Winnipegger Teresa Manitowich is recounting her battle with Lyme disease as tick season nears in Manitoba.
In October of 2019, she said she began to feel the symptoms.
“I just wasn’t feeling quite right. I was getting frequent headaches, I was very irritable and I had fatigue.”
Over the next year, her symptoms got worse and she developed joint pain that made her writing hobby more challenging. However, she continued to write and began to document her unexplained symptoms. She said the pain was unbearable and her doctor couldn’t figure out what was wrong.
She said she didn’t consider Lyme disease as things did not match up to what she knew about the disease.
“A friend had suggested it sounded like Lyme disease to them and I thought they were crazy because I never saw a tick. I never had a bullseye rash.”
Naturopath Jason Bachewich said the disease can be difficult to diagnose as well as treat.
“Someone will get a tick bite, they won’t get the classic presentation of a bullseye rash but yet they’ll have the fever, the aches, the pain, the joint issues.”
Manitowich had a test for the disease which came back negative and so she began to look elsewhere for help. A naturopath suggested another blood test that was sent to a lab in Germany and that test came back with different results.
“I was positive for Lyme disease, I was positive for bartonella and several other co-infections.”
She began taking antibiotics, nearly two years after her symptoms began and she said she felt different after just one pill.
She said she felt relieved to finally have found an answer for the symptoms she had been experiencing.
“I feel like I’m 90 percent recovered. You forget what normal is.”
Bachewich said the disease is rampant in Manitoba and it could progress into a potentially fatal situation if there are underlying health conditions and the disease is not caught in time.
“I had a family friend that ended up passing away of that disease at the age of 42.” he said “She was in a wheelchair at the end and couldn’t look after herself. So, I mean, this is the type of disease that can nag someone for years, if not decades.”
“Once it’s in the chronic phase, meaning, you know, people have been sick for two, three or four years and not really having a diagnosis, then it becomes much more difficult.”
As with many sicknesses, the better option is prevention and Manitowhich said the best thing to do is to avoid long grass, wear physical barriers and check your body thoroughly after being outside.
“It’s super important because that disease, I mean, the classic thought is it has to be on you for about 24 hours for the tick to transmit the bacteria. But there have been cases, the documented cases of people that have had the tick on them for less than 3 hours and have still gotten Lyme disease.”
— With files from Global’s Teagan Rasche