For a couple of young people from California, Louisiana can be an excursion into the world of insects and other leggedy pests that is a true odyssey. The first night we spent in our new home a mouse ran up my arm bringing me awake with a shriek. My husband, Bob, swore he didn't know I could levitate that high in a horizontal position. And when we got our puppies, I had never removed so many ticks from a little wiggling body in my life. My husband began collecting ticks as well outdoors with the puppies. They have mosquitoes in Louisiana too, in California we call them small aircraft and limit them to airports. Also, at that time (this was ahem years ago, you know), there was a very nice man known as the Standard man. He came to your house every 2 weeks and he had every product you might ever need to make life possible. And one thing he had was a bug spray that really got rid of bugs. So, silverfish and flies and mosquitoes and 17 other brands of flying, creeping and scuttling things left my house. Except the ticks. They were outside and I couldn't command them. So I just got a really good touch with the cotton ball saturated with isopropyl alcohol. You hold the cotton ball over the tick just a second or two and the tick thinks it's being smothered and backs out. You don't want to kill the tick with it's head inside your skin because you can get really sick that way. Who wants a dead tick head stuck in their skin anyway?
And so Bob and the puppies would go out for walks and then line up for tick inspection upon their return. And we all rocked along pretty well. Louisiana truly is one of the most beautiful places on earth once you deal with the 4, 6, 8 or more legged critters. And thanks to that spray the Standard man brought, my opinion of the place was rising every day as I was finally able to sleep at night.
One day I went shopping leaving my husband in charge of the puppies. I figured they would go for a walk and a romp and I would check them for ticks when I got back. When I arrived home, Bob was, in fact, laying on the sofa contemplating his navel which was filled with clear liquid. Now you just have to ask what that is all about, it's not something to you see when you walk in the door even in the strangest of households. Holding very still he began to explain to me that he and the puppies had indeed gone for a walk and a romp. He got back before I was home and he very thoughtfully began the tick check to save me the trouble. He had found a tick in his belly button. Knowing that I would apply a cotton ball saturated with rubbing alcohol, he figured if some is good, more must be better so he just laid down on the sofa and filled it up to the rim. I grabbed some cotton balls quickly and absorbed all the alcohol from the area but, alas, it was too late. The tick had drowned. And was still stuck in his skin. So the next move, much to my poor husband's embarrassment was the emergency room. After they shooed me out of the little curtained space I did hear recurring giggles, but they must have at least given Bob enough local anesthetic because he didn't howl while they extracted the tick. After the ER nurse had brought the paperwork over to the station, the desk nurse said, "Thank you, honey, they haven't had that good a laugh in months! Please bring him here the next time he does something."
The lesson to be learned here I think is that with ticks as with many other things in life there is too much of a good thing.
Until next time, Happy Searching!
