Setback

Recently we started getting into a bit of a routine of planning 3-4 day hikes between towns, averaging 15-19 miles a day. Last week, we managed to push a bit further every day allowing us to have a short day of only 8 miles on Friday (the day we were heading into town). Normally an 8 mile hike would take us about 3.5 hours, but Alex was feeling especially rough that day. We took it slow and made it to our pickup point in 5 hours. We chalked it up to maybe overdoing it the day before, not drinking enough water, not eating enough, not wearing enough sunscreen, etc. Nothing a day off and some rest couldn’t fix!

Saturday came and Alex still wasn’t feeling great. After resting, eating, and hydrating all day, he still wasn’t recovering. I started having the suspicion that it wasn’t exhaustion, but rather an illness. Later that evening, while I was chatting with my mom, she randomly asked if we had encountered any ticks yet. Yes we had, I told her, as realization of what that could mean dawned on me. I had pulled a tick off of Alex last week! Could he really have gotten sick from that one tick bite? It seemed so unlikely to me, but Lyme disease can be really serious so the paranoia started setting in! I took his temperature that evening and it was close to 104*…clearly this was not exhaustion and a temperature that high was a bit alarming. We made up our minds to see a doctor in the morning.

At the doctor, Alex received tests for flu, strep throat, and covid, all of which came back negative. As he still had a fever, was showing all the symptoms, and the timing of the tick bite lined up, they made the decision to prescribe antibiotics to treat him for Lyme disease. Unfortunately, you can’t actually test for it for 4-6 weeks so this is more of a precautionary measure. If Lyme disease goes untreated, it can move into your nervous system and become a very serious illness. So scary! So we left the doctor with instructions to rest and hydrate.

It is now Tuesday and Alex has started feeling better. His fever has stayed down and he has slowly gotten his appetite back. He says he is up for a hike tomorrow! We’ve decided to take it slow for the next week and just do day hikes until we are sure he is back to 100%. We got a rental car so we have the freedom to drive ourselves to and from the trail and will be staying in the Roanoke, Virginia area for the next week. This has definitely been an eye opening experience! We are now experts on tick prevention and will be taking it very seriously from now on. We knew it was a risk before, but we were definitely very lax on taking precautions. Lesson learned!

Things we will now do for tick prevention:

– Treat our clothes, shoes, tent, and backpack with permethrin – a highly effective chemical that kills ticks. We considered this before the trail, but we thought ticks were more of a danger up north and figured we could reconsider once it warmed up. Permethrin is also a bit controversial because it can be toxic if used incorrectly. We are very determined to use it correctly!

– Wear long pants and tuck our pants into our socks. Love this look.

– Be more careful about where we sit outside, i.e. avoid sitting in grassy areas where ticks are likely to be. We are pretty sure Alex got the tick when we sat in the grass waiting for a ride one day.

– Lastly, perform daily tick checks on each other! A tick needs to be latched on for over 24 hours to transmit a disease, so if we can catch it early we are much less likely to run into issues.

We are definitely learning a lot out here! And we both have a new, fiery hatred for ticks.