Day 78: Nipples, needles, and friends

Content warning: Pictures that look like nipples but aren’t nipples.

I woke up today, put on my workout clothes to exercise outside, and then felt the weird bump under my shirt that I had noticed yesterday but ignored. I lifted my shirt, and bam:

Nope, not my nipple.

It was a tick. I walked back inside, turned to Stedman, who was working at his desk, and asked, “Yo, is this a tick?” Cathy, Zain, and Josh immediately came over.

“I think we’re supposed to heat up a match to get it off.”

A quick Google search disproved that.

Stedman got his tweezers and pulled it off, but the head broke off and remained buried inside my skin. Stedman felt bad about it, but I was just grateful that he was there to help in the first place.

And so, the quest began to remove the embedded head. I lay down on our workout bench and Cathy got to work with a sewing needle (disinfected with rubbing alcohol, of course):

She got most of it out, but there was a bit that remained. Josh took the role of surgeon and cut around the tick bits to try to remove the leftovers. We weren’t entirely successful. We hoped my body would push it out on its own.

The aftermath:

We figured that I probably got bitten by the tick when a few of us went hiking two days ago. Unfortunately, I didn’t find the tick yesterday despite complaining about my ribs feeling sore/bruised and noticing that there happened to be a weird bump under my shirt (it’s really strange to me now that I didn’t think to lift my shirt to look at it but I must have assumed it was a weirdly misplaced pimple or something?). I also fell into a classic trap where I plan to work out, delay showering since I’m going to shower after working out, and then get sucked into working or something else for the rest of the day and end up not working out or showering. Yesterday was one of those days, and that meant that the tick had an extra 24 hours to fully gorge itself on my blood. This is the price I pay for being a lazy, dirty boy.

So now there’s the chance that I’ll get Lyme disease. Going to a medical care facility doesn’t sound like the best idea right now given, you know, THE PANDEMIC so I’m going to watch to see if I develop any early Lyme disease symptoms over the next several weeks. The early symptoms apparently can resemble the flu, which is perfect because I won’t know whether I’m suffering from coronavirus or about to descend into cognitive decline and other neurological problems associated with Lyme disease.

So, all in all, life is pretty great right now.

Heh, but actually, I feel incredibly thankful to be surrounded by dear friends who are willing to take care of me. I felt incredibly calm throughout the whole ordeal this morning, even when I was being stabbed by a needle, and I think the amount of trust I have for the people I’m with here helped. I feel almost insensitive expressing this gratitude because I know that there are tons of people who aren’t able to have close friends nearby given the social distancing environment we’re currently in. But I am thankful nonetheless!