Ticked off — my brush with a paralysis tick
10 tips for warding off ticks!
I moved out of a big Australian city to a regional town three years ago – a pandemic move.
I’ve learned to live side by side with snakes, an abundance of large spiders, rodents, cane toads and foxes. It goes with the territory. But it was my latest encounter with the not-so-humble tick that had me paralysed with fear. And, literally, paralysed.
TLDR: tips for reducing the risk of tick bites at the end
My adventurous dog Elsa and I love rainforest walks and take them daily. Most of the time I’m too busy looking out for snakes to worry about ticks. Elsa is medically covered for ticks so they can’t attach to her. But there’s no tick repellant for humans yet. This means, when we get home, if a tick is still alive it can crawl off her body and head for the nearest warm blooded creature; me.
Left untreated, a tick bite can do powerful damage to a human’s immune system including in some instances causing Lyme disease.
All of this was news to me until a couple of months ago.
How it happened
It was a steaming hot Aussie Christmas night, and I woke up at 3am to find Elsa resting next to me on my pillow. She sleeps on the floor most nights, but as I was travelling the next day, I felt guilty and let her snuggle in beside me for a couple of hours.
Two days later, I went to bed in my hotel room feeling hungover. Which was strange because I hadn’t had had much to drink. My neck glands were painfully swollen and I felt like I’d cut the back of my head. I figured I had scratched my head whilst brushing my hair. Not wanting to aggravate the scratch I thought I would give it a couple of days and see if it healed itself.
Fast forward to the middle of the night and I woke up with a raging headache, and discovered I couldn’t feel part of my scalp. Hoping it was just a strange dream, and with an early start planned, I downed a few glasses of water and drifted back to sleep.
Flying home on the plane a day later, I felt exhausted — and even leaning my head against the headrest felt painful. I was again conscious I had lost some feeling in my head.
Later that night, things got worse. With nausea, a very lumpy neck and a half paralysed head I feared I had some kind of brain tumour, stroke or — fill in the blank for bad medical news. I booked in for the doctor the next day.
The doctor listened patiently to my symptoms then asked to take a look at the back of my head. She quickly called her colleague to have a second look and again I braced for a terrible diagnosis.
“Is that … a tick?” she asked her colleague. The woman nodded — and they sort of laughed.
I laughed too, with relief. I felt utterly ill, but at least I wasn’t dying.
They swabbed it with alcohol to ‘drown it’ then applied a wart freeze gun (which was kind of painful) and, lastly, a careful tweezing removed the body and the head.
I was lucky to discover it — buried under masses of thick hair — and to have it professionally removed. Ticks can be very hard to spot, sometimes just a bump under the skin. When discovered most people try to remove it themselves using tweezers and that can be challenging for amateurs sometimes leaving a residue. The tick ‘transfer’ off Elsa onto me probably occurred that night I broke my own rules and let her on the bed allowing time for the tick to assess me as a more hospitable host.
The doctor was onto the idea straight away. After a couple of years of flooding and heavy rain, ticks are out of control in our region this summer and she’d had a steady stream of people in her office with similar symptoms.
What followed was two weeks of antibiotics, and feeling generally unwell — toxic. I coupled the antibiotics with a potent cocktail of immunity herbs and a ton of water. A month later my glands were still up high and I still couldn’t feel my head — but the toxic feeling had left. Two months later, I still can’t feel my scalp properly in some parts of my head. All from a parasite the size of a ladybird — one with access to some serious poison.
I’m an amateur, and this started as a diary entry. But I found the more I looked into research on ticks, the less satisfied I was with what people were offering as advice. Most shrugged, laughed or said nothing can be done.
That just made me more determined to go deeper down the rabbit hole of information and take some action to protect me and my household from having to go through it again.
I have had a hundred conversations with locals, medical people and vets and scoured the internet for tick related advice. I’ve captured the best of it below to help others. The information shared here was gathered this way and is not formal medical advice.
10 top tips for avoiding ticks
Here are some of the more helpful things I discovered.
- How to spot a tick: you’ve heard my story, and the tick could be seen clearly from the outside. But once a tick has buried itself in skin it’s not always visible. Here are some of the other signs — a raised bump on the skin, a red lump that’s itchy or sore, raised glands or lymph nodes (many told me about unexplained facial swelling) skin with a rash around it or just an unexplained feeling of general nausea or toxicity.
- Pet proofing: Of course if you live in a tick prone area, you should protect your dog and animals from ticks – they can kill a dog. But that won’t protect YOU or your family as the ticks can’t attach they can crawl off your animal onto you, your furniture etc If you have a dog who likes to roll in the grass like mine, you may need to consider where you walk and check and wash or rub your dog down when they get back from a walk. In the end I bought a kids safety door to stop my dog from entering the bedroom area of my home — that’s where the problems mostly start because you’re asleep and probably don’t notice something like a tick crawling across you.
- Scabies ointment: this is almost all you need to know. In all my searching, having a couple of tubes of scabies ointment in your car and in the house is a fail proof way to protect yourself from a suspected tick. If you rub scabies cream on the area in question a couple of times across a few hours you will kill the tick. It may still need to be extracted but this relatively harmless cream (can be used on infants) is great insurance against a suspected bite. You can purchase it from a chemist.
- Freeze gun: the other thing to have handy is a wart freeze gun — which is a quick and (sort of) pain free way to kill a tick so it drops off your skin or can be easily removed. This can be a bit scary for young kids — but fine on older ones.
- Alcohol swabs: the doctor said alcohol ‘drowns’ the tick. Keeping alcohol swabs handy in your first aid kit or on a walk can be handy.
- Tick tweezers: no matter what method you use, once a tick has embedded itself you will need to tweezer it CAREFULLY out — making sure the body doesn’t detach from the head (ewww I know!). That’s because the head can stay in the skin and keep doing damage.
- Shower: gardeners are particularly prone to ticks crawling across their legs or arms. Within a couple of hours of being in the garden, check your body and hose down or take a shower. Water won’t wash a tick off if it’s embedded but it will help shed one that’s still just hanging out.
- Washing linen: Sorry to tell you ticks can survive for at least a year just hanging out waiting for their next meal. They also survive water — unless it’s above 60 degrees Celsius and only if you apply that heat for at least ten minutes. This heat can be achieved on an intense washing or drying cycle which is recommended for anything exposed like a dog blanket etc. They are also killed by bleach.
- Lavender and other herbals: now we are getting into the unproven but why not? territory. Lavender, mint and rosemary (and other natural essences) are said to be a deterrent to ticks. Because, why not, I now use lavender soap. I am also growing herbs in the garden to keep our grass a bit clearer.
- Vacuum: the humble tick can breed in your floor boards and hang out waiting for appropriate conditions for at least a year. Vacuuming regularly can help — make sure you dispose of the bag appropriately. Apparently, they also can’t stand salt. I sprinkled salt across the carpet of a couple of rooms where Elsa had been hanging out. You have to leave it for a decent period, then vacuum.
Bonus information — don’t throw your dog in the swimming pool after a walk. Ticks can’t swim but they don’t, um, drown.
Also — fun fact — “Ticks are actually classified as arachnids, or relatives of spiders, scorpions and mites. If you look closely at a tick when identifying it, it kind of resembles a spider with its four pairs of legs and lack of antennae.”
The end. Happy tick hunting.
Elsa …
