The illness came on like a vicious badger. Fever and chills, weariness deep in my bones. It wiped out the remainder of Sunday like a squeegee pulled across wet glass. When I arose Monday morning the fever was gone and so off to work I rode. On the way I encountered a rain squall and took cover for some time under a tree. About an hour after I finally reached the office, the chills returned with wicked vengeance. What strange ailment this was, with its unusual suite of symptoms. Shaking uncontrollably at my desk, I tapped out an SOS. As I waited for my rescuer to arrive, I suddenly recalled the tick bites I’d received while out birding a week and a half before. One of the ticks had eluded my attention for what may have been longer than the “safe” period for transmission. That’s right, Lyme disease. Cursory web searching revealed a match for my symptoms. Not typically one for alarmist self-diagnosis, I wanted to believe it was just coincidence, but the facts could not be ignored. At the clinic, I shared what information I had with the health professionals. They, too, could not look past the facts, although the blood work they performed pointed to a viral, not a bacterial infection. That was encouraging. To be safe, the doctor ordered a Lyme titer and antibiotic treatment to address the possibility of a non-coincidence. I went home and lived through two days of feeling sicker than I have in a long time. And then yesterday the scourge left as suddenly as it had arrived, like a dark mantle yanked from my body. I felt reborn. The test results have yet to come back. However, the Lyme titer typically doesn’t show positive until at least four weeks after a tick bite, and my bite occurred much more recently. So I may never know if I had the disease. I may never know the true cost I paid to finally find that bobolink.