Tick - Tumblr Posts
Some tips about ticks for y'all who aren't super familiar with them, since I fear them a little and thus arm myself with knowledge:
- wear long, light-coloured, non-patterned clothing when camping/in close proximity to tall grass and trees to prevent ticks from easily reaching your skin, while also making them easy to spot on your clothes
- always check yourself and your clothes after going into the woods. Ticks like to lodge themselves in warm places (eg. behind your ears, on your neck, behind your knee, in your elbow, in your armpit, in your crotch, between your toes) but hair in those places usually deters them.
- ticks may wander a bit before they find a place to dig in, so finding a tick several hours after an excursion is common
- for those of you who've never seen or had one, a tick can be very small. At their smallest, they look like a piece of dirt with legs, but they can be bigger as well. The defining feature of a tick that has bitten you is that it has legs and can't be shaken off (don't try to brush them off unless their head isn't buried in your skin, or you'll risk squeezing them)
- if you get a tick, tweezers are probably your best bet. I've seen places selling tick removers or tick keys, but these don't work very well for ticks who have just taken hold. The flame and rubbing alcohol methods also seem pretty effective, but I've never seen them used before so I can't say for sure, and you may not always have that stuff on hand.
- gently pull your skin taught where the tick is so you have clear access to its neck. DO NOT GRAB THE BODY ITSELF. Squeezing their body will make them throw up and you greatly increase your risk of getting Lyme disease if that happens.
- grab as close as you can to your skin, then carefully pull out the tick. Even if the head stays in your skin, so long as the body (and by extension, the stomach) no longer has access to you, you're relatively safe. Tweezers can also help you remove the head.
- sanitize your skin and the tweezers, then put a band-aid over the bite
- a tick needs to have been feeding for 36-48 hours before you're at risk of getting Lyme disease from them, so as long as you spot them early, you should be fine. The size of a tick indicates how long it's been feeding, so the bigger it is, the longer it's been there.
- for those of you who don't regularly get ticks, you may want to keep yours around in case it needs to get tested. My preferred method of preserving a tick is to put it on a clear piece of tape, then seal it in with another piece of tape placed perpendicular to the first one. However, this may not be the most accessible method, so using a small plastic bag or container also works well.
- I'm not sure about other places, but where I live they often won't even test ticks anymore because the majority of them carry Lyme now, so it's easier just to assume that the tick had Lyme and work from there. However, this doesn't mean you shouldn't bother going to the doctor. There are antibiotics available if you go in and ask for them, which you can do (at least in Canada), even if you aren't showing symptoms. If you plan to do this, do it within a couple days of getting the tick. There are also antibiotics available for early stage Lyme disease, so if you notice symptoms early, there's still ways to recover.
- symptoms of Lyme disease may be similar to those of the flu, and usually start between 3-30 days. The bullseye rash is not guaranteed to develop if you have Lyme, so don't assume you don't have it just because you don't have the rash. Other symptoms to be on the lookout for are fever, chills, headaches, fatigue, and muscle/joint aches. If I recall correctly, Lyme attacks the nervous system, so the unusual amounts of fatigue and muscle pain are particularly important indicators to watch out for.
- black-legged ticks, also known as deer ticks, are the ones that spread Lyme, so if your tick isn't a deer tick, you're probably safe. I'm not going to include images in case people don't want to see them, but if you get a tick you can look up deer ticks to see if that's what you have.
- sources: things I've learned from working at a provincial park, and also source, source, source, source
Feel free to add on or correct me if I got anything wrong. Happy camping, and stay safe y'all!
I think the wildest piece of advice I encounter semi-frequently is to “have a doctor remove a tick” that’s bitten you.
Like yeah hang on let me just. Pop on down to visit my personal doctor who lives in my root cellar and tends to my every need and comes running when I ring a little bell. I’ll have them remove this tick from my arm.
This isnt even an “American healthcare is bad” post. I can’t comprehend a lifestyle in which having a doctor remove ticks for you would be practical unless you are married to one. Have people who write this advice ever even had a tick? Or, hell, been to a doctor? Best case scenario you’d be waiting hours.
Piper: *says the 'f' word*
Annabeth: Language!
Piper: I-I'm saying 'seal' in French! See? 'Phoque!'
Annabeth: ...
Piper: *stammering* What? I-I like seals?
(it's actually pronounced like that)
Let me hand you a summary of the shenanigans @xxthebubblewitchxx, @michamiw, and I do erjgrthyth
Cassandra Cain and Stephanie Brown really just died and came back without any drama like, "rip to Jason Todd, but I'm different," huh?
Here you go buddy! Decided to draw our Cuphead Ocs together!
@galaxy-kiddo
TICK PSA
Alright you guys, ‘tis the season again and I’ve already seen bullshit float about so here we go: what to do and what not to do when you happen to have a tick attached to yours truly.
WHAT NOT TO DO:
DON’T cover the tick in anything. Vaseline, nailpolish, whatever. Doesn’t matter. It’ll all suffocate the tick, making it panic vomit germs into your blood stream. That’s the opposite of what you want.
DON’T burn the tick. Same problem, plus the additional option of giving yourself a burn wound in the process.
DON’T squeeze the body of the tick when you try to remove it. Again this empties the tick’s digestive system into your body. Bad.
DON’T wait for the tick to detach itself. The longer it stays on you, the higher the chances it’ll transmit anything to you. Plus when ti detaches it may again vomit germs into you.
WHAT TO ACTUALLY DO
STAY CALM. A tick hanging on you is not a reason to panick. You’re not going to keel over just like that, and if you’re unsure what to do, there are many resources on the internet on how to safely remove a tick, like this one from the CDC (aka the professionals)
USE APPROPRIATE TOOLS. These can be suitable tweezers (the pointy kind, not blunt tipped ones), tick removers (there are cheap ones out there, those you can buy at the vets are totally fine for use on humans, too!). Ideally you can remove the entire tick in one go, however if that doesn’t work and the mouth part breaks off in your skin, that’s not a terribly big deal and you can totally remove it separately after you got the body remove. Again, don’t panic.
KILL THE REMOVED TICK. But not by squeezing it. Flush it down the toilet, submerse it in alcohol in a container etc. Ideally if the tick has bitten you and not your dog, keep the tick around in a sealed container in case you start having symptoms and someone needs to identify the tick species. Also IF you start getting symptoms like the tell tale Lyme disease rash, HIT A DOCTOR RIGHT AWAY AND TELL THEM ABOUT YOUR TICK BITE. Do not wait this out, ticks can transmit a whole host of diseases beside Lyme, so be mindful of that, too!
Some of those diseases you can actually get vaccinated again, such as tick born encephalitis. Check with the local authorities if you live in a risk area, and if so, get the shots to protect yourself.
I saw this draw the squad base by @chloropile and immediately thought of the Hot Mess because I felt like it summed up the chaos that sometimes happened in the chat pretty well.
Tagging stuff under the read-more.
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And as the vermin crawls, we lay in the foundations of decay