A little too much nature.

[rivka]

Michael had a meeting this afternoon at the UU church in Towson. I had an errand to do in the approximate vicinity, so Alex and I dropped him off, did my errand, and went back to the Towson church to wait for him. The meeting, unsurprisingly, ran late.

The Towson church has lovely grounds, including a well-maintained "nature trail" that's perhaps a quarter-mile long. Alex and I walked its length and back. There were numbered markers that presumably correlated with some kind of printed guide, but there was plenty to see even without a guide.

This evening, during her bath, I ran my soapy hands down her legs and felt a little bump behind one knee. I tried to wash it off. No luck. It was a small black circular mark.

"Michael!" I called. "Would you bring up Alex's magnifying glass, please?"

Michael took a look while I was drying Alex off. She was pretty wiggly, but he said he thought it was just a scab.

"That's a funny place to have a scab," I said. We laid her down on her stomach on the bed for a closer look. Bringing in a flashlight to aid the magnifier made it clear: she had a tick. And Maryland is a Lyme disease state.

Michael dredged up memories from a Tennessee childhood and recommended putting Vaseline on it so the tick would have to back out to breathe. I was unsure, so I dashed downstairs to ask Dr. Google, who (in the form of the American Academy of Family Physicians) informed me that Vaseline can actually cause the tick to salivate or, um, regurgitate into the victim. Not recommended. So in the end, Michael just pulled the tick straight out with tweezers, and it came away clean. I saved it in a plastic bag just in case. It was even still alive. Alex was fascinated to see it.

A few different sites assure me that ticks need to be attached for 24 hours or more to transmit Lyme disease. Michael checked the rest of her body thoroughly, and he's going to check me before bed.

Presumably, if we'd had the printed guide to the nature trail? One of those rustic numbered markers would've turned out to mean "deer ticks." Had we but known.

Comments

[curiousangel.livejournal.com]

It was indeed really, really small. Definitely not engorged, and much smaller than the ticks I remember growing up around in Tennessee when I was younger. One of my classmates on a 6th-grade trip had the misfortune of finding a tick in a very personal place, and I can still to this day remember the cry of "THERE'S A TICK ON MY DICK!!!!" coming from the boys' bathroom.

I went over her scalp as well as I could, given that she's got long, thick hair, but we'll continue to check over the summer. I also checked her everywhere else, and she's clear; the places we used to have the most trouble with were behind the knee, behind the ear, and along the scalp line.

[chargirlgenius.livejournal.com]

Eddie had one *in* his ear on our last camping trip. It was all I could do to keep him calm while I picked it out (hadn't bit deep yet) while everybody else in camp was panicking. Ah, the joys of camping!

Alex might like a game where you pretend that you're monkeys going through each others "fur". :-)