Editor’s note: This is Part II of Faces of Lyme, telling stories of numerous people in or near Eureka Springs who have contracted tick-borne, particularly Lyme, disease, in the past 5-30 years while the Arkansas Department of Health denied that Lyme disease existed in the state, due to following strict definitions of the Centers for Disease Control. The ADH still claims Lyme is very rare, and that the state had less than one case per million people from between 2005-2014. There have been more cases than that in Eureka Springs, a city of fewer than 2,300, alone. The series profiles how residents managed to cope with tick-borne diseases despite barriers of getting proper diagnosis and treatment.
John Fuller Cross
The year was 1985, and I had been turkey hunting, working my horses, and being in the outdoors from sunup to sundown, which I have done since I was a boy. Our family doctor, Robert Etherington, had just sold his business and his clinic building here to two young doctors, Dan Bell and Greg Kresse, and I had been assigned to Dr. Kresse.
I woke up one morning with a quite high fever, which is unusual for me, as I don’t get sick. My brother’s only daughter was getting married in Charleston, South Carolina, and I was supposed to be there, so I went, thinking the fever would go away. It did not, and after a few days of this fever, which had gone to 104°, I returned to Eureka Springs and went to see Dr. Kresse. He could make no diagnosis, so he sent me by ambulance to Washington Regional Medical Center to his old mentor, diagnostician Dr. Joe B. Hall (now deceased).
Dr. Hall made a number of tests, but he, too, could not come up with a diagnosis, except that it was a virus and was eating up my white blood cells, so I couldn’t fight this infection. I was put into ICU with only family visits, and then I am sure after much deliberation, Dr. Hall injected some type of liquid antibiotic intravenously into my system, and the strange thing was, I could immediately feel that it was working! When I began to recover, I asked the doctor why he had isolated me, and why I could be on the phone every day to my bank, running the operation there, with this 104° temperature. His answer was, “That’s the way these viruses are – one minute you are talking to the bank and the next minute you’re dead!” There were no marks on my body, but the doctor said it most probably was from a tick bite.
I spent five business days in the hospital, Monday through Friday of that week, and when I got home and gave the prescription to the pharmacist, he made a remark something like, “Boy that’s the strongest antibiotic you can give anybody without killing them.”
Dr. Hall told me before I left the hospital that they had sent my blood to almost every diagnostic center in the country, and the only thing they came back with was it wasn’t Lyme Disease, Rocky Mountain Spotted Tick Fever, or Tularemia, but they didn’t know what it was, either! Some years later, it was diagnosed as, and is still called, Ehrlichiosis and it is fatal!
Since May was Tick-Borne Diseases Awareness Month, this old banker looks back and counts his blessings every day for that survival, and other reasons as well. Those five days in the hospital are the only time I have missed work at this bank in the 61 years I have worked here, and started my 62nd year the 3rd of January.
And now you know the rest of my story.