So you're a friend of Poet's and defend her.
Don't forget this was a woman I talked to every day on the phone, I ran a thread with, and I got to know very well. She had seen me on antibiotics & how horribly they affected me (for a tooth problem) and even commented on it. All I ask is that she tell me what she knew and publicly posted on SI to someone else whose nephew had lyme disease--all I ask of her is the decency to tell me the truth when I brought it up to her, and said, point blank, "I can't afford to get lyme disease." Simple common human courtesy and decency. Birds, dogs, cats, deer and mice can carry the deer ticks that cause lyme disease, of course, but there are no deer in Central Park (the outrageous statement she made to me after I got lyme after visiting her--she kept saying I could have gotten it anywhere). There are no ticks on any dogs in my building, because they live in NYC, get walked in the streets of NYC. Risk is about RELATIVE risk. You do your best to avoid it and your friends act like friends, not like enemies who will take you directly into their garden and ask you to feed their dogs biscuits when they KNOW these dogs carry ticks and later publicly post on SI that these dogs bring ticks into the house and even get lyme disease themselves.
I know all about the endemics of the disease NOW that I've had it for 3 years and it has been devastating in ways you can never imagine unless you actually have it. Your statement is like saying that if you get bit by a mosquito in Connecticut you could get malaria since mosquitos carry malaria. There are vectors for a disease but there are areas that carry diseases.
By the way, I did take the antibiotics, which were horrible, for 2 weeks, and then 4 weeks. But some people need more and very high doses. Someone who used to post here a lot at that time, Rocketman; had a son who got lyme while hiking on the Appalachian trail and he had to take 3 courses of orals and a course of IV before he got better.
E, maybe YOU wouldn't visit any place on the northeast, but that's easy for you to say, isn't it? Try and live in someone else's body, and decide you will simply avoid all places on the entire northeast coast just in case you get lyme? That would be overly paranoid. On the other hand, there are ways to take precautions, one of which is to discuss it ahead of time with your friends. You've had lyme 5 times, that means you also live in an incredibly endemic area. Not every house and every yard on the northeast is high risk, as I made clear in my last post. In addition, there are other times one can visit friends who live in high risk neighborhoods, for instance, in the fall, when the ticks have become big enough to see with the naked eye, or the winter when they're inactive.
She is rationalizing this and you are rationalizing it for her. Just like she probably thinks Bush is rationalizing the war, people rationalize their actions even when they create horrible harm for others. I imagine if I had been your friend and you have had lyme 5 times and you knew my trouble with antibiotics and I said to you, "I can't afford to get lyme disease" when you invited me out, you'd have been honest, wouldn't you?
Honesty would have been all that was needed. Simple decency, simple honesty. As for you getting over it 5 times, tell that to Amy Tan, who posts on our newsgroup and has been hospitalized for it and had surgeries--I don't even want to go into it. Tell that to people who are in constant horrible pain every day, who are having seizure disorders as a result of it, or MS-like syndromes. It isn't always such an easy deal as it has been for you so far. And apparently she knew that as she posted on here that she lived a few miles from the epicenter and it was a devastating illness. In fact, the whole reason I brought it up to her was because I'd seen a few cases like that, my own doctor had to go on IV antibiotics the 2nd time he got lyme at his Montauk house because he got aseptic meningitis from it.
Just ask her one thing: why didn't she simply tell me what she knew when I brought it up in such stark and obvious terms? Why didn't she just say to me, her supposed friend, what she later was so willing to post on SI to a cyber-stranger? Why didn't she tell me her dogs got ticks, brough them into the house, and got lyme in spite of the tick meds put on them? Why would perfect strangers in Great Barrington be honest and decent with me & someone who even claimed she "loved" me say nothing? |
