“You Have a Tick Where?”
(This article was originally published January 14, 2023, in the Southern Spice section of Times-Georgian.)
Photo (Ew!)/Unsplash
Just before Christmas, I used the movie Stand by Me in class with my seniors as the culmination of our unit on “coming of age” literature. There’s an iconic moment in the movie, one that everybody talks about years later. No, not the Barf-O-rama (though that scene is a national treasure). It’s the other one, the scene where Gordie looks in his underwear, sees a bloody leech attached to his “manhood”and promptly passes out.
Yeah, my Wednesday morning was not too far removed from that cringe-worthy, traumatizing moment in classic cinema.
In the shower yesterday morning, as the warm water poured over me, I felt a strange, unwelcome protrusion on my body.
Okay, to be specific, the object was lodged in the crevices of my belly button. At first touch, it felt like a piece of debris that “perhaps” got trapped there during sleep. I tried to dislodge it.
No luck.
I tried harder. Surely this piece of “dirt” or whatever it was could be scrubbed from my tiny belly button.
But no.
“David? Are you there?”
“Yes, Love. What is it?”
“Can you come here?”
A few agonizing seconds pass. When he walks in, I tell him.
“You have a tick where? Oh, God, Love. It really is a tick, and it’s stuck hard, right on the inside of your belly button. Let me get the tweezers.”
God bless that man. He plucked, and I nearly fainted. I swear I felt the tugging deep in my uterus.
Finally, triumphant, he held up the offending creature.
But not all of it. Part of that little asshole remained attached to me.
Dammit.
I texted my department chair and let her know I would be late -- because I was “sick.” How do you express through text messages that you’re performing minor surgery to remove a tick’s head and legs from your belly button? You don’t. Less is more here.
Fifteen minutes later with a needle in hand, I had made minimal progress. I gave up and went to work, my belly button smarting from the trauma inflicted by David and myself.
When I got there, my colleague Sam, my “work husband,” asked me why I was late. I mentally assessed our friendship to determine if we were at a place where I could share the “tick in my belly button” saga. We’re there, I decided.
I explained. Sam waited a beat too long; then he laughed and quipped, “You know what ticks me off?” I flipped off his cheekiness, but in the next moment, I found myself being propelled by Sam towards the clinic.
We have two nurses at work - TWO. They took me to a back room and invited me to get up on the exam table. There I lay, supine and vulnerable, while they poked and prodded and plucked, and I got woozy. It was all too much. They had done their best, but their best wasn’t good enough.
They sent me to Urgent Care.
I went to my department chair to tell her the whole story and get coverage for my classes. She asked, naturally, how in the world I got a tick on me in January. Good question, I thought.
I said, “It must have come from the dogs.”
She said, “Do y’all walk the dogs in the nude out in Carrollton?”
Sigh
The nurse practitioner at Urgent Care was a little too excited. She asked if she could come back in when the doctor saw me. “Sure,” I said. I mean, why not? Today’s a freak show anyway. The more, the merrier.
The doctor comes in and tugs on the tiny bit of leg remaining in the nice, warm crevice of my belly button. It hurts A lot. My bloody and beleaguered belly button has had enough.
The doctor sees the writing on the wall. She prepares a syringe of Lidocaine and injects it into my belly button.
Relief at last! The pain has subsides quickly.
A final successful tug releases the creature’s deep hold on my navel. I want to kiss both nurse and doctor.
The doctor asks me how many people have worked on my belly button today. Six. The answer is six.
The next day I walked in to photos of ticks taped to my computer screen and a large stuffed tick on my office chair.
The quips from my colleagues, though, they’re something, namely a one way ticket to hell. Here are the standouts:
“You know what ticks me off?”
“Time to get to class. The clock is ticking.”
“You know what I saw on TikTok today?”
I am officially a freak of nature, an anomaly for the record books.
A cringeworthy picture of a tick from Unsplash. Ew. Just ew.
