I admit it. I am a woman of extremes. Especially emotionally speaking. I am either completely at peace, totally in a "go with the flow" attitude. Or - I am completely freaking out, worried about everything, thinking the world is surely going to come to an end over such and such issue.
As you can imagine, I prefer to stay in the peaceful frame of mind as much as I possibly can. This can be tricky at times, but I do do my best to remain "chill" about as much as I can.
When it comes to ticks and Lyme Disease - woo, boy! Is that ever a topic of great extremes for me! Given all I've learned about Lyme over the last year - let me tell you, I have a whole arsenal of information to scare the living daylights out of anyone! Lyme can be a very scary thing. And here we have Sweetie, diagnosed with Chronic Lyme Disease. Awesome. Let the freaking out begin - and not let up.
Except, as pointed out in my last post, it does let up. Get your kid with the right doctor, on the right medicine for the right length of time, and you start to see improvement. All seems pretty well again, pretty much of the time.
And honestly... as far as tick checking goes... even someone like me gets a little lazy. Things are on an upswing! I can tell she's feeling better (even though my kid rarely admits the opposite.) And besides - she's 9 1/2 years old! She is completely capable of checking for ticks herself! We remind her to do so... every once in awhile. Uh... when we think about it. Probably not enough. Yeah, definitely not enough. And I do check her out too! I do! Just not constantly. When I think about it. Which, really, it's kind of a really great relief for me to NOT be thinking about ticks and Lyme as much as I was, say, in the Spring.
Besides - if she were to get bit again by a tick, now is pretty much the optimal time for that, seeing as how she's on longterm antibiotics anyway. She couldn't possibly get reinfected with Lyme now, while being actively treated for it! Right?!
And also? Sweetie tends to spend most of her time inside.
No, it's really not a good thing. Kids should be outside, right? But I am, in a way, pretty grateful that Sweetie tends to be what I'd call an "indoor kid." Wanting more to stay inside and play with her Legos or stuffed animals, or watch a few episodes of Rocky and Bullwinkle & Friends from our DVD collection. She does crafts, draws out entire plans for new websites she wants to create, works on jigsaw puzzles, plays on the computer or on her DS. She keeps herself busy, rarely complaining of boredom.
It all works out pretty well for me, as I'm not what I'd call an "outdoor mom." I'll read, write, watch TV, get chores done, play on the computer, cross stitch, work on puzzles... that sort of thing. It's too hot or too cold outside, depending on the season, for me. I'll stay in the house, thank you very much.
So, the two of us, we get on pretty well together. During this summer when I have occasional days off from work each week, she and I do okay together. Well, apart/together lots of the time, doing whatever it is we desire inside the cool, comfy house.
But then there are days like yesterday where we, along with Daddy, spend a full day doing outdoor types of things. Yesterday, it was geocaching. Most Daddy involved activities, in fact, are centered around geocaching - a completely outdoor, mostly woods-based activity. And so there we were yesterday, from 8 a.m. until 4 p.m., trekking around the area's wooded areas, involved in various International Geocaching Day events.
By the time we made it home, after stopping for some necessary grocery shopping, we were all beat. Sweetie had definitely had the most "exciting" day out of the 3 of us, complete with a dramatic splat into a large, slippery puddle on patio slate tiles. Impressive that, 4 bandaids and soaking wet clothes later, she still wanted to tough it out and stay for the ending event's gathering.
So we're home, groceries unpacked, Daddy in the shower while Sweetie and I settled in to read for a bit. When Sweetie, distracted from her book (as much as I hate to admit it, she is decidedly not the reader - as both Hubby and I are), sticks her fist in my face and demands to know, "What's that? Is that a tick?! I can't get it off."
At first, no, I didn't think it was anything more than a teeny, tiny speck of dirt. No surprise there, given the conditions of the day and the conditions of Sweetie's puddle tumble. I tried to swipe it away, but it didn't budge. I looked closer. Well... maybe? Sweetie went to get tweezers and I asked her to bring me the magnifying glass too. With tools in hand, I successfully got it off her, easily. I placed it on my own back of the hand (yeah - I know - not the smartest move, Sherlock) and finally took as close a look at this mysterious speck as I could with the magnifier. Yep. It was almost undetectable, but this thing was moving, slowly but surely. And, yep, there I could see it's teeny, tiny legs.
This, my friends, was a tick.
Using the tweezers, I got it off me and squooshed it to death, finally rinsing it down the drain. When Hubby came out of the bathroom, I let him know what we'd found. It was on the back of Sweetie's hand. I didn't think it had bitten her. Hubby agreed, imagining that it was still on it's journey to a warm, dark body party where it could feed, when we found it and snatched it up.
After this, I did a thorough check of Sweetie, and Hubby and I looked over ourselves as best we could too. But even so, this whole experience brought up and reinstated some really deep concerns for me.
1) This particular tick was TINY! So even with regular tick checks - had we been doing them all along and even last night's actual check - it is HIGHLY probable that a tick or 2 or 3 or 90! could have been missed. Especially in hair. I can check all I want. I could be the best tick checker ever! I may find one. But it seems to me that, even so, I will inevitably miss several.
2) Sweetie actually is the one who found this tick on her. I wasn't doing a tick check on her. I probably wouldn't have done a tick check on her last night. Too tired from the day. Just don't think about it. Her fall injuries had been properly cleaned and bandaged, and she's not yet at an age where she needs to take a bath everyday. So even without a tick check, as a general rule she's not washing daily to rinse away what we don't see.
3) Sweetie found the last tick we saw on her too - not us. We thought that last tick was the tick that set her world upside down (and she had been inside all that day - by the way.) But from what we've learned from her doctor and the testing, it was most likely a tick previous to that one that bit her and gave her the Lyme. What is it with ticks and Sweetie?! As far as I know, I've never been bit by a tick. Hubby, who is regularly out in the woods, geocaching, more than any of us, has just been bitten the one time at the end of May. But Sweetie now has had at least 3 incidents of ticks on her. Granted, this one last night was not a bite. But still... had she not found it on herself, it would have crawled somewhere and dug right in!
And now, here we are, about a week away from finishing Sweetie's 5 month course of antibiotics. We go see her doctor on Tuesday. Of course, I'm going to let her know about this latest incident. I just hope this turn of events doesn't mean Sweetie's in it for another 28 days of meds before she moves on to the next stage in her treatment program.
It is what it is, and it has to be what it has to be. But she's been doing so well and I want to see her move on to the next stage. I'm hoping our little Tick Magnet has not just set her treatment back to more of the same old thing.
And it's not like keeping her inside can save her from the ticks!
And it's not like doing regular tick checks will ensure we find ticks anyway!
And - furthermore - when Sweetie is feeling unwell, like she was on Friday (sore throat, mild fever, general ickiness) - we can never be certain, it seems to me, that this is a "Lyme-based illness" or a "real" illness (meaning contagious. Actually the flu, for instance.) (I am not in the least insinuating that symptoms of Lyme Disease are not "real.")
Aannnndddd.... School's about to start again. Yippee! Bring on the sicknesses! Is it a cold? Is it the flu? Or is it Lyme? Who knows?! Whee!
Aaannnndddd.... here I go with the swing up to my "freaking out" mode.
Yippee, yippee, skippy.
