The tick must have slipped through a small rip in my jeans. I had felt a strange stab of pain in my knee joint as I emerged from the woods on a walk with friends. I dropped my pants. My wife spotted it. It was about the size of a sesame seed, its dark body contrasting against my skin, which made the little bugger easy to spot. You could see its hind legs wriggling as the tick eagerly burrowed its way through my skin to tap into my blood stream.
“TWEEZERS!”
Ticks love me. It happens almost without fail: I traipse off into the forest and I come out with a tick. It’s gross, it’s painful, and it’s worrisome. I don’t use enough bug spray (anything with DEET), or the best kind, which is hard to find in Canada (anything with permethrin).
My wife says I’m a tick magnet because of my thick body hair, which makes it easy for ticks to latch on. Ticks can’t jump or fly, so they climb up to the top of a blade of grass and stick out their two front legs like fish hooks, waiting for something furry to come along, like a deer, raccoon, or me.
Once a tick latches on, usually to your feet or ankles, it will crawl up your body, searching for a dark nook of skin where it will take a stab and hopefully go unnoticed. Then it will suck your blood for as long as it can, possibly injecting you with an extremely dangerous and debilitating disease in the process. If that wasn’t evil enough, some ticks have a numbing agent so you can’t feel their bite.
Certain ticks, as you likely already know, carry Lyme disease. If not caught early, Lyme disease can be a very serious, complicated, and life-long illness. Oddly, three female singers, otherwise unrelated, have all been diagnosed with Lyme disease: Shania Twain, Avril Lavigne, and Kathleen Hanna (Bikini Kill, Le Tigre). All of their careers have been affected. You don’t want Lyme disease, so you don’t want to be bitten by a tick.
When you go into the woods, you’re supposed to wear light-coloured clothing, long pants and sleeves (so you can spot a tick and brush it off before it bites), and tuck your pant legs into your socks. Then cover yourself in bug spray and wear a hat. That type of preparation for a summertime walk in the woods can tick some people off.
The good news about tick bites is that if you discover them early, you greatly reduce your chance of being infected with Lyme disease. Apparently, ticks need to be sucking on you for 36 hours or more before their poison is –shudder -- injected into you.
An old country doctor once told me that the best way to check for ticks was to strip naked after hikes and inspect your entire body, which is even better if you have a partner involved. Another way, this same doctor told me, was to shower every day. While washing yourself, you can feel for the foreign, hard little bump that is a suckling tick.
A few hours after the same walk that produced my latest tick, my friend noticed his son favouring his right ear. Sure enough, a tick was lodged behind his five-year-old kid’s ear. There was a bit of panic. I went into tick extraction mode.
Here’s how you do it: place the tweezers right against the skin, so you are grasping the head of the tick and not the body. This is very important. Once you have the head within your tweezer’d grasp, firmly pull straight back. The tick will hang on mightily and stretch the skin, but keep pulling straight back. It should pop out. Don’t twist or turn the body. Don’t squeeze too hard. Don’t burn it off with a match. As weird as this sounds, you want to keep the tick in one piece and alive. Yes, alive.
Unfortunately, Lyme disease is one of the most misdiagnosed and misunderstood diseases in North America because symptoms may vary widely. Experts argue over exactly where in North America Lyme disease exists (it was first diagnosed in Old Lyme, Connecticut, and is usually associated with north eastern USA). All agree that you can only catch Lyme disease from a tick bite, and the only way the B.C. Centre for Disease Control can test if your tick is a carrier is if you deliver your tick to them alive.
We were a long way from the centre at 655 West 12th Avenue. How do you keep a tick alive? You care for it. It’s kind of like getting stabbed by a mugger, and then offering him a drink and a place to stay.
Carefully place the tick in a small Tupperware container. Add some cotton or tissues soaked in water. Open up the container every couple of hours to let the stale air out and new air in (remember, ticks can’t jump), and add a few drops of fresh water here and there. You are now caring for a tick.
Once your tick is comfortably set up in its new home, thoroughly wash your bite point with soap, water, and a dab of Polysporin. Wash your hands, too. You’ll want to keep an eye on the bite for what’s called a large “bull’s eye rash”, one potential indication of Lyme disease.
Several days later, my friends dropped of the offending but well-cared-for ticks at the B.C. Centre for Disease Control. The lab workers were thrilled that one of the ticks was miraculously still alive. We waited. A few days later, we received the results: the living tick had tested negative for Lyme disease. No bull’s eye rashes appeared on either of us, so we’re assuming the dead tick was negative, too.
Next time we’ll try to use more OFF! so we won’t get ticked. We suggest you do the same.
Grant Lawrence writes a weekly Vancouver Shakedown column for the Vancouver Courier.
