By Lindsay Tice,Staff Writer

Dan Noble knew there was a problem when his legs went numb.

He’d been achy and tired, but he blamed it on hard days of working construction. He’d had some trouble sleeping, but he figured it was stress.

Numbness couldn’t be so easily dismissed, especially when it crept up his waist and enveloped his hands and feet.

“It was an awkward feeling,” he said. “I knew something was wrong.”

That “something” turned out to be Lyme disease.

An outdoorsman who lives in rural Norway, Noble had been bitten by countless ticks throughout his life. Like all 21,000 Americans diagnosed with Lyme disease every year – including the 200 a year in Maine – he got the infection from a deer tick, one of the smallest kinds.

Parts of his body were numb, while others burned in pain. His eyesight blurred, and his mind felt “foggy.” He couldn’t keep his balance well enough to go up and down a flight of stairs.

Noble took a summer break from his construction business, then closed it altogether. For months, he said, he couldn’t leave the living room couch, let alone the house.

Two years and several courses of antibiotics later, the 41-year-old can now take his three kids on short trips to go swimming. The numbness has eased. The pain is still there, but better.

He never thought much about ticks before. Now he and his wife, Nisa, 38, think about them all the time.

“A lot of people are walking around with Lyme disease – and they don’t even know it,” Nisa Noble said.

Weeks after Dan Noble went to the doctor for his numbness, he received a diagnosis: multiple sclerosis.

An MRI showed that the protective lining around his nerves, the myelin, was wearing away. His brain scan was speckled with abnormal white spots.

Doctors called it demyelination of the brain and spinal cord.

“It’s like the wire coating rubbed off, short-circuits,” Noble said.

He took medication, but the drugs didn’t seem to help. He and his wife, a registered nurse, researched MS. A few of his symptoms fit. Many didn’t.

“We just thought, you know, they slapped this diagnosis on so fast without looking farther,” Nisa said.

Dan, Nisa and their family searched for other possibilities. On the Internet, his sister stumbled upon Lyme disease, a bacterial infection that causes joint pain, fatigue and nervous-system problems.

At first, it seemed unlikely. Noble’s Lyme test had come back negative. He didn’t remember having the telltale “bull’s-eye” rash that so many patients get after a tick bite. And some of his symptoms – his extreme nerve pain, for example – weren’t commonly associated with Lyme.

But the blood test can be wrong. Not everyone gets the rash, and he’d read about others with symptoms like his.

Noble couldn’t shake the feeling that Lyme disease, not MS, was ravaging his body.

He drove to Connecticut to see a specialist. The disease was discovered in the late 1970s in the Lyme, Conn., area. The specialist diagnosed Lyme. To be sure, he ran a second blood test.

It came back positive.

The disease can mimic arthritis, MS or even the flu, so experts say many people don’t realize they have it. It’s not unusual for symptoms to disappear and reappear when Lyme is left untreated.

The traditional treatment is a course of antibiotics. After his diagnosis two years ago, Noble started on oral antibiotics. Then doctors inserted a line into his arm to give him three months’ worth of intravenous medication. Then a second line, for two months’ more.

For a while, even on medication, he could barely summon the energy to move from the couch. The former U.S. Marine got disoriented stepping a few feet into the woods behind his house.

On the best days, he was numb. On the worst, pain radiated down his spine and through his joints.

“When it gets going, it’s all over. It just overtakes me,” he said.

Slowly, he’s gotten better. Still on oral antibiotics, the fog has lifted from his mind. The pain is better. The numbness, or sometimes tingling, is confined to spots on his hands and feet. His most recent MRI showed that many of the abnormal white spots were gone.

Although there have been complications, Noble has enough energy to leave the house and hopes eventually to reopen his construction business.

He used to brush ticks off his arm without a second thought. Now he carefully places them in alcohol and sends them to a lab.

He and Nisa are committed to bringing more attention to the disease. The couple will help fight for a new national bill that would set aside $100 million for Lyme disease research and would create a committee of doctors and patients. Closer to home, they urge their friends and family to check for ticks, to be aware of the symptoms.

When a co-worker recently showed Nisa a suspicious bull’s-eye rash, Nisa told her to get to the doctor. Now.

“I’m scared of anybody getting Lyme disease,” she said.