages or never fully recover. I was also lucky because I had classic symptoms. It is a tricky disease. It can come on like a flu, it can incubate forever and then pop up in your brain or your heart.

We got our friend Mark to come to the house and we took out all the plants and shrubs that deer eat and replaced them with  ones they didn't like and our problem was mostly solved. But the threat of the disease is such that we are very careful where we walk, in some parts if New Hampshire we walk down the middle of the dirt roads now instead of on the woodland paths or hiking trails. Schools in the country have whole protocols for checking kids after recess. It is bad.

I was swimming with the five year old grandson of a friend the other day and while we were in the middle of a huge lake, he turned his face to me and said, "I like nature." I do too. I hope we can get a grip on this problem and work to eradicate it and we can find a balance between what wild animals need and what we want.