Our Sunday morning got hijacked today when I went to give our dog Abe a morning snuggle only to find, buried beneath all that fluffy white hair, a yucky. Ugly. Engorged. Tick. Ok, so for those of you that don't own a dog and live in the Eastern United States, perhaps you are not up on exactly how harmful a tick here can be. Well, here, we are in "the know" on deer ticks which often carry Lyme disease here--quite debilitating for humans, of which we know three people now and one dog (who has a slight limp and a hazy right eye).
So when we discovered, not one but two ticks (one, headless, on the carpet) and the other buried in Abe, my panic button went off. I tried to contact two neighbors for rubbing alcohol at 8:30 in the morning and I just about pulled Jordan out of the shower. Together, rubber-gloved and tweezers in hand, we held Abe down and tried to carefully extract the tick. After much confusion (thanks to the Internet) as to HOW one goes about the task of tick removal, the tick's body was removed. Unfortunately, despite following the best advice we encountered, we weren't able to get the tick's head out.
Today we visited the vet who assured us that the tick was not the evil, loathed deer tick and that we did in fact get the entire thing, head and all (after some digging around in Abe's wound). We go back in a month for screening just in case, especially given his other eye-health conditions.
Anyway, in my jumping to conclusions about all the possibilities (likely enhanced by Web MD), a friend sent me a message reminding me of this funny post I sent out last year about what I thought was a disastrous worm infestation:
It's 11:00 pm. And I am wide awake.
(Fortunately the worms ended up being moth larvae, which is totally normal and not invasive). But just a little reminder to me of the futility of Web-MD and self-diagnosis (and paranoia). Today we breathe a sigh of relief.
And for the record: Ticks. Are. Disgusting.
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