I was ten years old when a tick buried itself behind my right ear on my family's farm in California.

It stayed there for days — hidden in my hair, feeding silently — before my dad noticed it and removed it himself. The telltale bull's eye rash appeared around the bite site — the classic erythema migrans that is the unmistakable signature of Borrelia burgdorferi infection. No doctor visit. No antibiotics. No follow-up. A tick removed from a farm kid in rural California, and life went on as normal.

But Lyme disease does not simply go away when the tick is removed. It goes underground.

For the next six years, something shifted quietly in my body. By the time I was sixteen, the first autoimmune symptoms had begun to emerge — the kind of diffuse, multi-system complaints that doctors struggle to categorise and parents struggle to understand. Fatigue that seemed disproportionate. Digestive issues that came and went without explanation. A sense that my body was reacting to things it should have been able to handle. The slow, insidious unravelling of a system that had been compromised at its root — a root that no one had thought to look for.

By twenty-six, my body had reached its limit.