Meredith Hodnock

That's because Lyme disease is a chameleon, a shapeshifter that's always changing.

Lyme disease is caused by a corkscrew-shaped bacteria that lives in ticks' bellies.

If an infected tick bites you, the bacteria gets in your skin and starts to spread in a rash, sometimes in this iconic bullseye shape.

At this point, Vijay says it's often easy to knock out with simple antibiotics.

But if it gets past the skin, untreated, the Lyme disease bacteria can get into the bloodstream and spread to your heart, your joints, your nervous system.

Vijay treated patients that had half their face paralyzed, patients who passed out because their hearts were beating too slowly.

The longer a patient had Lyme disease, the harder it was to recognize.

Lyme disease could look like arthritis.

It could look like a summer flu.

It could look like meningitis.

It could be completely asymptomatic and look like nothing at all.

And Vijay was on the front lines, treating his patients, his friends, his neighbors.

He contributed to dozens of academic papers in his spare time, and he was also moonlighting at the local ER.

Until one day, he got a call.

And I signed on.

The drug company was SmithKlineBeacham, a huge international pharmaceutical company.

And this vaccine was kind of unusual.

The thing about Lyme disease is that it takes about a day, maybe two days, after the tick bite for the bacteria to travel from the tick into your skin.

And in that time, there's a window.

After the bite, but before the transfer.