Comment: A Ticklish Situation

The other night, while I was out at a social event related to my daughter’s preschool, my husband was home doing something altogether different with the kids at home.

While I was drinking homemade sake, eating 18 different kinds of cookies and wolfing down potstickers, my husband was attempting to calm our three year old daughter (while her big brother watched on with questions, no doubt) who needed to be held still while he removed, wait for it, a tick from the nape of her neck.

A tick.

From the nape.

Of her neck.

We thought she had a little pimple or mini-dreadlock back there, but when my husband looked at her head closely during bathtime while her curly hairdo was wet and not blocking his view, he saw that the pimple? Had legs. Legs.

What did my superhero husband do? He went to the Internet, of course. "Tick bites" entered into a Yahoo! Search portal yields an overwhelming amount of information. But he’s a great researcher, so he figured out what needed to be done. And he did it. He removed the tick with his tweezers and cleaned the area. He then studied what signs to look out for regarding Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever and Lyme disease.

He delivered the news of his evening to me right after I scampered home, late, and wired, from my cookie fest. To add insult to injury, he had also found a discarded dress of my daughter’s that had been profoundly and disturbingly soiled and abandoned on her floor. A tick and a shit-dress. That’s an evening for you.

To follow up on the tick situation, I called the doctor's office the next day and they warned me what to look out for and then suggested that I “look it up on the Internet.” This is the first time a doctor has been as transparent about it, but it cracked me up. I called the doctor and he said, “go look it up.” Is there a co-pay for that thoughtful, insightful advice?

Do we need doctors anymore, now that we have ample resources to cull from the web? Of course we do. There is a lot of misinformation online, and that can mess you up. But if you stick with the CDC and NIH, you can’t go very far wrong. Plus there are gruesome pictures to help you identify the rash you currently see on your child’s heinie or whatever.

So we’re keeping an eye on our daughter for symptoms that might need a real live doctor’s care. So far so good.

My husband asked me what I would have done if I had discovered the tick while he was at work. It was easy to answer that question: I’d call him and beg him to come home, tweezers in hand. There is no freakin’ way I would have attempted to take a tick out of my child if I could wait twenty minutes for the hands of calm to come home and take over. I have a tremor and I tend towards panic.

The man is a rock; that's the guy with the good brain, level head, and fine motor skills to whom I’m lucky enough to be married.