This morning I did a half hour or so of stretching routines to ease my tired muscles after yesterday’s long walk. Then went for a walk! To the supermarket to get some essential supplies for lunch and dinner.
When I got home I decided to clean the fridge. I’ve been meaning to do this for ages, and it felt like the right time to get stuck in. I moved everything and pulled out all the shelves and stuff and washed them in soapy water, wiped off the inside of the cabinet, and all of the door compartments. It took two hours to do the whole job, but the fridge is sparkling now. I did a few other small odd jobs and housework tasks.
More productively, I transferred some panorama photos off my phone from yesterday’s walk. Crater Cove (notice the water dragon sitting on the rock at foreground left):
Reef Beach:
This evening, my wife and Scully were out at a yoga class (its dog-friendly and Scully enjoys stretching and chilling out too). I turned on the shower to wash off the day’s manual labour, and was just stepping in when I noticed a weird thing on my leg. I tried to brush it off but it didn’t move. I tried to scrape it more vigorously… and saw a bunch of little legs wave around as the tick dug its head deeper into my skin. I’m guessing I picked up the tick during yesterday’s walk, since it was through a lot of bushland. I did take Scully to the park this afternoon, but we were only on grass and concrete, not in any bush.
I’ve never had a tick bite before, so had no experience on what to do. I quickly looked up a few web sites, and consulted with a friend in chat who is a pharmacist. The best course of action would be to freeze the tick with some sort of spray and then pull it out with needle-nose tweezers, neither of which I had. I decided the best course of action was to have a doctor remove it, and raced up to the hospital emergency room – fortunately just 10 minutes walk from my home.
I figured I’d have a bit of a wait, not being a serious emergency, but fortunately there weren’t many people there, and I was in an out within about an hour. A doctor saw me, applied some freezing spray to kill the tick, then extricated it carefully, and I was good to go. Thankfully there seems to be no adverse reaction, no itching or swelling or allergic reaction. (Also, thankfully being in Australia, there was no bill to pay.)
It did ruin the dinner I’d planned to cook, as my wife arrived home from yoga hungry and decided to make herself a sandwich while waiting for me to come home from the hospital. Ah well! 😀
New content today:
amazing – australia does have all the deadliest creatures in the world…
when I had a dog, I did end up with some ticks on occasion – never went to the hospital with them (also – the service here is not nearly as quick as in australia). we did use anti-ticks shampoo and collar on our dog, but living in a rural area means a lot of critters around – lucky me, this area only has a few dangerous animals. The ticks usually either fall on their own or get ripped off – the mouth area is the only part that might get stuck, and that’s not the dangerous part – the bacteria is more harmfull.
We have paralysis ticks, which have a potentially dangerous venom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ixodes_holocyclus
Also being in Australia, you presumably don’t have Lyme disease, rampant here in the northeastern USA. Glad you’re OK.
No, we don’t have Lyme disease here, but the venom of one common tick species is somewhat dangerous to humans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ixodes_holocyclus