Please bear with me; this is a true story, so, like all true stories (unlike fables, which are generally straightforward and to the point) it takes a meandering path, allowing the disparate but necessary elements to find their way into the timeline and create the tale as it unfolds.
Part I. The Tick
Mid-March 2013
I got a partial knee replacement. It was planned and was the second knee for which I had this surgery. Afterward, healing and rehabilitation therapy commenced. Have you experienced this surgery and its recovery? It’s painful, and a lengthy process. In my case, the discomfort caused me difficulty in falling and staying asleep. My doctor prescribed a popular sleeping medication to help. Being naïve at that time about the problems with such meds, I used it. Because my sleep did improve, I continued to take it.
Early June 2013
The Lone Star Tick’s home was in a small strip of Virginia woodlands, where she lived her tick life among the leaf litter. As one would expect, she was waiting for a warm-blooded dinner host to come along through the trees. Perhaps she worried about being eaten by a foraging possum before she could get her own meal. She was spared the fate of becoming a possum snack, however, when her unwitting human host brushed against her. Unbeknownst to her and her host, they were about to take a road trip together across several U.S. states!
Late June 2013
Ugh. While getting ready for work one morning, I discovered another gross skin tag located not-quite-on-my-side but not-quite-on-my-back. I couldn’t see it, but could feel it. I tugged at it experimentally to get an idea of its size.
Huh. It pulled my skin like a skin tag, but… It felt a little different than the usual tags. I dug around the bathroom cabinets, looking for a hand mirror that I could use in tandem with the large bathroom mirror to view this new unwelcome growth.
GAAAH! What I saw was a tick, fastened into my skin. Ticks have always freaked me out. Because I was home alone at the time with no one to assist me, I hurriedly finished dressing and drove straight to an urgent care clinic to Get. That. Thing. Off!
The clinic doctor removed the tick safely and identified it as a female Lone Star Tick. “Weeell,” the doc said, “Lone Stars don’t typically carry Lyme disease, but they can carry a lot of other ones. I’m putting you on a six-week course of amoxicillin.” The tick hadn’t ended up in the belly of a possum, but immediately found herself inside a little glass bottle (which, for some reason, the doctor gave me to take away with me, like some odd souvenir).
Mid-July 2013
My body wasn’t at all happy with that much amoxicillin; in the third or fourth week, it was giving me a lot of painful indigestion, and I wanted to come off that medicine.
Guess what other medicine I decided would be a good idea to quit – remember that sleep medication I was prescribed back in March? Yup. Did I mention I was naïve about sleep meds? I had no idea that stopping them could cause physical withdrawal symptoms. So there I was, with heartburn and gut pain and nausea and restlessness and anxiety. Oh my! Maybe it was a heart attack! Or maybe it was just because of the meds. But maybe I shouldn’t ignore the symptoms and take that chance.
A trip to the hospital emergency room and subsequent cardiac tests confirmed that I was not and had not, in fact, experienced a heart attack. Whew! Still, it was all very unpleasant and just a wee bit traumatic, so I was extremely glad to put all of that behind me.
Late July 2013
“Ha-ha,” my body said. “Psych! You only thought it was all behind us!”
One morning as I was getting dressed for work, I happened to notice a very dark brown, tick-shaped spot on my upper not-quite-my-back, not-quite-my-shoulder. I was starting to freak out; No! Not again! I couldn’t get a good look at it, but this time there was someone else at home to check it out. Not a tick. Whew! That was fortunate.
But if it’s not a tick, and I haven’t seen it before…
I immediately called to make an appointment with my dermatologist. He and I don’t like to dilly-dally when it comes to weird new things on my skin, as I had had two episodes of skin melanoma in years past.
Mid-August 2013
The dermatologist called me personally. That’s never a good sign, I’d learned. According to the biopsy report, that not-a-tick thingy on my back was yet another melanoma.
Would I have acted quite so quickly on the dermatology issue if I hadn’t been so traumatized by that little Lone Star? Maybe. But maybe not. So as I headed for yet another skin melanoma surgery, I thanked that tick for her role in helping me to PAY ATTENTION.