Jason M. Jones

There are mornings as a parent when you feel like you’ve lived a full day before getting out the door. On Wednesday before leaving for work, I heard my wife call from upstairs. “Can you come take a look at this?” Generally, these words are never good. But there are levels of bad. Obviously, you would prefer to hear, “Can you come take a look at this” and go find that the kitchen sink is backed up over hearing it followed by, “Does this mole look cancerous.” But when I got upstairs, the situation I met fell somewhere between. My wife had been doing 0ur daughter’s hair for school. She’d bent her over in the bathroom with her hair parted, and when I got there, I saw what looked like a thin skin tab or a shelled sunflower seed sticking out the back of her scalp.

“What’s that?” my wife asked. “Is that a tick?”

“No, it couldn’t be,” I said. I thought they were thicker, rounder. But as I leaned in closer, I saw that my wife was right.

“What do we do?” she said. “Can you handle this? It’s kind of wigging me out.”

The truth is it was wigging me out too. Ticks are nasty, not just because they’re bloodsucking parasites, but also because they’re ugly as sin. I mean, just look at that picture above. Doesn’t it skeeve you out a little? Or maybe a lot even. But I figured in situations where we’re both wigged out, one of us has to tack the lead, and since neuroses management is kind of my thing, I’ve become adept over the years at putting aside my reservations when someone else’s health and/or comfort is at stake.

“Yeah,” I said, searching my mind for what I knew of ticks, “get a match. I think we can light a match and blow it out and put the tip on the tick and it’ll let go or burst or something.” But we tried that and it didn’t work. I think that you actually have to use the flame to pop it. So we went to plan B.

“Of course,” I said. I remembered how I had a tick in my ear at school in third grade. I felt around in there during Mr. Acker’s music class. He came over and looked and sent me to the nurse who took care of it. “We should have tried this in the first place. Rubbing alcohol. You put rubbing alcohol on and it loosens the tick. I can pull it off.”

So my wife took a wad of toilet paper, doused it with rubbing alcohol, and squeezed it out over the tick. The whole time our daughter was wiggling, and I was watching the clock. I have to get out of the house by a certain time to catch a certain train to make it to work on time to make it home at a specified time to get our daughter from daycare. I won’t reveal what those times are since I harbor that web-bred paranoia that a psychopath might get hold of that information and use it to stalk me, but I was pressing up dangerously close to being late. When the dousing was done, I tried to pry the tick from her scalp with my fingers, which is of course idiotic, before I asked for tweezers. My wife handed them over, and I extracted the tick from our daughter’s scalp. By this point, my wife had looked up how to handle the situation, which is what we should have done in the first place.

“Wash your hands with soap and water and disinfect the area,” she read aloud.

I held the tick in the tweezers.

“What should I do with this?” I said. “We should hold onto it so if we call the doctor we can describe it.”

I went downstairs and put it in a plastic cup and covered the plastic cup with a book.

“It’s really wigging me out,” my wife said again.

“I know but you have to put that aside for our daughter’s well-being,” I said. And she did because she’s good at that.

Our son had a checkup scheduled, and after she dropped our daughter off at daycare, she brought our son with the tick in tow to the pediatrician. Naturally, I was worried about disease. It was one of the bigger ticks, so I assume Lyme disease isn’t a concern, but the bigger ones carry Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. To prevent the possibility of infection, the doctor took a look at the bug and prescribed amoxicillin.

Not to be overshadowed, my son was there for a few vaccines, and he took his shots like a champ. It was almost as if he understood that his mother’s morning had been stressful, and he simply said, I’m not gonna make it any harder, mama. There’s no fuss here. As for me, I ran a block and caught my train in the nick of time, and when I got to work, I was ready for a nap. No rest for the wicked though. No rest for the man who takes on ticks and destroys them. Mofo took my daughter’s blood. I took it back.