TICK...TICK...TICK...

It was a beautiful November afternoon, so I took the kids do a little nature walk / hiking path thing near our house. We walked and explored for an hour or so, met other people, saw fishermen, threw rocks into the lake. My son said it was beautiful and my daughter said it was "like a miracle." To sum up, we had fun.

Cut to 8 hours later. I'm in bed with my wife, watching LOST on DVD. There's literally one minute left in the episode and I unconciously brush my right arm with my left and feel a little scab, or dot of dried blood. I wipe it again and realize it's not a scab. EW! It's a freaking bug! I looked closer and saw that, yeah, it was a bug with its head in my arm. OH GOD! So we stop the DVD and I go to the bathroom while my bugphobic wife is doing her best to not explode.

She called the Nurse's hotline as I went online and we came to the realization that even thought it's been 8 hours, it's still well within the period of safety and I was not likely to have been exposed to any illnesses yet. This was especially true because the tick was not engorged. It was as if it had just settled in when I noticed it.

I got the tweezers and tried to grab it without...ew...removing its head. I pulled about 4 times and it wouldn't come out. Ew Ew Ew.... So I took my shirt off and got serious. That's when I saw the others.

There was another on my shoulder and another near my other shoulder. How my wife didn't pack up and leave right then I don't know. I brushed one of them and it took off. It hadn't dug in yet. We got it off and put it in a ziploc bag. I gently tugged at the other one on my shoulder it came right out. Into the bag. I went back to the one on my arm and went back to tugging. Pop! I got it out in one piece and put it into the bag.

Then we thought..."Oh crap...the kids." Both kids had had showers and were already asleep. How do we wake them up and say, "We need to see if there are bugs burrowing into you, like Daddy."? Luckily, they're solid sleepers and we just went in, rolled them over, pulled up their shirts and pants and rifled through their hair and found absolutely nothing. There were 3 total and I got all of them.

So I'll go to the doctor on Monday and see if he wants to give me any antibiotics or anything, but I'd say I'm out of the woods. Ha Ha. Get it?