Little Parasites

Posted September 07, 2007

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"That thing? I don't know -- but I know what you mean. It used to be a teeny bump, but then it turned into that hangy thing." Ben's in the bath, and I've stopped washing his hair to investigate something I can feel with my fingers -- some kind of lump. When I part his hair to look at it, my stomach flips over. It's the size of my pinky fingernail, this thing, fleshy and hanging from his scalp like the skin tag that sprouted from underneath my left breast when I was pregnant, as if my body had found a revolting way to represent the growth that was happening invisibly inside. "Look at this," I say to Michael. "It looks like a skin tag, but then it has all that hair wound up into it." Michael peers at it, retrieves the magnifying glass and peers again. "I don't think that's hair," he says, and when I say, "What do you mean?" he mouths the word legs.

The thing is, we have found ticks on the kids, deer ticks even, but they have always been -- as described in the books -- "the size of a poppy seed." They have been tiny little brown things on arms or legs or even, once, stuck to Ben's cheek like a toast crumb. We have always pulled them away without incident. But this -- this thing like a giant corn kernel made of Silly Putty -- this doesn't even look like an insect. "At least it can't be a deer tick," Michael says. "It's way too big." This is the hook we hang our relief on for all of one minute. Because after I pull it off of Ben's head with tweezers, after it leaves some repellent piece of its own head behind like a trophy, I Google "engorged tick" and look at the pictures -- and it is a deer tick after all. In about the time it takes Ben to dry off and dress himself, we become Internet-trained experts in the field of Lyme disease. "I'm going to call the practice and find out if they treat it with prophylactic antibiotics," I say, like the epidemiologist I now am. "But first I'm going to call my brother."

My brother, a real-live epidemiologist -- insofar as he is actually a doctor with a masters degree in public health who works as an infectious disease specialist at the CDC -- is full of sympathy but not sure what to tell me. "I know more about ticks down here," he says, about the South, where he lives. "I wish I could help you." His specialty is malaria. I cannot begin to imagine how frustrating our phone calls are for him: we're always like, "Malaria shmalaria, what can you tell us about coxsackie?" It would be like somebody saying to me, "You've been a teacher before -- so teach me how to play the accordion!" I call our practice, and the on-call person calls me back (in the cartoon version, you'd see the clock hand spin around and around between these two events) to say that they don't treat for Lyme disease unless there are symptoms. By the next day, there are symptoms: a red rash spreading from the bite in rings.

And here we are, on day 2 of a 28-day cycle of amoxicillin to treat the Lyme disease that Ben has now been diagnosed with. I am uncharacteristically not worried: they're catching it early, they don't anticipate complications, Ben's not actually ill. What I am is something like -- how do I put this? -- outraged. Maybe one day Ben will have a college roommate who is always borrowing money from him and drinking his beer, and I will feel about him the way I feel now about the tick. A parasite! Mooching off the cheerful host of my own son! Infecting him with illness and yuck! That jerk. I still shudder when I think of it -- or look at it in the jar where we are still suffocating it to death, like a chrysalis from an Aliens movie. And I'll tell you -- we're lucky we found it, because we haven't even been checking the kids for ticks this late in the year (not that we would have found it on his scalp anyway, and not that "tick check" isn't one of our big jokes around here -- the thing Michael whispers when he unbuttons my pants). "Hey honey," I say to Ben, my son who tells us when he smells a neighborhood fart carried in on the breeze, who alerts us to the exact shape and color of whatever he digs out of his nose. "If you ever notice something weird again, like that 'hanging thing' on the back of your head, just let us know, okay?" "Okay," he says. "I guess it just never occurred to me to mention it."

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Little Parasites

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by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Little Parasites

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