My brother is in the hospital with tularemia from a tick, 3rd day on a cocktail of meds, really sick. He went out and trimmed the rose of sharon bush, in an open mowed sunny yard, next day found a tick on his back. High fever that will not go down, fierce headache that morphine will not ease, achs, so weak he cannot set up or stand or walk on his own, won't eat, depth perception is so bad he can't find a cup on the tray in front of himself, white blood count and platelet down, liver function OK but not perfect.
If you find a tick and it's attached, save it in a baggy, get to a doctor. Tick diseases are skyrocketing, tick populations are exploding. Without treatement they kill sometimes,recovery for some tick bits can be weeks.
Doctor said there are a number of people in hospital for this, warm winters he said is one of the problems.
I did not know you could get rabbit fever from tick bites. Hope your brother has a rapid recovery.
ReplyDeleteBreezy days can be bad for ticks because the little bastards parasail. All the ticks I've found this summer have been high up (shoulders, head) when I've been outside in open areas, like our garden.
Nan, not many people know that ticks blow on the wind. You know your stuff. Glad you commented.
DeleteStill have a scar on my leg from one.
ReplyDeleteNote:
Trying to work the blog issue with Google - no luck so far. May just initiate new blogspot blog.
Ron
Just after USMC bootcamp at Paris Island, SC (1990) they shipped all Marins, regardless of what your job would be later, north to extended combat training for 30 days.
ReplyDeleteWe did a lot of day/night land navigation in the beginning on a side of the base with a lot of deer. There were just herds of deer walking around during the day in the open.
Anyway the ticks were biblical. We would come to a dirt road and strip down and remove no less than a dozen ticks from ourselves and our gear.
For the unlucky ones where the ticks could not be removed with tweezers the Navy Corpsman would have to burn them out. (Think about someone putting a Bic Lighter to your armpit until the bug dropped. Hard to watch, worse to smell.)
When we moved to a different part of the base and started shooting, dummy and live rounds, the deer seemed to stay away. The ticks did too.
My advice is that if you have a lot of deer using your backyard as a freeway, to check your family and animals frequently for ticks.
Rich
Rich, thanks for the info. I don't think he has deer in his yard, but he does have lots of raccon and possum drifting around robbing neighbors bird feeders.
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