Actually, it never really leaves. A couple of warm days in the middle of Winter will activate deer ticks, the most common source of this disease.
What you can do to prevent Lyme disease:
· After you’ve been outdoors, inspect your self, your children and your dogs for ticks. I don’t know their secret (constant grooming?) but my sister's barn cats never have them. Deer ticks are tiny, about the size of the period at the end of this sentence. Have someone else inspect your back and scalp.
· I have found that ticks of all kinds tend to climb upward until stopped. I have found them on the back of my knees where tight jeans stopped them. If they make it past the knees, the next stopping point is at the crotch, then the waistband, the armpits and the back of the neck They can and do make it to the top of the head so check the scalp, eyebrows and in and behind the ears. My dog usually had them where his legs, ears and tail met his body, and at the back of the neck, along his spine and under his floppy ears. If he’ll allow it, brush your dog’s hair backward with your hand, so you can see his skin. If you get an itchy, crawly feeling (I've felt it twice), you have stepped into a "bloom" of newly-hatched deer ticks. They are very fast, all climbing upward. There will be thousands of them but they look like pink-gray dust. If you can separate one from the mob, you'll need a magnifying glass to see it. These have not been infected yet. Just take a hot soapy shower to get rid of them.
· If you miss them on the first inspection, look again in about 12 hours. You have about 24 hours to find them before they start sucking and infecting. If you can't see any small red bumps with a black-head, simply run your hand over the person or animal. If you find a small bump that wasn’t there 12 hours ago, it’s probably a deer tick (the larger ticks are easily picked up on the first sweep).
· All the instructions I’ve ever read tell us to use a tweezers to remove the tick. . I stopped doing that when my dog bit my hand because I pinched him with the tweezers. Thinking about it, tweezing the bug doesn’t make a whole lot of sense; it squeezes the infective juice out of the tick into the victim, and that’s how we get Lyme disease. What I find works better is to use the nails of the thumb and middle finger, slide them under the tick, which sits on top of the bump like a tiny scab, and pull straight out from the skin. Even the dog won’t object.
· If the tick has swollen at all, get thee to the doctor for a blood test immediately and take the tick with you in a sealed container. I missed a few on my long-haired dog and they eventually fell off him and lay on the floor looking very much like a gray grape. Yes, they swell that much. Don’t step on it! Blood is hard to get out of the rug.
· As far as I know, there is no alternative for the 10–14 day course of antibiotics if you need it.
Have a great Summer!
