Sally Breslin: My Life: THE ONLY GOOD TICK IS A DEAD TICK!

I hate to admit it, but I’m extremely paranoid about getting a tick on me – to the point where just the sight of one sends me into a total panic and makes me do weird and irrational things.

Last summer, for example, after I read an article about ticks intensely disliking the smell of rose-geranium oil, I bought a bottle of the stuff and sprayed it all over myself every time I went outside. Needless to say, I spent the entire summer smelling like a walking underwear-drawer sachet.

Just the other night, I was sitting on the sofa and opened my laptop (which, appropriately, was on my lap). There, crawling up the screen, was a tick the size of a poppy seed. Had it not been brightly illuminated by the computer screen, I, with my cataract-cultivating eyeballs, never would have seen it.

As a purely reflex action, I tried to squish the tick with my thumb, completely forgetting that ticks virtually are unsquishable...unless you drive over them with something like an SUV.

So the tick didn’t die when I squished it, it just fell off the computer screen and disappeared... somewhere. The thought of having a tick that tiny, able to hide in any of about 15 quadrillion places on the sofa, caused me to instantly take leave of my senses. The first thing I did, just in case the little bloodsucker had landed on me, was strip off all of my clothes and toss them into the dryer on the hottest setting, hoping to roast it to death. It didn’t matter to me – at least not at the time – that my clothes might shrink down to the size of an American-Girl doll’s.

The next thing I did was grab my vacuum cleaner and crank it up to turbo-suck. Then I vacuumed every inch of the sofa, cushions and carpet in the vicinity of where I’d been sitting. Still, I wasn’t able to relax the rest of the evening.

I blame my paranoia on a similar incident that happened one night many years ago while I was watching a movie on TV.

I leaned my head back against the sofa cushion and felt a tender spot on the back of my scalp. Curious, I reached up to touch it and discovered a small, rubbery lump. I knew when I’d washed my hair that morning the lump hadn’t been there, so I couldn’t imagine how something had sprung up so fast.

I rushed to the bathroom, grabbed a hand-mirror and, straddling the sink, checked out the back of my head in the medicine-cabinet mirror. The lump had little black legs sticking out of it!

A tick! I felt my heart begin to race.

I ran to my computer and looked up “tick removal.” After scanning through the list of 10,000 potentially fatal diseases a tick can carry, I finally came to the “how-to” section. It said to use tweezers to grasp the tick as close to the skin as possible, slowly pull it straight out, making certain not to leave the head beneath the skin, and then immediately apply alcohol to the bite to disinfect it. It also advised not to squeeze the tick too hard because its innards and toxins might go shooting back into your bloodstream and kill you…or something to that effect.

I dug out my tweezers and then returned to the bathroom mirror. I couldn’t, however, hold the tweezers and the hand-mirror and part my hair to expose the tick all at the same time, so I attempted to do things blindly. Three times, I thought I had the tick in the tweezers...and three times I yanked out a big clump of hair.

Before I ended up plucking myself bald, I decided to do something that only someone in a truly desperate situation ever would dare to do…I woke up my husband.

There he stood, his eyes squinting against the bathroom light as I shoved the tweezers into his hand. Trusting a half-asleep man to tweeze my scalp was a brave move on my part…very brave.

“You have to grab the tick as close to my skin as possible and pull it straight out,” I instructed. “But don’t squeeze it too hard.”

My husband finally managed to open his eyes wide enough to actually see something.

“Are you sure that’s a tick?” he asked, his nose an inch from my scalp. “Looks more like a mole to me. I don’t want to yank off a mole!”

I sighed. “Trust me and just yank it out, OK?”

He hesitated, then tightly clasped the tweezers, aimed and pulled. Unintentionally, I jumped. The tweezers produced only the hind end of the tick.

“Nooo! You didn’t get the head!” I whined.

“You jumped!” he accused.

Against my better judgment, I allowed him to try again. This time, the tick’s ugly little black head did come out. My husband tossed it into the sink and stared at it. “How did it breathe with its head buried in you anyway?”

“The Internet says that ticks breathe through their butts,” I answered as I frantically searched for the bottle of alcohol.

“Funny place to have a nose,” he muttered.

We had no alcohol, so I grabbed a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and doused my hair and scalp with it. My husband just stood there and silently watched me.

“Um,” he finally said when my hair was dripping wet. “I hate to bring this up, but doesn’t peroxide take the color out of your hair? I mean, isn’t that where the expression ‘peroxide blonde’ comes from?”

Ever since that night, I’ve really, really hated ticks.

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Sally Breslin is an award-winning syndicated humor columnist who has written regularly for newspapers and magazines for most of her adult life. She is the author of several novels, including (ironically) “There’s a Tick in my Underwear!” Contact her at: sillysally@att.net.