I've never felt this much pain…battling a tick born illness

hey everybody Welcome Back To Living Traditions Homestead well today is going to be a little bit different of a video um I wanted to actually do this video for you guys at this time while I'm actually not feeling very good uh because I wanted to actually do this while I'm still have all this fresh in my mind before we get started with uh what Kevin's going to share I do want to thank a lot of you for praying for Kevin's dad uh Sunday when our newsletter came out we shared that Kevin's dad had been in the hospital he was having some health issues he actually had covid and was having some complications with his kidneys he has kidney disease and so we asked for prayer for that afterward Kevin's mom also came down with covid so the two of them have been fighting hard Kevin's dad was released from the hospital yesterday his mom is doing okay at home and both of them are on their road to recovery so thank you all for praying for them those of you who have signed up for our newsletter but today we wanted to also share with you that Kevin's been having some health issues too and we wanted you all to kind of hear from him about what's going on so about six or seven days ago I started to have some joint pain um I don't really talk a lot about it on our Channel but I do have arthritis I have psoriasis and because of that I also have psoriatic arthritis which flares up usually a few times a year and can be quite painful but I usually can work through it and to be honest um usually the the more I work or the more active I stay the better it gets it just feels better if I'm actively working all of the time which in this lifestyle seems to not be a problem you guys have often seen and wondered why Kevin wears gloves Kevin's very sensitive to chemicals and a lot of times is exposure to chemicals through his hands we'll give him a we'll give them a psoriasis flare-up which will then move into his joints and cause him quite a bit of pain so in a nutshell that's why you see them in gloves a lot and that is what he was thinking was happening just a short time ago when this all started so again about six days ago um I started to have some joint pain didn't really think a whole lot about it it was in the normal kind of areas my my ankles and my hands and my knees were hurting and I just kind of kept going on with life as normal not thinking much of it uh this went on for about three or four days I think um where you know I'd wake up in the morning and I'd be really pretty sore but you know I'd be able to still work through the day and not not have it affect me too bad in fact I shot the video that you guys saw a few days ago where I built the beginning of the pool area for the ducklings that I was having some problems during when I was filming that video but again didn't really think a whole lot of it well a couple days after that it just started to get worse and worse and then on top of the joint pain I was also just getting so tired which I I now I'm not a napper I've never been a napper I'm not the kind of person to like rest during the middle of the day but I was laying down for you know three or four hours in the middle of the day could barely get out of bed um finally on Sunday um Sunday morning it was it was getting pretty bad but I said to Sarah I'm still going to come to church um I think if I can just get out of the house and kind of take my mind off things maybe maybe it'll be better so I went to church we came back home Sunday afternoon and by Sunday afternoon I was just in so much pain um even your skin hurts even my skin hurt I couldn't you guys never see me without a hat on but I could barely even wear a hat because my my hair hurt my skin hurt even just like my shirt rubbing on my stomach hurt um but it was Sunday evening by this point and there was no you know we live pretty far away from the nearest hospital so I said you know what we're gonna wait till Monday morning there's no urgent cares in this area that are open after hours so so we're gonna wait till Monday morning and go to the doctor well by Monday morning it was it was really it was really bad I could barely get out of bed um I called the doctor as soon as they opened on Monday morning and uh we got right in um at first when we got in there I told the doctor about my both my parents having covid and he said well I think you probably have covert as well um it's just an atypical form it doesn't have all the symptoms of normal covid um I told him I didn't think that that was true in fact I had already taken a covet test at home after both my parents got it just to make sure but twice twice two different ones but he still wanted to give me another Cova test in the doctor's office so I said fine let's rule that out uh that came back negative as well um after talking a little bit more he started to ask more about my symptoms and asked me if I had any tick bites recently um and I did um about a week or so ago maybe 10 days now about 10 days ago I had a tick on my side and normally ticks aren't that big of a deal here in Missouri at least in well they're just common it's you know they're not a big deal because they're everywhere and they're constant and they're all the time if you're working outside especially if in our area I mean it's common daily to have ticks on you right so it's not a big deal just because it's so common right and so normally we just you know every night we check ourselves for ticks and we pick them off and move on with life but apparently one of the ticks that was on me had a disease that it transmitted to me called well what they think is erlichiosis or sometimes called tick fever and then that is what is going on with me so they put me on doxycycline which is a strong antibiotic um but you guys by yesterday afternoon I was in so much pain I've never ever in my life felt the amount of pain that I was in by yesterday afternoon even just laying down hurt standing up hurt every joint every square inch of my skin everything in my body was just painful luckily the doctor recognized the signs pretty pretty quickly once he ruled out the covid and and he knew pretty much what was going on he knew that this was going to be what it was now it was too early to do a test to know whether or not it was going to be Lyme's disease Lyme disease or liquiosis anaplasmosis or some other tick-borne illness telomeria which is sometimes called rabbit fever um those are all things that are transmitted by ticks in this area right um but erlichiosis is by far the most common here in our area but luckily the treatment for all of those tick-borne diseases is exactly the same it's a round of Doxycycline which again is a strong antibiotics a lot of times it's given for malaria it's given for some really pretty nasty you know bacterial bacterial infections um so I started taking those antibiotics yesterday morning by today I'm feeling quite a bit better I don't feel like I'm you know my joints feel quite a bit better let me put it that way I still am having some issues I feel like my eyesight isn't quite normal I feel like maybe I'm not thinking quite as clearly as as I do sometimes and I'm just real slow moving a little dizzy at um some of that could be just from the antibiotics themselves but at least most of the pain has gone away as of today Kevin was able to help with a little bit of the chores today he went out and made sure that the quail were okay he opened up the greenhouse for me because that's one thing I'm not able to do by myself and after that guys he was pretty tuckered out and came back in and laid down and uh rested all day yeah so it's uh it's very possible that it's going to be you know kind of a slow recovery as far as what we're what we would consider a slow recovery doctor let us know that even if he's feeling thinks he's feeling better to take it easy probably a couple weeks yeah and our doctor also Farms so he knows what it's like and he warned Kevin to not try to get out back on his feet too quickly and tire himself out so erlichiosis if it's not treated fairly quickly can be pretty dangerous um it can be fatal if it's not caught early although that that's normally more and people that already have some immune problems but it's it's a pretty nasty thing and it's something that to be honest I got pretty cocky about with the ticks when we first moved here we were like a lot of people kind of freaked out about the ticks and we took a lot of precautions we thought you know we needed to be really safe from the ticks but the longer we've been here in the Ozarks the more ticks are just a normal part of life and we've you know we've gotten kind of arrogant thinking yeah it's not that big of a deal you know you don't really hear about many people getting sick from ticks and there's so many of them around if it was common it would you know you'd hear about a lot of people getting sick we'd um we really have been paying more attention to the chiggers because the chiggers are they're so painful right you know and they're so itchy and and normally over the last few years we have using been using a spray Sawyer's spray it's this instant insect repellent it's a Permethrin right and you just use this you spray a couple full outfits for your boots pants a couple shirts that you're going to wear it's good for six weeks and six Washings on your clothes we've been using this basically to prevent chiggers because sugars are just so terrible to get right uh but you know and they're like immediately annoying right you know they they just really itch and and to be honest in in most years I get chiggers really bad and Sarah gets way more tick bites than I do um so it's rare for me to get ticks even on me um except I did have one that it was on my side and I could tell when I took it off that it had been on there for quite a while and from what I've read now um for the ticks it was a lone star tick and that um they only take about 12 to 18 hours the transmitter ichiosis if they have it so I'm sure that's the one that got me it's been about two weeks since that tick was on me and it's still inflamed here on my side so that probably should have been a red flag to me as well that that could be what was going on and ideally I would have gotten into the doctor sooner if I hadn't kind of misdiagnosed myself thinking it was just arthritis I probably should have gotten into the doctor sooner because waiting is about five days that I waited to go to the doctor and um would have been nice to get some treatment a little sooner a lot of times tick bites will cause some kind of rash or something and you always hear about like the bullseye rash around a tick bite for Lyme disease actually it's pretty it's more Uncommon to get a rash than common I think only like 10 percent of all the cases will actually develop a rash so that was another thing that you know we didn't see a rash so we didn't really think it was the tick bite right but really our Focus like I had said is has been on um on chiggers and even though the spray is good for ticks and chiggers we've been just kind of waiting for the heat of the summer to come because that's when the chiggers come out so normally I get chiggers really bad when we go Blackberry picking which is normally around the Fourth of July and prior to that we just don't worry about it too much right and so basically our negligence for not spraying our clothes early enough in the season is what has gotten us here and right and just not being super thorough on doing tick tricks right true um so I guess part of the reason I wanted to do this video today is is first of all just ask for your prayers that I recover fully from this and there should be no reason why I don't with the antibiotics but I do need to be on antibiotics for two full weeks and I'm only on day two right now so um I'm happy with the way that it's helping already um I know it's going to get better as time goes on but we also wanted to just kind of give a cautionary warning to you guys that you know ticks are I mean this was by far the most painful thing I've ever had I felt like my whole body was was pain um I couldn't I could barely close my hands my my I mean just everything parts of my body I was trying to tell Sarah I said parts of your body that you didn't even really realize had feeling like like the skin around my belly button hurt and at one point Sarah just barely put her hand on my back and it felt like you know like being stabbed I mean it was just unbelievable and it was just that infection running through my body um I'm still today I'm still super tired I'm gonna actually go in and take another nap after we do this which again is not something I enjoy doing but I know that I need to do and I know I need to recover because this is a busy time of year for us there are definitely other ways that you can prevent getting tick bites and ticks crawling on you I think the most common that people know about is to wear long pants and to put your socks up over the bottoms of your pants wear long sleeves tuck your shirt into your pants so that the ticks can't kind of crawl up your waistband and and in that way a lot of people will use like deep Deep Woods Off it has DEET in it to spray their pants and their you know their legs or whatever one of the old timers that we came across several years ago said that they used to put Sulfur powder in a sock and would use that like dust it on their legs and their ankles and their boots and everything all up their pants we have done that in the past when we first moved here I did that all the time in fact I would just keep a sock with Sulfur powder hanging next to the door and every time I would go out you basically just take the sock and you beat it against the sides of your pants and on your boots and that sulfur smell keeps them away in fact that guy told me that when they were kids when matches used to just be mostly sulfur I guess they would actually in the spring they would eat matches the heads off the matches to get sulfur into their system now I'm not saying to do that because I don't even think matches are really all that have that much sulfur anymore but that's what he told me they did and then that would prevent them from getting ticks and chiggers all summer long probably also made you smell great I would imagine well well the first thing I want to say about that is you can buy sulfur blocks for your cattle like sulfur assault blocks so that they lick it and they say that that'll keep some of the bugs off of them in the fly so there might be something to eating software although you guys we aren't recommending it because we don't really know but the other thing I wanted to say about that is the reason why I kind of want to get wanted to get away from the sulfur is that that smell and the powder kind of stuck in the clothes and then when I would do laundry it wouldn't ever really come out and so like all your laundry ended up smelling like sulfur which is really not a very thing great thing to smell like right and you know with our lifestyle being so active and we're always outside and that kind of thing that's why we kind of move toward the Sawyer spray because we can do like all of our outside work pants with it and all of our our boots and stuff like that and even though it's a chemical you don't spray it on your skin right you just spray it on your on the outside of your clothes right so I feel pretty good about that we're not normally big Advocates to spray and you know basically poison on your skin um but with the cellular spray it's just on the outside of your clothes so I feel okay about that yeah so you guys this is your friendly warning don't get cocky when you're out there working outside if you have any ticks in your area at all you know it's very prevalent here it's not prevalent everywhere but there are ticks almost everywhere so be careful and protect yourselves right all right you guys that's that's it for today's video uh sorry to be kind of a bummer um hopefully I'll be feeling better by next week and we'll be back with regular videos um I did shoot a video for Saturday so you guys can look forward to that right and then hopefully by Monday when we normally do our filming Kevin will be all better or at least mostly better and our schedule will be back to normal right so thank you guys thanks for the prayers for my mom and dad and if you have some extra time I won't mind a prior to as well hopefully everything will turn out just fine you guys thank you so much for stopping by the homestead if you're enjoying our Channel make sure that you hit the Subscribe button and also remember that the best way you can help us here well this week is to just pray for us you guys we'd appreciate it until next time thank you so much for stopping by the homestead take care and God bless God bless

Channel: Living Traditions Homestead

Views: 305,652

Keywords: Living Traditions Homestead, Missouri, Ozark's, homesteading, Ozarks, self-sufficient, homesteaders, unjobbing, tick fever, tick bite, tick borne illness, tick born illness, tick illness, tick sickness, ehrlichiosis, Lyme disease

Id: 9MFtc9n9x60

Length: 19min 19sec (1159 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 28 2023