<p>My daughter had Lyme disease last summer - we never saw the tick, but we did see the bullseye rash - around her bellybutton. The doctor prescribed the antibiotics without even seeing her in the office after I described the rash, we confirmed with a blood test a few days later. She was pretty nauseous and generally felt kind of crappy, and I had to pull her out of her summer day camp (this is my younger daughter, she was 9 at the time) because of the photosensitivity caused by the antibiotics. </p>
<p>I concur with everyone else about what you should do.</p>
<p>Another possible culprit behind your bug bites might be the black fly which is in season in wooded New England roughly from the beginning of June to the 4th of July. Also, I know I have a gazillion mosquitoes that rise up through the floorboards of a north-facing porch. Could these be mosquito bites?</p>
<p>We live in an area full of ticks and yet have managed, knock on wood, to avoid Lyme disease and extended tick bites largely by developing a second sense for detecting them crawling on our bodies. We keep a container of alcohol and a pair of tweezers handy all through the year. As soon as we feel the creepy crawly feeling, we check for ticks, and if there’s one crawling around, we pick it off and put it into the alcohol. By the end of the fall, we typically have 50-100 ticks collected. They tend to run 50/50 dog ticks and deer ticks. This year we found ticks on our dog as early as January. Another feature of global warming, I guess.</p>
<p>Not to get too descriptively gross, this will not be for the faint of heart or the overly imaginative, (but I live in a deer tick region, work outdoors, and am familiar with Lyme), the deer tick after latching onto you to become engorged with your blood, then reguritates the blood back into you, transmitting the disease, this takes on average 24 hrs. If the tick is not yet attached or engorged the risk of Lyme is slight. That at least is how our Dr. explained, and as I said, there is much experience with Lyme in this “neck of the woods”.</p>
<p>Right - I agree with the freckle comparison, but ground pepper? I suppose it depends on whose mill you use. I guess they could be the larval stage - we always called seed ticks on the farm.</p>
<p>Thank you for your responses and suggestions. A few answers below.</p>
<p>o I was bitten sitting in my living room, not outside</p>
<p>o The thing that bit me was pitch-black, a tiny speck, size of a coarse-grind pepper
smaller than the average freckle which is roundish and close to dime-size, not this.
just a tiny sliver but packed a bite. The bite lasted only couple of sec I felt it.
And I was on that chair no more than 10 minutes so max time is really 10 minutes.
Med journal says deer tick had to be engorged for period of time like 24 hrs before
its communicable</p>
<p>o It curled up when squeezed and i threw it away, not thinking much about lyme disease
at the time</p>
<p>o I caught a cousin that looked just like it on a wall, put in a jar of alcohol and examined
it under mag. lense, it had classic ticket shape and shell</p>
<p>o The bite marks looked more like flea bites, and I had multiples of them, not a single
bulls-eye rash</p>
<p>look just like flea-bites-1,2,3 pics ( dont go there if those things put you off )</p>
<p>o I was fatique and head-in-a-fog for 2 days. This happened after 2 weeks.
Not sure if related because I didnt sleep well the night before. Then I got my normal sleep and the next day woke up fresh and my energy back. I can’t say I feel fatique because of bad sleep or illness caused the bad sleep.</p>
<p>What really bit me ? Do deer tick larvae bite ?</p>
<p>You can be bitten anywhere, since the tick is picked up long before it latches on. However, you don’t generally feel tick bites (that would be counterproductive for them-- they need stealth and a solid 24 hours). Ticks are flat, hard, and don’t curl up. Still, you might have Lyme.</p>
<p>If it was in your living rooom and you felt it, it was no-see-ums, which come through screens and are vicious little suckers that make your life a living hell if you’re sensitive to them and make everyone who’s not sensitive to them wonder why you’re whining so much.</p>
<p>Any insect that causes a rash should be treated with respect. Go see your doctor.</p>
<p>cali dad. Are you still getting bites in your house? Do you have pets that go outdoors and indoors? If yes to both, I’d still say fleas.Oh, and fleas jump and are very,very fast little devils.</p>
<p>We don’t have any pets nor do our friends. Yes we still get multiple bites daily, never saw or caught what bit us except that 1 time, that small tiny black sliver of a thing ( I think if you break off the tip of a pencil, that would be the size of it, even slightly smaller than that), me around the ankles and lower calf, and my wife around her neck and around arms. The bite marks gave signs of something vicious clearly had bitten us, small local redness, but subsided after couple of days. Far as we are concerned our house is clean and recently built so we dont really have any dry rots around. </p>
<p>I wonder if you folks in the northeast, have gotten bites like what we are going through now? </p>
<p>I just keep thinking they sound like flea bites. I grew up on a farm and have been covered in ticks and I have never felt one bite and with that many bites, it seems you would find more embedded.</p>