Update: Me, 1; tick 0

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I feel obliged to acknowledge the outpouring of support — two Facebook “thumb’s ups” — from those concerned about being tick bitten in what I’ll euphemistically call a “sensitive place.”

And by “sensitive place” I do not mean the part of my brain that triggers weeping during movies where the dog dies.

I went to the doctor. He examined my sensitive place, as did his young female assistant. He said I was fine. No pills. No pain. No threat of Lyme Disease.

So let me post a handy guide in case you’re ever bitten in a sensitive place. Note: these tips only apply to ticks. If you’re bitten in your sensitive place by anything larger than a tick, I’d suggest you contact either the police or maybe a marriage counselor.

• Remove the tick with tweezers. As noted in yesterday’s post, I took my wife’s advice to try and make the tick dizzy. This was foolish. Dizzy ticks don’t remove more easily than clear-minded ticks. It helps to wobble the little bastard. 

• Save the tick. It can be helpful in diagnosing potential harms. The doctor said mine was either a deer tick or a Texas tick. Since it had attached itself to my sensitive place, I’m referring to it as the dreaded dick tick.

• Wash the bite area with warm water. Because the water runs right off my sensitive place, just how to effectively do this puzzled me. I decided the best thing to do was take the mug I use for my morning tea, fill it with warm water, stand in the shower and plunge my sensitive place right into the mug. I did this multiple times and am now considering making it part of my morning routine.

• Ticks like famous people, too. George W. Bush, Christie Brinkley, Daryl Hall, Alec Baldwin, and Ben Stiller have all suffered from Lyme Disease.

• Take it seriously. I probably wouldn’t have gone to the doctor without Val’s urging. I’m glad I did. I’m now more aware of the dangers and prevalence of Lyme Disease. It’s highly debilitating, deadly even.

Lastly, be sure you thoroughly wash and dry your morning mug after immersing your sensitive place inside it. 

Took me about four sips before I realized why the morning tea was tasting so extra spicy.

Related …

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Tick bit where no man wants to be tick bitten

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I woke up feeling morose yesterday morning. I felt lost. I felt forlorn. I felt a sense of hopelessness.

I knew it wouldn’t last. I knew things were bound to change. Sure enough, they did.

They got much, much worse.

What happened?

I felt my balls.

I’d noticed an irritation and detected what felt like a nubby pencil eraser attached to the skin.

With trembling dread, I crab-walked to the bathroom, turned on the light, and began a gentle inspection.

A tick was sucking on my right nut!

The nerve. We’d not even been properly introduced. 

By the size of it, the tick had been there since, oh, 1982. The sucker was huge. It was engorged like it had been given a seat at an all-you-can-eat binge, a regular ballfet.

We live in the woods. Our stupid dog gets one or two ticks a year. Val and both kids have had their brushes with the nasty little buggers. 

But their ticks have had the decency to bite them in places relatively free of pain and embarrassment. 

Mine sought to inflict maximum pain, fear and humiliation, like an attack planned by Tick General Patton.

I couldn’t believe it had undetected surpassed all my sartorial defenses to make it clear to my testicles — and ticks probably win some kind of bonus points if they make it to the one part of the male human body that includes a syllable that’s pronounced “TICK.”

Understand, I’ve not been roaming naked through the woods. I’ve been fully clothed from head to toe since at least Fall.

So this tick — about the size of a pepper seed — somehow climbed up my shoe, over my sock, up my calf, through a forest of leg hair, evaded the hem of my boxer shorts, and found the most sensitive part of me before deciding to feast.

CHOMP!

If I’d have known even one girl at Ohio University with that kind of precise persistence I never would have graduated.

I summoned Val to the bathroom with a voice that always leads her to believe I’m either about to ask her for a lot of money or confess to one small sin in hopes it’ll conceal a much larger one.

I ask her to gaze at my groin. She knew by my demeanor this is not an invitation to foreplay.

“Wow! A tick! And it’s a big one.”

You can now appreciate the integrity of my storytelling because I didn’t edit her comment to read, “Wow! It’s a big one!” before getting to the part about the tick.

She told me her experience taught her the best way to remove a tick that was as embedded as mine was to make it dizzy; to rub it in a circular way with my finger. 

“That’ll loosen its grip and cause it to withdraw. Then you can use your tweezers to remove it. You do not want to pinch it off so the head stays in your body. That could lead to Lyme Disease.”

As you may know, Lyme Disease leaves victims chronically fatigued and is not to be confused with Lemon Lyme Disease which leaves victims chronically fatigued sourpusses.

She left me alone and for the first time in my life I began to ponder the best way to make a tick dizzy. 

Sure, I could rub it with my finger or I could get creative. I could dance, shake my hips, maybe do calisthenics. 

I decided to use the recommended finger method when I realized the other options were more likely to make me dizzy and I’d soon be pinching tweezers upon my scrotum.

 Well, the operation was a painful failure. I was unable to extract the tick head.

Val said to call the doctor; the doctor said to come over ASAP. That’s an hour from right now.

Every alien itch has me feeling like charbroiling my groin with a flamethrower.

I fear I’m about to endure a painful episode, one that’s sure to involve embarrassment.

Wish me luck.

And that’s the tick tock on today’s tick talk.

Mourn not the culprit of all this pain and embarrassment.

Sure, the instigator is dead, beheaded by tweezers, but how many ticks do you know that died having a real ball?

Related …

Human groomin’ and the evolution of bugs

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3 nights, 2 deer, a bear, the bee & me

Pest control from a pacifist

Even stink bugs need love

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Human groomin' & the evolution of bugs

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This weekend at a backyard picnic I saw a multitude of grown ups grooming bugs from one another the way fastidious zoo chimps do and wondered what Darwin would say.

Is man evolving or devolving? Is communal human groomin’ a evolutionary advance or a retreat?

I was raised to not put my hands on another human being without his or her explicit sober permission, this included a girl of scandalous reputation the boys all called “Back Alley Sally.”

She was always up for a good shadowy pawing, bless her heart.

On Saturday, I nearly got as far with a retired postal worker as I used to get with Sally.

And the guy thanked me!

We both had these pepper seed-sized black bugs crawling all over us and as we stood there talking baseball and sipping beers, we spent the entire conversation flicking bugs off one another.

Why were we feeling so grabby?

Blame our latest plague.

They look like deer ticks, those dreadful little blood-suckers that infect us with Lyme Disease, an affliction that leaves victims chronically fatigued.

They are not to be confused with those suffering from Lemon-Lyme Disease, an affliction that leaves victims chronically fatigued sourpusses.

Geez, I must’ve been bitten by an insect that leaves me prone to telling stupid bug jokes.

Here’s another:

Q: How can you tell carpenter bees from look-a-like bees?

A: Carpenter bees are the ones with the tiny tool belts.

Anyway, these new bugs are tick replicas and are becoming as numerous as the obnoxious and ubiquitous stink bugs.

So I began calling them stink ticks.

Of course, I was wrong.

There is no such thing as stink ticks.

At least not yet. Insects keep evolving. Remember, bees used to just sting you. Now, they can kill you.

It’s a very disappointing trajectory. You’d think before they went to killer bees they would have tried their hands at being burglar bees or vandal bees.

It’d be like going outside one night to enjoy some summer magic and having to run for your life when lightning bugs begin shooting actual lightning out of their buggy little butts.

Of course, it’s not always bad. We’ve always had beetles and then one day we all got to enjoy . . . The Beatles!

Turns out these new tick-like annoyances — and that’s all they are — are called billbugs.

They’re, in fact, part of the extended beetle family, and I’ll let you know the instant I detect a way way to pin the blame on Yoko.

I read it online: “The adult tick is very flat, whereas the billbug is round, curved and fat," Allegheny County Health Department Entomologist Bill Todaro said.

I prefer getting my news in printed form, but in this case I’m sorry I didn’t see any video of Todaro. It’s always been an ambition of mine to one day describe an esteemed entomologist as “bug-eyed.”

Todaro says the billbugs are motivated by the some of the same base impulses that used to move my old friend Sally.

“Their purpose is to find the love of their life, to mate, lay eggs, and then die,” Todaro says. “It’s a mass spawning.” 

I read where they’re called billbugs because they have what is described as a long snout.

I looked and couldn’t discern an embarrassing honker.

But what do I know?

I’m the guy who still turns cockroaches over in the hopes of seeing anatomical evidence of why they’re called cockroaches. There’s none.

If roach cocks are too minuscule to be seen with the naked eye they shouldn’t be called cockroaches.

They say every creature great and small has a purpose, but what things like stink bugs and billbugs contribute to the universe is a mystery to me. 

I just hope they don’t get worse.

Deer ticks are bad enough. I’d hate to think we’d have to one day be wary of  another beloved woodlands creature the way we do tick-infested deer.

I like Bugs Bunny, but I don’t think I’d feel the same about bunny bugs.

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