Tick bites are getting really scary.

When Lyme disease isn't caught early, the fallout can be scary.

When Nicole Greene's friend plucked a tick from her head back in 2001 and flushed it away, she thought nothing of it again until six years later when her doctor told her she had Lyme disease and asked if she'd been bitten by a tick.

"I'd never heard of Lyme disease. All I could think was, 'No, I'm not an outdoor person, there's no way I have that,"' Greene wrote in her blog this week for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where she is deputy director of the Office on Women's Health.

Driving home from the medical appointment, she remembered the seemingly minor incident from years before.

"My older son used to go to a sleep-away camp and there were parent weekends. I went on a parent weekend and at the time I had long curly hair and I assume that's when the tick attached itself to me," Greene told CBS News.

Some time later, she was visiting the friend. "I must have felt something on my head and said, 'What is this?' And she called her mom who was a nurse and her mom told her to get the tweezers and get it out and flush it. It was all of two minutes," Greene said.

"I never even saw it. I did not know about ticks, and I definitely did not know about Lyme disease."

In the months and years after that, mysterious health issues began cropping up, becoming more serious over time. She experienced achy joints, foggy thinking, depression and shaky hands, to name a few. Despite her efforts to pinpoint a diagnosis, the reason behind the symptoms didn't become clear until after a flu-like bout in 2007 that left her bedridden for weeks. Her doctor tested her for a slew of conditions - lupus, sickle cell disease, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome and Lyme. The Lyme test came back positive.

Greene is one of many people who don't notice early signs of Lyme disease, brush off the symptoms, or whose medical providers missed the symptoms, which often include fever, headache, fatigue, and a bull's-eye skin rash called erythema migrans, considered the hallmark of the disease. It appears in about 70 to 80 percent of infected people, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, although some doctors believe many more cases lack this obvious sign.

If Lyme is caught early, it can be treated with antibiotics. But if it goes untreated, the infection can spread to the joints, the heart and the nervous system, which explains some of Greene's symptoms. Patients may suffer with severe headaches and neck aches, heart palpitations, facial palsy, and arthritis with severe joint pain.

A tiny tick, about the size of a mark a felt-tip pen makes, transmits Lyme disease to humans -- specifically, a bacterium called Borrelia burgdorferi.

"The tick is so minuscule, the majority of people don't remember getting bitten by it," Dr. Neil Spector. Read full story: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lyme-disease-when-it-isnt-caught-early-fallout-can-be-scary/