Reply to Please wake me from this real estate nightmare, or just give me your advice!

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[quote=Anonymous]A year and a half ago my family moved from DC to our "dream house" in semi-rural New England. (Vibrant town with great schools, movie theater, arts and community life, but a 90-minute commute from NYC on a good day. We work from home.) We were extremely familiar with the town -- I grew up there, and my husband grew up near by. We bought a big, old, rambling house that was very overgrown and started to restore it, clearing the jungle-like four acres of land so our kids could have the play space that we always dreamed of for them. It was like an article from Elle Decor!
There was a problem, though. Literally the day that we did our home inspection, my husband got bitten by a tick and got Lyme disease. We never saw the tick. Since we were still in the process of moving and our doctors were in Washington, they didn't catch it and the disease quickly progressed. Even though we were both natives of the area, we didn't make the connection either -- we didn't know though that Lyme disease had rapidly spread in the last 20 years due to certain suburban development patterns, and we associated the sickness with a simple bulls' eye rash and a few aches and pains, instead of full-blown neurological symptoms, with heart-attack-like symptoms thrown in.  We thought he had a brain tumor or was in the midst of a mental breakdown. 
Finally, after a bizarre tour through many doctors, more than a year of antibiotics (for months administered through an IV) and homeopathic remedies that were far more effective than we would have imagined, my husband is beginning to feel better. 
My question is: what do we do with our house? 
Miraculously, my husband -- the main breadwinner -- was able to keep working through all of this, so it's less of a financial issue than an emotional one. For starters, we are mildly terrified of these four acres that we saved up for years to buy...because of the deer ticks. Yes, there was an element of terrible luck involved, and now we know what to look for and spray the yard, but the disease is freakishly pervasive -- even just at our small daycare, other parents have been temporarily paralyzed by Lyme disease, for instance. I feel like that's not ok.
More powerful than the particular fear of the disease itself, though, is the sense that this entire area and lifestyle has been poisoned for us. The gorgeous view out of our kitchen window, which sold us on the house? It reminds us of Lyme disease. The "privacy" of a big house and lots of land? It reminds us of our horrifying isolation last winter, when our home basically turned into The Shining. (Luckily, our parents are still in the area, so we had them to talk/sob to.) I do realize that what made all of this so traumatic was circumstantial -- if we'd been living in the area for a while and had a social network, and known the schools and routines, it wouldn't have been such a nightmare. I was also pregnant with my third child throughout this period -- think I got the positive pregnancy test the same week my husband got bitten, haha! So there are stresses that have diminished and will continue to diminish.
But yeah, at the end of the day, I f-ing hate this place and want to move back to a city. We would likely lose a ton of hard-earned money. And though we've been mulling a move for the last year or so, I still worry that we are being somehow immature and impulsive -- since we still want to live near our parents, we have focused on asmall northeastern city with great walkability, restaurants, culture, built-in friends from before, but schools are shaky, crime is pretty high (we dealt with both of these things in our old DC neighborhood), and I worry that we'd be sacrificing our kids' childhoods for grown-up pleasures. And then maybe we'd get robbed at gunpoint and be forever traumatized by that instead. 
What would you do?[/quote]

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