1975: The Lyme Connection

Dear Ann,

Have you ever heard of Lyme disease? I am writing this letter because I know you can help thousands of people by warning them about this awful sickness. I have been battling it for 18 months. Frankly I am not doing well.

It would be impossible for me to describe the emotional and physical pain that I have been through. I am a 42-year-old man, married nearly 20 years, and have a family. The days of slinging a 100-pound sack of bird-seed over my shoulder and walking to the backyard are over.

Today I can't even lift a five-pound sack of flour. There was a time when I could play nine musical instruments. I sang in the church choir and ran my own small business. Today, I do none of the above. I am saving all my energy to fight Lyme disease.

The treatment costs are staggering. IV antibiotic therapy runs from $150 to $475 a treatment ... We have already taken out a third mortgage on our home. Had I been aware of the symptoms from the beginning, I could have had $15 worth of oral antibiotics and that would have done the job.

Thank you, Ann, for allowing me to try to help others.

--S.J.N., Mattituck, N.Y.



Protecting a nuclear power plant is no small task. When it opened in the 1980s, the Shoreham nuclear power plant on Long Island's North Shore boasted a 175-man militia equipped with Uzi 9-millimeters, AR-15 assault rifles, and 12-gauge shotguns. This elite paramilitary unit patrolled the "protected area," a dense forest hundreds of acres deep that buffered the "controlled area," a huge concrete dome sheltering the uranium nuclear reactor. Every eight hours, a fresh detachment of fifty men, armed to the teeth and clad in steel-toed boots, tan pants, and khaki shirts, marched in lockstep through the protected area along dirt paths and through marshes, their watchful eyes and ears continually scanning for intruders. One Shoreham security officer, a short, blond-bearded, barrel-chested man, remembers the scene during the 3:00 P.M. to 11:00 P.M. shift in October 1987. His platoon had just moved out, marching into a field where they often spotted herds of thirty or forty wild deer darting ahead of them into the wooded glen. He felt a brief pinch on his left ankle and thought it was the stiff new Army boots he was breaking in. Later that night, he went home and showered. Pulling off his white tube socks, he noticed a small red mark on his ankle. Those damn boots, he thought, and went to bed.

When he awoke the next morning, the nagging blister had grown, so he grabbed tweezers from the bathroom vanity and poked at the area. Suddenly, something started to move, and he realized it wasn't a blister at all. It was a live bug. Panicked, he frantically dug into it. As he extracted the critter, it broke in two, spilling its insides into the microscopic holes it punched into his body.

Seventy-two hours later, he thought he had caught the flu. Within a week, his joints began to ache.





Most people don't think of deer as swimmers. But swim they do. Indigenous to most of the United States and Canada, white-tailed deer can swim distances as long as four miles.

Their natural predators -- wolf, bear, mountain lion, and coyote -- are long extinct from the northeastern landscape, but one tiny foe remains. Poised atop a blade of grass, the deer tick waits patiently for anything warm-blooded to brush by, feeding on deer as well as smaller creatures like birds and mice. The tick jumps aboard and pierces its sharp mouth hooks into the skin of its unlucky host. A tiny glutton with a king-sized appetite, the tick sucks the blood of its host in a feast that can last up to two whole days, while it swells to a bubble over three times its original size. At the same time, the little parasite deposits its own fluids into the host, fluids that sometimes prove fatal.

From Lab 257 by Michael C. Carroll. Copyright 2004 by Michael C. Carroll. HarperCollins Publishers. Used by permission.
This excerpt starts at page 3 and ends on page 9 of the hardcover edition.