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May
14
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About a week before we found out she had Lyme’s disease, I’d made my husband check the girl child for ticks.
“Hey, isn’t there manly man stuff outside for me to do?” Ticks are creepy and gross. How much manlier could he get? Head checks were his job, not mine.
A few days later, I learned that the population density of the deer tick, carrier of Lyme’s disease, can be plotted at the CDC website. If you look at the blackest, densest part of that graph, you’ll see that it’s in central New Jersey. If you could scrape away that dense blackness, you’d see my old house. No one ever mentioned ticks in the relocation package. Funny how that worked out.
I’m not a fan of New Jersey, but it does have its good points. It has beautiful beaches, some excellent colleges, the Pine Barrens, and great Italian restaurants. Also, it gave us The Sopranos, which redeemed them quite a bit until that final episode.
We had two acres of lush woods, a dog, three cats, and five kids; daily tick checks were essential. Especially for the girl with the long hair. Who liked to sneak the long-haired cat into her room to trap at night. Even with the best precautions, in the four years we lived there we pulled hundreds of ticks off of ourselves, the kids, and our pets.
It happened during one of those sweltering summer spells, the kind that ends with a $500 electric bill. Luke, one of our cats, was dragging his butt back and forth across the carpet. He wiggled his butt and ground it into the floor, mewling, as he scootched himself along. Turning around, he’d drag himself back the other direction. After watching him do this a few times, it was clear he wasn’t just trying to scratch his over-fed butt as he made his way toward the food bowl. So I figured it was time to investigate.
I picked the cat up and looked him over for easy fixes, like burrs or broken legs or a chewed up tail or something. Nothing.
Lifting his tail, the problem was immediately obvious. Luke had a tick, and it was sticking out of his butt. The tiny, still-mostly-flat tick had embedded itself on the rim of Luke’s pulsating sphincter; only its abdomen showed. Poor, desperate Luke. No creature should have to endure that. Naturally, I called my husband.
“Luke has a tick in his butt. He’s trying to scrape it off on the carpet.” I watched Luke drag himself across the floor again. He stared at me, silently begging for help, eyes filled with misery.
“You’re not thinking of taking the cat to the vet for this are you?”
Bastard!
“Because no way plucking a tick out of his butt’s worth two hundred bucks.” I hung up.
As the day moved on, the tick grew. By the time my husband got home from work Luke’s butt tick was fat and bloated, just ripe for the picking.
Despite my best efforts to make things go more like I wanted them to, he made a very good case for holding the dangerous end of the cat. This meant that I was in charge of the tweezers. Believe me, this was not Plan A. In fact me working the tweezers was somewhere around Plan D. Or F. But hey, I got to be protected by the strong manly-man who selflessly volunteered to keep the cat from hurting me. And at great danger to himself.
Like most cats, Luke was stupid. So naturally, he needed to make the tick recovery operation more difficult than it needed to be. Even with many years of cat stalking experience under our belts, the cat was still faster.
Psychically clued in to our evil scheme, Luke zipped across the room and flew down the stairs. I tried grabbing him before he slipped under the couch. Five minutes later, we dragged Luke out from under the couch, shredding carpet and skin in his wake.
We wrapped the cat in a towel, carefully and firmly restraining all of the stabby bitey parts. Taking a deep breath, I gingerly reached toward his butt, lifted his tail, and tried to grab the tick with my tweezers without getting my face too close to ground zero. My aim wasn’t so great.
Yelping like a puppy, Luke’s butt contracted. It sucked the entire tick back inside of the cat’s butt by at least a centimeter. A couple of minutes later, I watched with fascinated horror as his butt give birth to the tick. Trying again with even less success, the cat twitched and growled at us. Our plan wasn’t working very well, probably because I was trying harder to avoid his ass than to grab the tick.
“Hurry this up. He’s stabbing me through the towel, and I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be able to hold him without hurting him.”
Glaring at the husband and taking a deep breath, I made a resolution: I would not fear the butt. I leaned in and went to work, getting a firm grip on the tick this time; my husband tightened his hold on the cat. Slowly, steadily, I pulled. I knew that a quick tug would probably break the tick, leaving its head embedded in Luke’s butt and on the wrong side of his sphincter. I really needed to avoid that.
Now, sometimes there are things in life that don’t need to be experienced. But when you do experience them, it’s only fair that you share them. With everyone. This was one of those things.
Let me just say that soft, moist tissue in most mammals is stretchy. But there’s a line somewhere between “stretchy” and “can span multiple zip codes.” If only we didn’t know this.
Imagine turning a skinny, wet pink balloon inside out. And then a cat screaming, breaking loose, and running across the house. Yeah, it was kinda like that, only louder and much more horrifying. The tick dangled and squirmed off the end of my tweezers. I would’ve smiled, but I was still traumatized by what I’d seen.
I’m happy to report that there was no lasting damage and the cat’s butt had plenty of elasticity left. Within the hour, he crawled out from under the couch and slinked off to plot his revenge.
