The tick

The thought of this tick having Lyme disease is bugging me.

This post isn’t about the blue-suited superhero who had his own short-lived cartoon and subsequent live-action show starring Patrick Warburton (he also voices Joe, the police officer who uses a wheelchair, on “Family Guy”). An actual tiny, blood-sucking tick—the kind we used to use matches to remove from each other at summer camp—made its way onto Katniss’ velvet-soft ear last night.

My wife and I tried the match trick–lighting a match, blowing it out and immediately touching the still-hot burnt end of the match to the tick’s body. This method may seem strange, but it is effective and forces the tick to remove itself  from the host. But of course, Katniss wouldn’t hold still, even when she was distracted by peanut butter. We finally had to use tweezers to pull the parasite off—hopefully we got all of it. Sometimes when pulled off, the tick’s head or parts of its mouth can be left behind, resulting in possible infection.

Ticks can carry various diseases, most notably Lyme disease. We saved the tick in an empty pill bottle just in case Katniss gets sick—we can have the tick tested to see if it is carrying a disease.

She seems to be her normal self now, snuggling with my wife and me last night while “Gilmore Girls” was playing on Netflix. I still don’t get the appeal of that show. Maybe Netflix will air reruns of “The Tick?”