I’ve felt a bit like molasses which has been stretched farther than it’s quite comfortable reaching for the last couple weeks, but I assumed that was thanks to my crazy life and thought no more of it.

As it turns out, I’ve been suffering from Malaise.

Now, I didn’t think that was a medical term in common use, but if you look up ‘tick disease’ and search around a bit, it’ll describe malaise as one of the symptoms.  Some of my other favorites were ‘nausea, fatigue, fevers, joint aches, muscle soreness’, and so on.  I took note of these, since they’re also the symptoms I’ve been enjoying for the last couple weeks.  On some portion of the CDC site you’ll find a discussion of the ‘bulls eye’ rash, which would indicate Lyme disease or some such.  Thankfully I did not find a bulls eye.

Of course, the missing ingredient not yet listed is a tick bite…but, unfortunately, I’ve got one of those.  After carefully cataloguing my symptoms for the past two weeks, this morning I took my (frozen) tick and my tick bite to the doctor.  As it turns out, my tick can be easily identified, as you see in the this picture borrowed from a UPMC site:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Although the tick I befriended has a much dimmer white spot, it’s still a lone star tick and has quite likely given me STARI.  So generous of it, don’t you think?

The doctor sent me home with two weeks worth of antibiotics and lots of rules about when I could take them and how I should stay out of the sun.  This will work quite nicely into our Atlanta trip next week, don’t you think?  But at least it will be an improvement, I hope.  And you’ll just have to forgive me if I cross my fingers that spring break is grey and overcast.

What I can’t understand is why I didn’t figure this out sooner and spare myself the last two weeks of fabulous fun.  Unless, of course, I was too busy defining malaise…

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