Tick Bites in Norway (Is this country trying to kill me?)

I've had some strangely close calls since being here in Norway.  Within weeks of arriving, jobless and with little more than a suitcase of belongings I was stricken with a tooth that had died inside and become little more than a bacteria factory.
When the Dentist (highly recommended them) says "we need to do this now" and starts without permission, you bloody well let it happen.  Apparently the inside of the offending tooth had been feeding harmful crap into my blood stream (in my head) for the last few months.  Nearly lost an eye.

Of coarse the next shock came when I received the bill.
5000Kr for the lot.  Which apparently is cheap by Norwegian standards.
By by savings... Damn I was missing the NHS...

Anyway, recently I had another scare.

Now I might have mentioned the activity known as Larping.  Live action roleplay.  Now in Norway they generally do this differently than in the west.  Far more emphasis is put on the acting in character than the "fireball!" part that's found everywhere else.

At the end of these Larps (or Laiv) there is usually much drinking.  Now being drunk in a forest is a humbling affair, especially when you wake up the next morning bitten from head to toe by "Mygger" which I believe are mosquitoes.

One of those bites got worse.  Found just above my right ankle, one assortment of little bite marks started getting worse, redder and bigger.  Generally being ignorant of such things I pretty much assumed my awesome immune system would take care of it and tried not to itch.


"Ass" out of "u" and "me?"

A few weeks later, while helping my girlfriends parents with their cellar clean out, they noticed the mark on my leg and were rather alarmed.  Apparently it looked like a Tick bite and apparently I needed to see a Doctor immediately.

This turned out to be an adventure in itself.  In Norway, the health service exists in a private and not so private system.  First I went after convenience: walking to the nearest center, my mind filled with worrying facts about Tick Bites (Flått biter) crippling me at a later age. That first place was closed due to "server issues."

I wasn't impressed.  So I went to the next nearest.  Which after waiting for nearly 3 hours as a "non member" watching "members" go in as priority, I found out a simple look at my leg would cost me around 1000 Kroner (that's about 110 GBP).  Erm... no.  Just no.

Eventually I went to the most public version of the many Doctor's practices in Oslo.
I was seen within an hour, got tested for Lymes disease (which came negative), had my bites even measured for snake bites (I was drunk, but I'd like to think I'd have noticed a snake!), and then promplty got a shrug from the Doctor who gave me a prescription for some wonderful "answer to all problems" antibiotics.  Apparently there was so many bite marks in that region that she hadn't a clue what had happened, but the rash wasn't stopping and I did have the white circle mark.  Total cost including medication? 620 Kr.


Overall, anticlimax.  No problem with that!

Still, it had been a bit of an emotional roller coaster, starting with drunk in the forest, ending in a hospital room with my pants rolled up.  It seems like everyone had an opinion about Tick bites, everything from the "meh" catagory through to the "doomyness."  The local tabloids have regular scary articles about them getting even more dangerous every summer.  Guess I should read the papers more, pinch of salt well prepared.

Two weeks later on medication which stopped me from having milk or cheese (No Tea or cheese on toast, it's like they hate me, bio-terrorism against the English...) the rash had gone, and once again I had survived this harsh deadly environment known as the Path to the North.  Norway.

The lesson here?  Twofold.  Alchohol and forests don't mix and if you see a bite mark which is getting bigger, pay the man and get it checked.

To end the post on a high, here is a storm: Skandinavisk style!  (Sorry about the quality, I'm not an expert and yes, you can here the locals playing football).

Thanks for reading!

R