Contact Lyme

My wife rose early this morning and joined me on the porch to watch the sun rise. Not that there was much of a display today; the clouds were too thick to show anything but a gradual lightening from inky black to hazy gunmetal with the occasional wisp of white.

While I sat contemplating this, she realized she’d forgotten to call her brother last night to wish him a happy birthday. She and I had talked about it, too, as we were heading into the house so I could finally go to bed. I suspect her sister arrived shortly after I went to bed and distracted her.

But this is a common occurrence, her forgetting things. And while I have surely exposed her to the little spirochetes happily munching away at my brain, she has not been bitten so far as we know. Also, she has the opposite constitution as me, and so would most likely be able to fend them off quite readily as I have not.

All the same, we’ve decided she suffers from Contact Lyme, as do all of the people currently living or having lived in our home over the past few years. My symptoms seem to bleed over into their behaviors. It’s terrible.

When I first noticed this, I stopped complaining or being specific about what hurts (not that I was much of a whiner to begin with). But this had no appreciable effect on what was happening. Or at least what I was seeing. There are, of course, other explanations. My wife has caretaker burnout. My daughter is an adolescent, which says it all I suppose.

Nonetheless, I wonder if others are seeing anything similar in their own homes. My wife and close friends notice it, too, so at least I have the comfort of knowing it’s not all in what’s left of my poor little head.