So the past weekend we celebrated my daughter’s 28th birthday at her beautiful new place in the Santa Cruz mountains, and I enjoyed hiking with doggies in the towering redwood forest behind the property.
Along about Tuesday I noticed a slight ache around my navel, and figured I’d probably nicked the skin or bruised the area somehow on the trip, what with all the lifting of doggies and gear into and out of the truck. Thought nothing of it; I get cuts and scrapes all the time and they eventually go away.
By last night I was really noticing it whenever I bent over and compressed the navel area, so as I hopped into bed I grabbed a flashlight to check it out. Lo and behold, it appeared I had a foxtail embedded in my belly button! “Gross!” exclaimed the wife.
(For those who don’t know, foxtails are grass seeds, shown at left in the photo below, that are designed to self-burrow into soil when blown hither and thither by the winds. They also tend to self-burrow into other things, particularly the skin of dogs and other animals that wander through tall grasses. A single foxtail can cause infection, and as it glacially burrows its merry way through muscle and into organs, can be fatal.)
Mine, as I stared at it embedded in my navel, looked like the ones in the right of the above photo — dark, wet with blood, and thoroughly nasty.
My intrepid wife grabbed a pair of tweezers and prepared to remove the offender.
What did she pull out? (Hint: it wasn’t a foxtail.)
A blood-swollen tick. A tick that had been elongated by the pressure of my navel walls. (Muscle! say I. Fat! says she.)
Ewwww! said other family members when informed of my parasite-hosting adventure.
I took a hefty dose from my handy-dandy store of doxycycline in the am, and today I’m off to the doc for further checking.
If only removing the ticks attached to our wallets were that easy.
Hope all goes well with the doc, ticks are nasty buggers, so are foxtails. It’s one of the reasons I now always wear long sleeves and long pants. Growing up it was almost always shorts and a tee-shirt. Now it’s heavy cotton long sleeved shirts. Even in summer my shirts are still really cool. As for the pants it’s usually just normal cargos, though if I’m traipsing through bush, I bust out the Carrharts and make sure stuff is tucked in.
B
I have a cool doc. He said no evidence of Lyme, just watch for the telltale expanding rash over the next couple weeks, and go ahead and keep up the doxy for the next 10-14 days if I want to be sure.
He’s pretty cool about prescribing things if I make a good case for them, including “I like to have extra on hand,” wink wink nudge nudge say no more. When he and I started discussing his AR and “earthquake” preps midway thru our first visit, I knew I’d found the right doc for me.
OUCH! Yucch! I had a Spitz years ago, who’s cheek was swollen. A night-time visit to the Veterinary emergency room ($$) determined a foxtail had imbeded itself in her mouth, on the inside!
All this reminds me of two things:
1. Why do all tv shows/movies show ‘outdoorsmen/women’ running around in shorts? Ridiculous!
2. Dogs always adapt to their names. My Spitz was named Nessie, after the Loch Ness monster. Poor choice.
I despise ticks. We have tons of them here in the Northeast, and lots of human-sized/shaped leeches.
David:
If you’re willing to share your doc’s name, I would really like to contact him. I’ve been trying to stockpile 90 days supply of oral doxycycline for my family.
I’m certainly willing to drive from the Walnut Creek area to do so.
Trying to get wide spectrum antibiotics from Kaiser, our “normal” health provider, is pointless.
Any help, advice, or informal pointers will be greatly appreciated!
Armageddon Rex