OK, so we thought the fleas were bad. This morning I was snuggling with Jonah--we had just returned from our favorite breakfast joint, the "Waffle House" only a few blocks away. They call you "Baby" right when you walk in the door, regardless of your age or gender, as in "Hey baby, I'll be right with you." And they serve diner-type breakfast complete with a fry cook that never stops moving and all those cool nicknames for every type of egg, sandwich or hashbrown. Anyways, we were happy and full, and Jonah was on my lap and I felt a strange lump in his hair. Hmmm...further investigation revealed a TICK, complete with waving legs and a plump little abdomen.
"Ummmm, Brett! We have a situation!"
Jonah went on playing, completely oblivious to our frantic internet searching and surreptitious calls to the pharmicist and urgent care clinic. OK, we were being slight drama queens, but come on! A Tick? Gross. I think that might be one of the things in life that makes me the most woogly of all. I guess it could be worse, like pinworms or headlice (which, by the way, are also very common in Florida). But really, isn't the fact that I woke up this morning with 20 flea bites (same as Maya yesterday) evidence that I am shouldering my fair share of the pest burden?
The consensus was that we try to remove the little guy with tweezers. There were lots of other ideas, like coating it with clear nail polish, lighting a flame to his rear end (the tick's, not Jonah's) and pulling it out with bare hands. Sigh.
We told Jonah he had a bump on his head and we had to fix it...he was a trooper, I held his head in my lap while Brett was Tweezer Man. The only problem was that the only tweezers we have on us are Swiss Army Knife tweezers. They really stink, especially at pulling out ticks. We were warned against squeezing the tick's belly, as that would send his vile guts into Jonah's bloodstream. Twisting the tick body can break it off at the neck and leave the head in. Also to be avoided was touching the tick with bare hands, as that could subject the tick remover to disease too. Great.
In the end, we basically mutilated the tick. We didn't mean to, but he was cemented in Jonah's head and our tweezers were lame, but after completely flattening him out and pulling off pieces of his body by accident, there was not much of a choice. There is still a part of the head in Jonah's scalp. Apparently this is very common, and lyme diseas is not very common down here, although ticks are. We were told to just keep an eye on it, keep disinfecting the wound site and hope that as the puncture heals the tick parts will fall out on their own. Yuck. Ticks basically saw into your skin, stick their heads in, then glue themselves to the edges of the hole, so even if they want to they can't back out easily.
We really wanted a picture to show you, but when all was said and done there wasn't much left to take a picture of. So you just will have to take our word for it that it was not a fun experience. If any of you have had personal experience with removing ticks successfully, I would love to hear from you, please comment below. We need a more effective plan in case this happens again.
On a positive note, we switched rooms, and now have more confidence that our flea problem will go away. Maya and I and Banchi are still pretty itchy and Brett and Jonah have none.
And we were worried about the alligators. Ha!
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3 comments:
nice tick story. i had one at camp when i was a kid. we tried to drown it with suntan lotion. that got boring so we tried to scare it out with a lit match. that didn't work. then a camp counselor/dropout saw what we were up to, pinched it, and yanked it off. so we had to find something else to do. probably something fun and creative like throw rocks at each other.
I grew up in Roseburg OR and I used to remove a lot of ticks from our dogs. We would use tweezers and turn counter-clockwise while applying pressure to remove them. Worked the majority of the time. Great to see your blog.
Hey Kristin, my sister pulled a tick out of my belly and it ached for weeks because a piece of it was left in there. Calvin's survival guide says to fill a plastic water bottle with warm water and place the neck of the bottle around the tick to create a vacuum. Without air, the tick backs out of your body. I don't know how well this would have worked on Jonah's head, since it is hard and hairy, but on other body parts it sounds like it would work.
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