On Tick Bites 🪲
...real or imaginary. some endorsements. I am still here.
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This morning Rosalind crept up behind me and poked me in the back.
“Ew, Mama!” she shrieked, “What IS that?”
I choked down a too-large gulp of hot coffee. “What do you mean, what is that? What does it look like?”
“You have a boo boo on your back,” she explained, poking it again.
“What kind of boo boo,” I asked, my thoughts racing. “What color is it?”
“Red, mama, and pink,” she said, drawing her dirty little claw across my skin. I looked down at my plate of food: Jimmy had lovingly made us blueberry pancakes before leaving for work—in front of me was what I pictured my back looked like: a beige expanse pockmarked with slimy red welts.
My back does look bad. So does my front. We are doing IVF, and part of this part of the process involves daily shots of progesterone delivered to a very specific 2 inch circumference on each of my upper buttocks. I can’t see back there and I don’t want to: Jimmy keeps drawing circles with a Sharpie so he won’t mess up the delivery range. Too far in one direction, you hit the sciatic nerve, risking crippling pain and numbness; the other and you hit a blood vessel. I don’t know what happens if you hit that and I don’t want to imagine. Across my lower belly, the blood thinner shots leave huge blueberry bruises, fading to banana peel. “Looks like a peacock, mama!” Rosalind told me the first time she caught me without my high waisted underpants on.
“Try to take a picture of the boo-boo,” I suggested, desperate. I know I am asking too much. Rosalind can use the camera but at 5 years old, focus is not one of her great skills. This is what we get:
I reached back to feel the area. It is in the exact part of your back you can’t reach, even if you have spent a lot of time at yoga, which lately, I have not. One dog walk around the block is all I can manage.
“Do you just leave that exercise bike in the living room to torture yourself?” Katie asked me the other day, and my eyes blurred: I can’t see items anymore, which is lucky, because there are all kinds of things scattered across our floor at all times. Dog toys, important school papers, bills to pay, a box that needs to go to the recycling but might never make it. It’s not just the shots and their side effects, it’s the part-time job ordering the meds, counting them, checking them off the list, dosage, timing, amounts, sticking the progesterone suppository up as far as my middle finger can take me before it slides out again… you get the idea. It feels like I have clocked into my shift at the hospital before I even brush my teeth, another thing I have to keep remembering to do. On the IVF Reddit page, a stranger writes, simply: “It feels, at all times, like I’ve taken two Benadryl,” and my eyes filled with tears of recognition. That is exactly what it feels like. I am so fucking tired.
My fingers stretched, finally tracing over a bump. It feels hard. Foreign. Possibly… entomological.
“Rosalind,” I shrieked, “please come back over here and tell me if this looks like A TICK.”
“Yes, Mama,” agreed Rosalind gravely. “It looks like a tick.”
Oh god oh god oh god, I thought, here we go. Sure enough, the weekend previous, we had been down to Storm King, 500 acres of outdoor museum, mowed, sure, but certainly tick infested, like everywhere in the Northeast in summer. We’d done tick checks upon coming home, of course we had, but then we’d left our possibly-tick-infested clothes in a pile by the side door. My new cotton sundress was not meant for the dryer, so, immobilized by exhaustion, I simply left it there. Certainly a tick would have marched right off that expensive woven shift dress and made its way into our living room, up the kitchen chair and into my back. Of course it had.
Suddenly it was me, not the five year old, struggling with “big feelings.” Who am I kidding: all the time lately it is me making everything harder at home. I know it is not my fault; we are in this process and it is brutal, and I am the one taking the mood-altering pills and the painful syringes morning and night. But my nightmare is to be the person making things harder for everyone, having grown up in a house where sometimes it was always the moods of certain people dictating the energy of the whole place. My go to, as an only child, was to simply swallow it down and then throw up in my mouth a little later, wondering what it was about Cheerios that made me feel so unwell. Acid reflux, anxiety, and of course a gluten intolerance later, I am glad my daughter’s emotions are at the top of her face, not the bottom of her stomach, no matter how inconvenient that can be at times, like when the iPad won’t load, or the bathing suit is inside out, or when I have become a human incubator for a toxic life-form.
Last summer Jimmy had to take the anti-tick antibiotics after a bite and I can still hear the echo of his violent vomiting after his first dose—he’d forgotten to take it with food. I didn’t want this. None of it: not another pill to take, not another list of side effects, not another set of symptoms to monitor. Not another foreign object inserted under my skin, not the horrible hooks of the tick’s mouth lodged inside of me. Not a red rash, a boiling fever, a permanent allergy to meat… all because my new dress couldn’t go in the dryer, all because of my exhaustion, the persistence required of IVF, my need. My big, old, messy, painful need.
I sent Rosalind to brush her teeth and texted everyone I knew within a five-mile radius. Jimmy is at work and can’t get home quickly enough. Anne is off doing something, and offers her boyfriend to come examine my back. She is mostly joking, I think, but I tell her NO THANK YOU, imagining myself bent over, boobs out, her partner gazing in horror at my crouched form. Katie offers that I can come to her salon. I picture myself, Gregor Samsa, but a giant tick, scuttling on all fours (eights!) past the ornate mirrors and glistening non-toxic hair products. Caroline says, “I can come right now.” She’s just taken a tick off of one of her girls a few days ago. “Give me fifteen minutes,” I say, and I ferry Rosalind out the door for school drop-off.
Waiting for the school doors to open, I can’t help myself. My feelings are now too at the top of my face, and when a fellow mother that I don’t know well, but see daily says, neutrally, “How are you doing?” I tell her everything. The trip, the bump, the friend coming over. “Oh good,” she says, when I am finished, “if you didn’t have someone coming, I’d offer to look at it right now.”
“That’s so kind of you,” I said, my eyes widening at this unexpected offering, “thank you!”
“I’m an operating room nurse,” she explained, “I’m used to dealing with with gunshot wounds. Nothing can gross me out.”
“I see!” I said, my jaw hanging open a little.
Heading home again, thrilled with my new mom-connection, I look around. There is no time to clean anything up except the fetid Dunkin Donuts cups by the side door, moved one step towards the trash by removing them from the car. I do this. I leave the screen door open so I can hear Caroline coming. I gaze at our table, still covered in breakfast detritus. I decide to sit down instead. Soon, there’s the sound of a car in the driveway. In comes my hero.
I lead her to the bathroom, hoping for the best overhead lighting. I scramble for my tick removing accessories, somewhere on the toothpaste-stained sink, covered in random pieces of hair, a large, dirty rock stolen from somebody’s garden, a box of the progesterone suppositories. FOR VAGINAL USE ONLY, it proclaims, as though its job was to make my bathroom even more intimate, disgusting. Caroline doesn’t care. “Let me see it,” she says, and I bend over, topless, crouching on the rug.
“Oh Olivia,” she says, almost right away.
“YES?” I whimper, picturing the the beast, its pinchers, its foul jaw, its bloated gray body.
‘It’s not a tick, my friend.”
“WHAT?” I ask, unable to pivot my mental imagery, still picturing medical intervention, phone calls, hold music, specialist pharmacy, syringe, calendars, waiting, anxiety…”
“It’s a pimple. A whitehead. Do you want me to pop it?”
The answer was, I realized, yes. I had come this far. We were together in this horrible bathroom, the faint smell of urine on the air, the 70’s linoleum gritty with sand from some long-past trip to a beach. What was one more step into vulnerability? Why not let my squeamish husband wield a 22-gauge needle? Why not feel a friend’s strong fingers on my naked back? If I’ve learned anything lately, it’s: better out than in.
“There,” she said, before I realized it was over. “Look at that.”
A weird little hard nub had emerged, big enough to gawk at. The size of a tick, the same, hard texture—but neutral. Mine.
“I love a good pimple popping,” Caroline said, standing up.
“Wash your hands,” I begged, pulling my shirt back down.
She did.
Two endorsements at the end of the essay:
First, FOMB (Friend of Mom Blog) Anna Vogelzang has new music out. I was so behind in writing mom blog I couldn’t pitch her fundraiser to release this album, but now it is out and you can listen to it!! Please check it out!!! Look how beautiful:
Second, Dorcey Applyrs for Mayor of Albany! I had already made my decision when we ran into her after the Pride Parade, sweaty and flushed in the line at Chipotle. “We’re voting for you,” I exclaimed, by way of greeting. “Thank you so much!” she said, flashing a winning smile. Leaving with our chips and guac, Rosalind and I went back to the bus stop where we continued to wait for a bus that simply refused to come.
“I have to go potty,” Rosalind admitted, so back into Chipotle we went, where we ran into Dorcey again. She gave me a knowing look, as a fellow mother.
“You’re back!” she said, teasing.
“We can’t get enough of this place!” I said, beelining for the bathrooms. Giving up on the bus, I decided we could just wait at Chipotle and eat our snack while we waited for Jimmy to come get us in the car.
Gathering up more napkins, I ran into the future mayor again as we each reached for a plastic fork. “You go first!” she insisted. Assessing my sweaty face and crazed eyes, she asked, “are you having a day?”
“We are actually having something of an adventure,” I told her, and she nodded, with total understanding. “Well, there’s a whole crew of us sitting over there if you’d like to join,” she said, and my heart swelled. “Thank you!” I said, regretting already leaving our stuff at an outside table. Literally, can you imagine inviting a sweaty woman in a straw hat that you just met at Chipotle to eat lunch with you? I CANNOT, which is why I am not running for mayor. This is the personality of a public servant, or, might I say, the grace of royalty? Too much? Anyway, she has a PhD in public health, tons of great endorsements, and a jerkoff running against her issued attack ads that accused her of missing too much work… turns out she was on maternity leave. Fuck u, Dan. Mom Blog for Applyrs!
Please 💖 like 💖 this post if you liked it. I need the energy. Comment below: have you had a tick bite? How bad? Have you ever let someone else pop your pimple? Never mind, I don’t really want to know about that honestly. Who are you voting for? Any elections happily discussed. You can also reply to this email with your thoughts if you’d prefer. Audio version forthcoming, I pray, but I had to get this out while I could… I skipped my nap… you’re welcome…
I hope you sleep all night long,
xo,
Olivia
💓 female friendship💓saves the day, we love to see it
Ok, I am very sorry for your trauma AND I was absolutely riveted by your retelling of it AND I'm so so glad it wasn't a tick.