Ticked off

We went walking in Delaware yesterday and in the parking lot, I pulled a large (dog, I think) tick off of Helena’s leg.

Tick, I thought. Mm.

As a fairly die-hard urban inhabitant, there are certain public health concerns that I have more or less ignored. Ticks. West Nile Virus (although from the size and enthusiasm of the massive skeeters we get in our back yard, I probably should worry more). Whatever that horrible disease you get from breathing the air above mice poo in campsites. This is not necessarily bright of me. It’s not like I’ve thought it through. It’s just that you have to pick your enemies and my enemies have been solidly in the camp of urban pests. Serial foot-fetishists. Muggers. Bad drivers and especially those people who use up two parking spots. Jehovah’s Witnesses. I’ve found it hard to get worked up about things you can catch being in the healthy outdoors since I don’t go there too often.

But still, ticks are weird and when we got back from Delaware, I checked the children.

Three of the tiny evil bastards. Each. I pulled them off whole and crushed them between my nails before I read that you weren’t supposed to do that. Ooops. Then I flushed them down the toilet and staggered around feeling squeamish. Ed and I tick-checked each other but we seem to have got away scot-free, which I find hard to believe but I’ve looked and I don’t see anything but of course I’m freaked out. And in the meantime my children have been bit. by. ticks. Which carry Lyme’s disease. Which is bad. And now I’m (sort of theatrically) half-convinced that we’re all going to get it and that we won’t have the bullseye rash to warn us and that systemic devastation will ensue. All because I thought it might be nice to practice the pleasures of living somewhere out in the green and pleasant landscape.

I felt terrible and confessed to Ed that if I had known that it was some crazy tick season I wouldn’t have let us all wander around that park. I’m the American. I feel responsible for protecting the family from all threats on this side of the pond while he has to field the threats on that side (of which there are none, frankly, except maybe stinging nettles). And I felt bad.

No, he said. In this new phase of our lives, we are both strangers in a strange land. We’ll learn together.

I felt a little better but last time I was a stranger in a strange land and dealing with a parasitical foe, I had amoebic dysentery twice which is not something I’d wish on anyone.

Evil, malicious, blood-sucking little fiends. I hate ‘em. I’m staying on the patio from now on, with a Mojito maybe, possibly even under mosquito netting. I’ll take foot-licking crazies any day over tiny ticks, smaller than freckles, that can make you that sick. Blah. My tendency is to get all Felix Ungary about it and start hyperventilating. Unlike Felix, at least I don’t worry about things until they happen to me.

But it’s all about the devils you know. These little devils seem mysterious and threatening to me.

Similar Posts:

• What a wheeze.
• Trying
• Onwards! Ever onwards and sideways!