Chuck Bryant

That's right.

So, on the one hand, yes, from everything I've read and all the impressions I have, they were very much dismissed, and it was very much sexist.

And also, I think, because they weren't doctors.

But on the other hand, the doctors who were being presented with these cases were like, I have no idea what this is.

So let's just pretend it's not real.

But luckily, those two women in the groups that they established, they went on and they contacted Yale Medical School.

They contacted the state and they really kind of put this on the map.

They said there is a mysterious epidemic that's going on where you have a lot of kids who suddenly have juvenile arthritis out of nowhere.

What are you guys going to do about it?

And because of their agitation, this mystery made its way to the desk, or I guess the microscope, of a guy named Willie Bergdorfer.

And he was, at the time, the world's foremost authority on what's called Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, which is another tick-borne bacterial infection.

I remember that when I was a kid.

That was a big news item.

It was.

A scary one.

He was working.

out in Colorado, and Colorado was ground zero for Rocky Mountain spotted fever for a while, which is, yeah, you do not want to have that.

It's a really bad bacterial infection.

But by this time, they had done, thanks to the legwork done by the moms and the patient advocate groups in Lyme, Connecticut, it had been pretty well established that the common thread between all these people, besides where they lived, and by the way, it was

Chuck, Lyme, Old Lyme, and East Haddam.