I lay on the emergency table, my left breast prepped for microsurgery. The resident peered at the underside of my bosom to examine the creature clamped in the middle of a dark and angry rash. The spider-like bug had been there for at least three days, having hitched a ride all the way from the grassy marshes of Prince Edward Island, where I had spent an afternoon in hip waders and bulrushes.
"I've seen hundreds of ticks," the doctor assured me, his scalpel flashing under the hospital lights as he slashed into my breast to dislodge the bug. "I've picked them off myself up north.
"It's not a tick," he continued, gluing my skin back together. "So don't worry."
Three years later, I wasn't worried — I was panic-stricken. A strange illness had begun to assault me. My body felt like a powder keg. My skin was on fire. I was dizzy and had chest pains. My muscles twitched, and I had trouble keeping my balance when I walked.
I shuffled from doctor to doctor, desperately trying to convince someone that the symptoms were not something a prescription for anxiety pills would heal. I was tested for HIV, syphilis, West Nile; nothing showed up. I was finally told I most likely had two autoimmune diseases — that I was in the early stages of both multiple sclerosis and lupus.
My own layperson's investigation suggested a more plausible explanation: Lyme disease, tracing back to that bite three years before.
What I could never have imagined as I set out to seek treatment was that I had stepped into the middle of one of medicine's most vengeful clashes — a war that not only pits patient against doctor, but also physician against physician. Patients' lives are in the balance as U.S. doctors lose their licences, casting a chill over the entire North American medical community.
This war has claimed hundreds of thousands of Americans, and many more who go undiagnosed and untreated — not only victims whose lives are diminished, but also many who are in wheelchairs or bedridden.
Many Canadian doctors and medical institutions are like conscientious objectors, not only retreating from the battle but also seemingly denying its existence. I encountered outright hostility to the possibility that I could have been infected by a tick bite in Canada.
Lyme disease is an acknowledged epidemic in the United States. There are hundreds of thousands of Lyme patients, most of them in states next to the Canadian border. Last year, there were more than 21,000 reported cases of Lyme disease in the United States, but the Centers for Disease Control believes that the number is actually 10 times greater. The number of Americans infected with Lyme disease over the past 30 years could be as high as three million.
Daryl Hall of Hall & Oates recently cancelled a tour because he was too sick with Lyme disease to travel. He is just one among a star-studded cast of victims that also includes best-selling authors Rebecca Wells and Amy Tan. By the time she was diagnosed, several years after she first became ill, Ms. Tan was hallucinating. She has recently joined the groundswell of increasingly rancorous patient-advocate groups south of the border.
The CDC's map shows areas of widespread Lyme infestation all along the eastern seaboard. But here in Canada, ticks, which are carried by songbirds and mice, apparently need a passport.
"It's here in minute cases, confined to a relatively small number of areas," says Paul Sockett, who heads the Health Canada department that oversees diseases that pass between animals and humans. He argues that the endemic areas in the United States may be located in the middle of those states, so the ticks wouldn't make it as far as the Canadian border.
But Ernie Murakami, in Hope, B.C., says his own caseload shows the official statistics are deeply flawed. Dr. Murakami, known among advocacy groups as one of a handful of "Lyme-literate" doctors here, says he has treated 1,000 Canadians for the disease, from Halifax to his home province. He has counselled another 1,000 patients and their doctors by telephone.
