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Awful. I hope you both feel and get better asap. I pulled about 30 ticks off myself last time I was in the highlands, but happily no symptoms manifested. I'm sorry you weren't as lucky.
Marron-
Yeah, I've had tick bites before with no issue when I spent a lot of time at an ex's on SkyE and did a lot of hill walking etc. I think it's just the luck of the draw-apparently 80% of people will fight it off even without treatment but one in five won't, they're not sure why. I can place it at one shitty 'campsite' at Shieldaig that was basically communal pasture land that they still let sheep freely graze but used as a resource for accommodating tourists : / I suspect it's because I was pretty burnt out at the time which is why I'd taken a holiday in the first place so my immune system wasn't able to cope with it on its own. Still, NHS response has been shockingly bad.
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I'm not great tbh and it's cost me a lot of money (thousands) to get private testing and treatment as the NHS are useless-if they'd picked up on it earlier I might not be in this situation but as it stands I've got advanced neurological symptoms as well as an inflamed nervous system which means stiff sore neck and spinal column so no bike riding for almost a year now and generally feeling total shite.
My partner got it too and has more chronic fatigue/arthritis symptoms so it can express itself in different ways-the main thing is that not everyone gets the rash so if you get bitten and feel like you've got the flu a couple of weeks later insist on getting a 30 day course of antibiotics asap even if the GP protests ignorance or doubt, that's in their own guidelines and treatment pathways and they don't require a positive blood test to do it as they sometimes claim. I got palmed off for months being told that it was a sinus infection, stress, that Lyme 'doesn't exist in the UK' etc. Total shite.