Makalea was a teenager when the joint pain started. It was intense, it had no obvious cause, and no doctor could explain it. Her three younger siblings were dealing with their own unexplained symptoms around the same time. All four of them spent years moving from one appointment to the next without an answer.
The family dog got one almost immediately.
Makalea, who posts on Instagram and TikTok as @heymakalea, told Newsweek that their dog Molly developed a bull’s-eye rash around a tick bite. Her mother took Molly to the veterinarian where the dog was diagnosed with Lyme disease and started on antibiotics. Molly recovered quickly and went back to being herself. She lived to 16.
Missing symptoms
It took roughly another decade for the humans in the house to find out they had the same infection. Makalea was diagnosed in early 2020. Her siblings got their answers in the years that followed. She believes all of them were probably exposed around the same time as the dog.
The thing that kept the diagnosis out of reach that whole time was a rash that never showed up. Makalea remembers pulling ticks off herself as a kid, but she never mentioned it to a doctor because she assumed the tick bites couldn’t be relevant without the telltale ring. None of her siblings developed one either.
“It turns out, it’s a myth that Lyme disease always means you get a bull’s-eye rash,” she said.
The disease can present in different ways
She is correct, and the misunderstanding is so common that it shows up in clinical literature as a diagnostic problem. According to the CDC, the erythema migrans rash appears in roughly 70% to 80% of infected people, which means a substantial share of patients never get one at all. The classic target pattern is an even narrower percentage than that. Most erythema migrans rashes are uniform red or purplish ovals that expand outward over several days without any ring-within-a-ring appearance, and they often turn up in places people don’t look, like the back of the thigh or the scalp.
The CDC also lists fever, chills, fatigue, headache, muscle and joint aches, and swollen lymph nodes as early symptoms that can occur with no rash present. Untreated, the infection can move on to arthritis in the large joints, facial palsy, and heart rhythm problems.
Between the four siblings, doctors eventually identified Lyme along with several co-infections, including Bartonella, Babesia, and Rocky Mountain spotted fever, according to Newsweek. Each of them had a different experience with the illness.
Spreading awareness
Makalea now estimates she is about 90% recovered after years of treatment, and she has spent that time posting about Lyme awareness to a substantial following. What she wants people to take from her family’s decade-long experience is narrow and practical: a tick bite is worth mentioning to a doctor whether or not anything appeared on your skin afterward. In addition, any flu-like symptoms that won’t resolve are worth investigating.
“If I had caught Lyme early, my life could’ve been so different,” she said. “So I hope sharing our story helps others avoid that path.”
The dog, for what it’s worth, has been the family’s punchline about the whole thing for years.
