Wow!!! I have on a microscope on my desk a slide with some very clearly visible spirochettes. Looking for Bb this way has been described as a needle in a haystack exercise, but in his case there were enough that I have 4 visible in a single field.

They are next to some cellular debris, and are snakelike in appearance with evidence of a slight spiral twist to the bodies.

The sample is from a small itchy red bump that formed in the center of one of my old rash sites.

I have a camera on the way and will get hard copies of all that I see.

The rash was one of the original bites from an unknown insect around the end of June 2004, so about 5 months old and all healed except for this little bump that got active again.

I used a 100x oil immersion lens with phase contrast, but they would be visible with a good quality microscope with just standard brightfield illumination I think.

Here's the procedure for those who are interested:

To obtain a sample I just scraped at the red bump a little with a sterile needle, and then rinsed anything picked up on the needle tip in a drop of sterile water on a glass slide. Then the drop of water with the sample is spread thin on the slide and dried. Sort of like a blood smear except it contains whatever one was able to scrape off, not just blood. I fixed with methyl alcohol and stained with Hemal stain, just like a blood smear.

More or less. That is an artists rendition, the view through a microscope is a little different.

Here is a picture that look very similar to what I am seeing. I don't see that many... this is probably from a culture... but that is just what they look like with the setup I am using.
http://www.med.sc.edu:85/borrelia.jpg

I also found another one that was distinctly different and looked like this:
http://www.yamagiku.co.jp/pathology/image/154/9.jpg

This is more snakelike and lacks the tight spiral on the body. The one I saw was folded over in the shape of a pretzel.