I had a very similar story that I’ve shared on here before. I fortunately very much knew it was Lyme because I got it in Europe where the bullseye rash is much more common. My PCP, in his infinite wisdom, said it was a skin rash and wanted to refer me to a dermatologist instead. Why? Because he couldn’t be bothered to Wikipedia Lyme disease and learn that the European one takes 8 weeks to appear, and because the gestation time didn’t line up with his knowledge of American Lyme disease, well, surely it’s not Lyme disease, even though it was an extremely obvious bullseye rash right where I had gotten the bite. It didn’t matter to him that I told him that I had gotten it in Europe AND that I had looked it up and noted that the European variant takes longer.

I live in Texas and I was lucky/smart enough to tell my PCP to piss off and walk into an urgent care where a nurse who was born in Maryland immediately diagnosed me and gave me antibiotics. If you get a tick bite do not ignore this. It will fuck up your life if you do. It’s insane your doctor didn’t just proactively prescribe antibiotics. The long term effects of Lyme disease are bad enough that it is absolutely something that is worth giving antibiotics for even if you aren’t 100% sure.

The incident has made me have a pretty strong skepticism of whatever doctors say. I now know that you, and only you, are responsible for your own medical care unfortunately. It is insufficient to trust someone simply because they have the letters MD after their name