Luke and the Butt Tick
About a week before we found out she had Lyme's disease, I'd made my husband check the girl child for ticks.
"Hey, isn't there manly man stuff outside for me to do?" Ticks are creepy and gross. How much manlier could he get?! Head checks were his job!
A few days later, I learned that the population density of the deer tick, carrier of Lyme's disease, can be plotted at the CDC website. If you look at the blackest, densest part of that graph, you'll see that it's in central New Jersey. If you look closely enough at that dense blackness, you'll see my old house.
Anyway, while I'm clearly not a fan of New Jersey, it does have its good points. It has beautiful beaches, some excellent colleges, the Pine Barrens, and great Italian restaurants. Also, it gave us The Sopranos, which redeems them quite a bit, really. They don't mention ticks in the brochures, though.
We had two acres of woods, a dog, a cat, and five kids; daily tick checks were essential. Especially for the girl. The girl with long hair. Who liked to sneak the long-haired cat into her room to trap, I mean cuddle, at night. But even with the best precautions, in the four years we lived in Jersey, we pulled hundreds of ticks off of ourselves, the kids, and our pets.
It was one of those sweltering summer spells, the kind that ensure you a $500 electric bill, when I noticed that Luke, one of our cats, was dragging his butt back and forth across the carpet. Wiggling his rear, he mewled gutturally, scootching himself along the floor. Turning around, he dragged himself back the other direction. After watching him do this a few times, it was clear he wasn't just trying to scratch his oversized butt as he made his way toward the food bowl. So I figured it was time to investigate.
Picking up the cat, I looked him over for easy fixes, like burrs or broken legs or a chewed up tail or something.
Lifting his tail, the problem was obvious. Luke had a tick, and it was sticking out of his butt. The tiny, still mostly flat tick had embedded itself in the sphincter; only its abdomen showed. Poor, desperate Luke. No creature should have to endure that. Naturally, I called my husband.
"Luke has a tick in his butt. He's trying to scrape it off on the carpet." I watched Luke drag himself across the floor again. He stared at me, silently begging for help, eyes filled with misery.
"You're not thinking of taking the cat to the vet for this are you?" The bastard. "No way plucking a tick out of his butt's worth two hundred bucks." I hung up. And as the day moved on, the tick grew. By the time my husband got home from work Luke's butt tick was fat and bloated, ripe for the picking.
Annoyingly, the husband made a good case for holding the dangerous end of the cat, meaning that I was in charge of the tweezers. Believe me, this was not Plan A. In fact me working the tweezers was somewhere around Plan D. Or F. So I got to be protected by the strong manly-man who selflessly volunteered to keep the cat from hurting me, and at great danger to himself, or so he claimed. Yay, me!
Experienced cat stalkers that we are, our suddenly suspicious cat was faster. Somehow clued in to our evil scheme, he zipped across the room and flew down the stairs. Skulking behind him, I tried grabbing him before he slipped under the couch. Five minutes later, we dragged Luke out from under the couch, shredding carpet in his wake.
We wrapped the cat in a towel, carefully and firmly restraining all of the stabby and bitey parts. Taking a deep breath, I gingerly reached toward his butt, lifted his tail, and tried to grab the tick with my tweezers without getting my face to close to ground zero. My aim wasn't so great; the point of my tweezers poked him.
He stiffened. Yelping like a puppy, Luke's butt contracted. It sucked the entire tick back inside of the cat's butt by at least a centimeter. A couple of minutes later, I watched with fascinated horror as his butt give birth to the tick. Trying again with even less success, the cat twitched convulsively, growling at us. Our plan wasn't working very well, probably because I was trying to avoid getting too close.
"Hurry this up. He's stabbing me through the towel, and I don't know how much longer I'm going to be able to restrain him without hurting him."
Glaring at the husband and taking a deep breath, I made a resolution: I would not fear the butt. I leaned in and went to work. Getting a good grip on the tick this time, my husband tightened his hold on the cat. Slowly, steadily, I pulled on the tick. I knew that a quick tug would very likely break the tick, leaving its head embedded in Luke's butt - on the wrong side of his sphincter. I needed to avoid that.
Sometimes, there are things in life that don't need to be experienced. This was one of them. Let me just say that soft, moist tissue in most mammals is potentially stretchy. However, there's a fine line between "potentially stretchy" and "can span multiple zip codes."
Imagine turning a skinny, wet pink balloon inside out. And then a cat screaming, breaking loose, and running across the house. Yeah, it was kinda like that, only louder and much more horrifying. The tick dangled and squirmed off the end of my tweezers. I would have smiled, but the sight of Luke's inside-out butt had traumatized me.
I'm happy to report that the cat's butt had plenty of elasticity left, and Luke was fine. Within the hour, he crawled out from under the couch and slinked past me with almost no suspicion in his eyes. It's a little bit sad that he never understood what an enormous favor we did for him that day. I guess that's one of the downsides to being a cat.