Ladybugs, thank you for joining me for this month’s edition of Tell Us About. Our prompt for August comes to us from MK at MK’s Adventures in Style, who suggested we write about vacations or holidays. Some of the gals outside the U.S. refer to these special days of time off, away from work, away from the daily routine as holidays. While those of us in the U.S. refer to them as vacation days. Whatever you call them and wherever they take you, even maybe just some down time in your own backyard, vacations/holidays can be a great way to recharge your battery and bring some lightness to your life.
I wrote about our summer vacation plans earlier this season in a post for Where Bloggers Live. You can find that, here. For todays prompt, I have decided to share a vacation moment that made a difference in my life.
Tell Us About
Tell Us About (TUA) is a global writing challenge where bloggers from all around the planet respond to a different prompt on the third Thursday of each month. I joined the group early in 2023 and so appreciated the invite to do so, and the opportunities to do some creative writing on my blog. When LIFE got crazy with PC’s health, I stepped away from blogging. But I am happy to report that LIFE seems to have settled down and we are actually just back from 2 recent vacations. How ’bout that timing?
You can find my other TUA posts here:
Tell Us About –
- Play
- Scent
- Gardens and Gardening
- Ways I’m a Curiosity
- Travel
- Imagination
- my theme choice for September, Legacy
- Hometowns
- Laughter
- Music to my Ears
- Beauty in my World
- Blah-blah-blogging
Before we wade in, just a reminder: Once Upon a Time & Happily Ever After occasionally uses affiliate links which are usually italicized. If you click or make a purchase from an italicized link provided I may receive a very small commission at no cost to you. Thank you for your support.
Please find the places and posts where I link-up on this page.
Tell Us About 08.2024
I actually wrote the memory of this trip home for the memoir writing class I took this summer. Our prompt was: pick one color from a summer past and write about that color. The color I associate with this memory is green, all the green of my childhood hometown, Memphis (Bartlett), Tennessee. Mid-stream, I changed my mind and wrote something different but saved this piece to share with my daughters. Decided that rather than tell you about vacations, holidays and trips I have taken in recent memory, I would share the details of a trip that changed my life.
Have begun publishing some of my memories (I hesitate to call them ‘memoirs’ as that sounds so scholarly and authorly), on Substack. Hoping to use Substack for a place to share memories with my family. You can find me, here.
That Time with the Tick
Our summer vacation of 1998 was a green one. At least while we were visiting my parents in Memphis. At that time, we had lived in El Paso for 10 years. And while I loved it here and considered El Paso home, I still missed the green of my childhood.
We had purchased our Ford Windstar van especially for the purpose of taking our poodle-husky sheep-dog-look-alike pup Cici, (she always looked like she needed a bath!!) with us on the road trip.
Had the console between the driver’s seat and the front passenger seat removed so Cici would be able to lay on the floor of the van between my husband and me.
At 12 and 14 years old, the girls were pretty good travelers and able to entertain themselves over the 2 long days of driving. Having Cici along was a pleasant distraction for all of us.
While we were home, we enjoyed mom’s cooking, going for ice cream, playing at the park and hiking the paths at Shelby Farms. We took Cici with us just about everywhere we could because she was on vacation, too.
Walk in the Park
One afternoon, we took Cici and the girls to Shelby Farms. The trails were well cleared and maybe even paved but Cici wanted to off-road it a bit. There were no other people or pets where we were walking so I unfastened her leash to let her roam. And just moments after climbing out of the van, our pup was galumphing off the trail and into the deep, cool green of the forested farm. Dashing between the pines and oaks, her paws barely touching ground on the mossy forest floor. Cici was El Paso born so in her 3 years had never experienced such verdant lushness.
A word about the pictures in this post…most of them are photos I have taken from scrapbook pages. So, they are not crystal clear or very artistically captured. But they are all I have from that period in my life.
Cees, as we called her, was pretty hot when she decided to take full advantage of the cool water of a creek that meandered inside the park. She splashed about, shaking the churned up, muddy water off her shaggy fur. It took some wrangling to get Cici out of the water, onto the trail and back on her leash. Thank goodness, I had an old towel in the back of the van to dry her off some before we allowed her into the car for the drive back to my parents’ house.
When we got Cici home, she had to have a bath, which we did with the hose and a bottle of shampoo in the backyard. While bathing her and then brushing out her fur, we inspected her for ticks something we never worried about in arid El Paso. Thankfully, we found nothing.
Heading Home
Early the following morning, hours before daylight, we started home to El Paso. Cici was still worn out from her adventures the day before, so she settled into her space on the floor between the front seats and cat-napped most of the day. The closer we got to home the more determined we were to continue driving til we got there. I took a turn driving before sunset but my husband had to drive once it got dark.
When I returned to the passenger’s seat after my last turn behind the wheel, I fluffed up a pillow and settled in to take a little nap. My head was hurting, and I rarely had headaches. I chocked it up to eye strain from driving in the dusky near-dark. My daughter, Lauren, reached over from the seat behind me and rubbed my head to help me relax. But as she did so, she came across a bump in my scalp at the very top of my head. She asked if the bump hurt and I told her no, I didn’t feel anything. Lauren told me to turn on the interior passenger side light so she could inspect my head more closely.
A Souvenir
There in the dim light of van, Lauren saw an engorged tick burrowed deeply into my scalp. In disgusted alarm I begged her to ‘get it,’ to ‘get the tick’ out of my head immediately. Just thinking about it now, send shivers up and down my spine and a sick feeling to the pit of my stomach.
Lauren successfully plucked the tick from my scalp, carefully handed it to me for my inspection as we both knew it was important to extract the entire insect when removing them. It looked like she had done so. I flicked it out the window.
The rest of the trip home was uneventful and we were settled into our beds a few hours later. When I awoke the next morning, though, my headache was back. I assumed the trip had just gotten the best of me and took it easy for a day or two, catching up slowly with the laundry and chores around the house.
The Flu?
But after a week, my headache was still present and now accompanied by chills, body aches and fever. The flu. I self-quarantined in my room for a day or two but continued to feel worse.
I went to my general practitioner and he confirmed that I most likely had the flu, sent me home with instructions to increase fluids, rest and just let the virus run its course.
Nope, not the Flu
After several weeks of flu-like symptoms that were increasing in severity, a friend of mine reminded me that I had told her about the tick Lauren found in my head. She suggested that perhaps I needed to be tested for Lyme disease. That, however, was easier said than done as my health insurance company argued that Lyme disease was rarely found in El Paso. They couldn’t justify the need for the test.
By this time, I was bedridden. Not only did I hurt all over, and could barely lift my head from the pillow, but I couldn’t think straight. I couldn’t speak in complete sentences or communicate my needs. Couldn’t focus mentally or visually. Just remember looking out my bedroom window at a cool green corner of my backyard thinking I just wanted to die and be buried under the lacy branches of my mimosa tree. I was certain my life was over – that I was surely dying with something…a brain tumor, leukemia??
The Tick
After, much debate with the insurance company then my parents offering to pay for the Lyme test themselves, my GP was able to secure permission for testing. The results took several days to come back but when they did, they were positive for Lyme but also positive for Lyme antibodies, indicating that I had perhaps contracted Lyme some time earlier. It became unclear whether my present symptoms were a relapse of my first case of Lyme disease or they were connected to my more recent encounter with a tick.
My GP prescribed a week of antibiotics but after those 7 days, I was really no better at all. The end of summer vacation was upon us and I would be starting back to school but couldn’t imagine trying to work in this condition. I still hurt all over and was so foggy brained. My memory really suffered, too, and I just flat couldn’t think straight.
The GP changed my oral antibiotics and gave me a 14-day dose. There might have been some slight improvement but I was still unable to function anywhere near normally. My family doctor finally asked my insurance to approve a referral to an infectious disease specialist. Which resulted in another battle with the insurance company but was eventually approved.
Finally, Some Help
Dr. Lam, the infectious disease specialist, repeated the Lyme disease testing and those results indicated that the concern was more for a relapse from an earlier case of Lyme. He wanted to start me on a regimen of daily IV antibiotics but that required insurance approval, too. My parents stepped right up to offer to pay for the treatment and jumped into their car and drove to El Paso to help me through this 2-week round of antibiotic therapy. Reluctantly, the insurance company finally came through for me again. I was unable to drive because my thinking was so impaired so my parents took me for each day’s IV treatment, then dropped me off at school where I tried to work the best I could, setting the library up for the new school year. Thank goodness, I wasn’t required to have library classes yet.
Thank Goodness for Family
Brennyn, my now neonatal nurse, accompanied me a time or two for my treatment as she was already curious about and interested in the medical field. Lauren was very alarmed by the shunt that was inserted into my hand for the treatment period and the bandaging wrapped around that area. She hung back at first and was almost scared to get too close to me. But I remember both of my precious daughters climbing into ‘big bed’ to snuggle me, offering to bring me food or water, damp compresses for my head. Bless their hearts. I was scared and so were they.
In the photo above, you can barely make out the shunt that was inserted into my right hand and then kept in place by a bandage. How ’bout those nails, btw??
By the end of the 2-week treatment, I began to think I was going to live through this experience. My body aches had diminished but not disappeared and I was sent for a consultation and follow up appointments with a rheumatologist out of concern that I was developing rheumatoid arthritis from this relapse. I never tested positive for RA but now, 26 years later, I am beginning to feel as if I might have RA in the knuckles of my right hand and in my right knee. Will see what the next few months bring before deciding whether to investigate further.
Never the Same Since
I feel like I have never been the same since my ‘relapse?’ of Lyme. Every year about this same time late in the summer, I have similar symptoms of brain fog, body aches, confusion. I have been retested for the antibodies but they came back negative so maybe it is all just psychosomatic.
First Tick
After much reflecting and remembering, I have been able to recall the time that I probably originally contracted the Lyme disease. It was during a vacation to Sky High Ranch near Creede, Colorado. I had driven to the ranch with the girls, following my parents in their station wagon.
On the day that we were to begin our trip back home, I was sick. I can’t remember the symptoms clearly other than something like the flu. My sister drove my car to Albuquerque where she flew home. My then-husband flew into Albuquerque with his daughter and we spent the night there, then he drove all of us back to El Paso. I was so sick when we arrived home that he had to carry me to bed.
The image above is the scrapbook page I created to commemorate my illness.
I am not certain I have all of these details straight as Lyme really did a number on my memory and in some ways, on my personality. I feel like there are moments and days and weeks where I am still numb and in a trance, a shadow of who I once was. The biggest difference I have noticed is in my speech and ability to think quickly. It always feels just a little like I am underwater or moving (and thinking) through quicksand.
Have created a Pinterest board around my experience with Lyme and interest in learning more. You can find it, here. And just in the past 5 years or so, I have learned of a number of ‘stars’ who have suffered with this tick-borne illness. Check out this People article for just a few of them.
Your Turn
If it is summer in your hemisphere of the woods, have you enjoyed a get-away yet this season? Or perhaps where you live, you are knee deep in winter, and planning some kind of escape to warmer climes, or some down time to play in the snow?? Hope you will join me to visit the blogs of all of the Tell Us About bloggers to read their take on this month’s prompt.
The Gang
Summaries of their posts are below.
- Gail from Is This Mutton has always kept a journal of her holidays as a child and shares some excerpts, including what the wallpaper looked like at a 1970s Bournemouth hotel.
- In this month’s edition of Tell Us About, Suzy reflects on her lifelong love of holidays, from rainy caravan trips in Cleethorpes to adventurous travels around the world, and shares her dreams of future destinations. Find her at www.suzyturner.com.
- Marsha at Marsha in the Middle,is about to set out on an adventure with a friend. They’re visiting Ireland and Scotland for a whopping 16 days! But, that’s not what she’s writing about. Instead, she’s recounting the wonderful experience she and Nigel had riding on Amtrak!
- Debbie the host at Debbie’s World, wonders if life is one big holiday after retirement. Her blog’s tagline is ‘Midlife – travel, fun adventure’ so holidays are an important part of her life. She reminisces on some fabulous holidays over the years.
- The Frugal Fashion Shopper, Penny, has looked back at her Tell Us About Travel and sees she promised a Part 2. Well, here it is. And she thinks there might be a Part 3 in there somewhere!
- Jill, who blogs at Grown-up Glamour is exploring the difference between travelling and holidays.
- The host of MK’s Adventures in Style, suggested today’s prompt. Anxious to see what she is sharing.
One Last Word
Today (Monday, 08.12) begins our second week of PC’s retirement. I am not really counting the retirement days we had on vacation. Good news, we haven’t killed each other yet. To the contrary, it has been most excellent!! I highly recommend retirement as soon as you are able. In the meantime, continue finding joy in your work and life’s purpose. Have a restful weekend.
Hugs and kisses,
Wow! That must have been such a scary time. We have a lady in our church who had Lyme Disease and it literally changed her personality. She was a school teacher and had to take early retirement. I’m sorry you still suffer from flashbacks/setbacks. Thank you for sharing your struggles with all of us.
The Lyme disease was terrifying. Can’t believe I actually had it twice. As lovely as the forested areas are in Tennessee and Kentucky and Ohio, when we gofor visits, I still get nervous about ticks. I am so sorry for your friend who had Lyme. It changed my personality, too. I think I am ‘slower’ to process things and struggle to talk sometimes. I used to be pretty fun-loving and crazy but after the Lyme, I was much less so.
Thank you for your sweet words and support.
Lucky for us (I guess; depending on how you look at it!) Lyme is so prevalent here in Ct (it is named after a town– Lyme in our state where it was first studied in 1975) so if there is even a hint or possibility of Lyme we are treated right away. In fact 9 times out of 10 they start us on the antibiotics before they even get the test results back. I feel like nearly everyone I know has been tested and treated for Lyme at one point or another but most have a full recovery since we are so hyper aware of it.
I am so sorry to hear of your horrible ordeal and that you’ve had such long lasting effects from it. NOT the sort of souvenir you want to take home from vacation.
I knew Lyme Disease was named after a Connecticut town. But didn’t realize the rest of the history. So glad they take seriously any indication that a person might be sick with Lyme up there. I hope with the instances of ‘stars’ contracting Lyme that it would bring more research and understanding to the disease and hopefully, insurance companies will be less hesitant to allow testing.
Thank you, sweet friend.
Wow, that’s so crazy Leslie. I know Catherine from https://catherinegraceo.com/ has struggled with Lymes and almost died.
XOOX
jodie
What an experience, you poor thing.
Isn’t it scary how something so small can do so much damage?
Absolutely. I really pause when walking through forests or dense vegetation. Thank you!
Gosh Leslie…what a horrendous experience! I can’t even imagine how frightening that must have been. I must say, I am absolutely disgusted by the way the insurance company handled it. I really feel for you in the States, not being able to just go and get tests and treatment when you need it!
Big hugs
Suzy xx
The Lyme Disease experience is one that keeps on giving. But I kind of expect recurrences now and try not to be thrown off by them. As far as the insurance goes, it is very frustrating to have to bargain with the insurance company over things. I don’t like that haggling. And when someone is sick, that’s the last thing they want to do!! Thank you so much for your visit and kind words.
Wow. That is terrible. Summer at the beach (bush beach) also means ticks here. We’ve had two encounters with ticks getting at the kids but no Lyme or ongoing issues. Thankfully.
Your health system sounds so bad, that they argue about what tests you can have. It seems a very faulty set up. Our idiot PM wanted to copy your system and people voted for it – mind you a lot of people don’t seem to realise they voted to butcher our medicare system so that’s a whole other issue. And of course, the new Govt will never put the money back in to fix it.
Thanks for sharing with #Allseasons
Oh no, what a horrible experience to mar the memory of what must have otherwise been a wonderful vacation! Lyme Disease and other tick-borne infections can be so scary. I’m glad you got treatment and are well, but am so sorry that you were so sick and still have some lasting effects. I have a very good friend that got very sick from Lyme years ago and it has affected her whole family, sadly.
Wow! What a crazy awful story. So sorry you had to go through all that. And it makes me mad how we have to fight for treatment with our health insurance companies. I feel we pay so much for health insurance and get so little in return. Lyme disease is a big problem in my area. It seems everyone has it or has gotten it at some point in their lives. Neither I nor anyone in my family has ever gotten it though, which is crazy considering we live in the woods and were outside all day every day. I wear a lot of bug spray though, because I’d be eaten alive by gnats and mosquitoes if I didn’t, so maybe that’s why I’ve never gotten a tick bite.
What an awful experience and such a terrible end to a family trip. Shame it took so long for you to have the various tests and treatments. I always find your health and insurance system hard to comprehend.
Enjoy your husbands retirement , the start of a new life chapter.
Hi Leslie, thanks for sharing this harrowing tale about your holiday illness. We have ticks here too in Australia but thankfully not where I live, they are nasty little mites! The photos are great and I’m so pleased to hear you’re both enjoying PC retirement! It’s been a great prompt for Tell UsAbout, we always learn more about each other don’t we?
Oh, my goodness, Leslie! I am so glad your daughter found the tick when she did. More importantly, I’m glad you had a doctor who kept fighting for you against the insurance companies. Your experience makes me think of the way my hypothyroidism makes me feel…the brain fog and not quite being myself. But, you just go on because that’s the only way, right?
https://marshainthemiddle.com/
I have heard it can be a struggle to deal with hypothyroidism. I have always been ditsy – imagine you are not surprised!! – but it became unmanageable with my Lyme disease. I simply could not think. But you are right, we just go on the best we can. Big hugs to you. Hope you have enjoyed the best vacation!!