Solace at Cripple Creek

So yesterday Tretan came into the house and said, “Daddy, I got you some presents.  Come see!”  Lately he’s been bringing me presents.  Mainly wild edibles like dandelions, violets, plantain, mint, etc.  Awesome stuff that makes me love him more.  So he led me out to the back deck and opened up a box.  Inside I saw assorted change that he had obviously scavenged from the floor of our filthy van.  I said, “Oh boy!  Money!  I love money!”  which was neither entirely true nor entirely false.  He said, “Yeah, and this.”  At which point I noticed that he was toying with something that looked sort of like a snail shell about the size of the last joint of my pinky finger.  So I said, “What is that, is it a shell?”  Which it wasn’t.  So I looked closer and saw several small lines on one side.  Then I saw that those small lines were waving — Dear God!!! This thing was alive, and it was the hugest, greenest tick ever!  It looked like if you poked it with your finger, it would explode.  If it was only swelled to a quarter of its current size, the legs would still be laughably small compared to the abdomen.  In short, even for a hardened, ice-veined pragmatist like myself, it was revolting.  So I asked, “Where in the world did you get this?”  To which he replied, “Here on the deck.”

So here is where the story gets weird.  You see, I had a terrible headache the previous night — tunnel vision, loss of hearing in one ear, I could hear the Earth breathing through the soles of my feet. I attributed it to blocked sinuses, since I hadn’t been able to breathe through my nose at all.  Nevertheless, I got myself up as usual yesterday and went about my morning business.  Yoga, caring for our animals, communing with nature, etc.  While I was on the back deck filling our wild bird feeder with organic, shade-grown sunflower seed, I decided to try the old farmer’s hankie (where you clear a nostril by holding the other nostril shut and exhaling forcefully through the offending nostril).  I tried twice with no results except my left ear popping, but on the third try, I felt a massive blockage blow out, and suddenly my head felt light, and I felt like I was smelling movie theater popcorn.  Not possible, but it’s what I smelled.  I didn’t think any more about it, and went about my day, happy to be free of the headache.  Until Tretan gave me the Big Green Tick.  Then I got a terrible suspicion, which grew into a terrible certainty, which led to a trip to the emergency center at the Virginia Tech Department of Pathological Entomology.

In short, I now know that the Big Green Tick was actually a Tanzanian cephaloacarian — a Brain Tick!  It wasn’t full of blood, it was full of spinal fluid and, potentially, some gray matter.  They assure me that I shouldn’t notice any long term effects, as the amount of brain that a brain tick eats is, comparatively, quite small.  But still.  Come on.  It’s my brain, and I didn’t really want any of it eaten.  Incidentally, there’s also a pinkie-diameter hole in my right ear drum, which they literally covered with blue painter’s tape.  They think it ate its way out during the night but that I must have been laying on my right side, so it retreated back into my brain case and started the long journey through my sinuses.  Anyway, they say the hole should self-heal in 3-4 months.  Let’s hope.  In the meantime, we’ve decided to start wearing nose-plugs and ear-plugs whenever we hike, which may be never again.  On the bright side, they tell me that, while their numbers are on the increase, Brain Ticks are still quite rare.  In fact, the chances of my being parasitized by this Brain Tick are actually much lower even than the chances of winning the lottery!  So that’s kind of cool, huh?  Here’s a picture of me holding my present from my son (and a little bit of my brain) in my hand:

It would have been bad enough to find this on our dog!

For an update on the brain tick, see our June 5 post.