Creepy Crawlies

It was a dark and not-so-stormy night.

As we pulled out of the driveway, gravel crunched underneath the tires. The mansion-sized lake house stood behind us, quietly watching from its spot in the woods. The water, murky and brown, lapped the muddy banks as we drove down an abandoned road.

There were no streetlights, so I couldn’t see.

But I could feel.

I rubbed my forehead, ten fingers over smooth skin. I moved my hands higher and felt the damp of my hair, still drying. Then I felt . . . a scab? A new zit? No, a scab. It was on my hairline.

I picked the scab and was about the flick it away when I decided to take a closer look. Pressing on the internal car light, I glanced down. Then I stopped breathing. A brown, eight-legged, deer tick crawled around my index finger.

“Omigod! Omigod! Omigod!”

I flung the tick off my hand. My moment of breathlessness was replaced with massive hyperventilating.

“A tick! A tick! A TIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIICK!”

More massive hyperventilating.

“It bit me. It bit me. I have Lyme disease!”

I was inhaling rapid gulps of air and then more and more gulps and I could feel myself becoming lighter as if I were about to float away. All I could think about was Amy Tan -- a writer who was diagnosed with late-stage Lyme disease.

“EEE-ooh, EEE-ooh, EEE-ooh!” (That is supposed to be the sound of my messed up breathing.)

A deep, big voice broke through the night: “CALM DOWN.”

It was Ron.

He pulled the car off the road and drove until he spotted a McDonalds (even in BFE there’s McDonalds). We both jumped out and moved our bodies like worms, trying to shake out the willies. Ron held me by my arms and asked if I was okay. Then he checked me for ticks (or rather, more ticks).

“Ah! What’s on my back?” I screamed.

A strand of hair.

We emptied out the entire contents of our car looking for the little critter. When we couldn’t find him, Ron coaxed me back inside and tried to cheer me up with a vanilla soft cone. I was so busy plotting out how I’d live my life with a debilitating disease that the ice-cream melted and dripped down my t-shirt.

But something bothered me even more than my potential exposure to Lyme disease: my inability to handle stress. What if instead of a tick, we’d gotten in a car wreck? What if instead of seeing a creepy crawly I’d seen a severed a body part (you know, from our car wreck)? What if instead of Lyme disease, I had cancer?

After the tick incident, I was fine. At home, I researched and read up on ticks, I called a doctor, and I came up with a plan for monitoring the red spot on my scalp – the tick bite scar – and will watch for symptoms of disease. But how can I teach myself to calm down in the moment, so that next time there is a crisis I don’t react with panic and hyperventilation, but instead I respond appropriately?

Any input here would be appreciated. In the meantime, if you’d like to freak yourself out, read Amy Tan’s book The Opposite of Fate and then spend a weekend at a lake house in Maryland (tick hotbed of the nation).