DO NOT MESS AROUND WITH DEER TICKS.

Deer ticks are serious business. Two of my three kids have had Lyme disease as adults. I got a deer tick on me while sitting in my garden in a residential area in a town in NE USA (in an area where ticks are endemic). Luckily spotted it and removed it almost as soon as it bit.

Both of the kids were very ill. One had the bulls-eye rash so we were alerted and luckily went straight to hospital as kid developed Lyme disease encephalitis. The other (no longer living at home) had no symptoms at first and THOUGHT THE TICK HAD NOT BEEN ON FOR LONG so did not worry. But then developed flu-like symptoms, head-ache, and finally Lyme-induced FACIAL PALSY.
Which is no joke and lasts for weeks.

It is misleading for docs to say don't worry unless the tick has been on you for 24 hours or more. In my opinion and in that of some doctors, if you have a deer tick bite at all, you should take the antibiotics just to be safe. But this is controversial.

Untreated Lyme disease can ruin your life.

There is no human vaccine, the one that was in development did not work enough to be licensed, though approved for animals.

There was a very effective human vaccine, lymerix, IIRC, but the anti-vaccers got at it, and it was withdrawn. A competing, successful vaccine was withdrawn before it came on the market, even after good trials results.

I did some web research, and the result was a little confusing. Some authorities say that it's calcium supplements, also iron supplements or anti-acids, that will interfere with doxycycline...rather than calcium in food.
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/d...s/a682063.html

Other reputable sites say avoid any kind of calcium as much as possible. Still other advice is to not eat dairy 2 hours before or one hour after taking doxycycline. Honestly, how is one to know?

Taking antibiotics with yogurt is a no-brainer--I do that all the time in an attempt to keep my system in balance. But since I received only one large dose of the doxy (as a preventive) I'm trying to follow the nurse's directions to cut all calcium out for 5 days.

It's so hard because I love my milk-heavy cuppas all day long--they keep me going! The husband, thinking to be helpful, bought me some soy milk ...BUT ... reading the fine print, it's enriched with calcium! Same with the other milk substitutes in my supermarket, all have added calcium. It's ridiculous!

Finally I found that non-dairy creamer I usually hate, Coffee Mate, has no calcium, so I'm using it in my tea. NOT very good at all, but it'll have to do for a few more days.

Yes, exactly!! Making a breathy noise like a violin just missing a note in the highest register. A modified, quiet but continual, shriek.

Actually a black widow spider may be more dangerous (more consistently dangerous) than an attached deer tick. But the idea is the same--PANIC.

I guess I should calm down about ticks though. This was my first (known). Some of you posters here seem very matter-of-fact about them. I hope I can learn to take them in stride, too, as this area is chock-a-block with the little devils, and everyone here has a tick "story" ... or three ... or five.

I agree they are horrible, but they are also a fact of life around here, so one can't really head to the doctor every time a tick grabs hold, I'm afraid. I just try to be vigilant -- bandanna over the head when walking in the woods, trousers tucked into socks when gardening, and a body check in the evening, so that if I see something the next day, I know that it wasn't attached the day before and thus have a time frame. We also check the dogs every day to ensure they aren't bringing any nasty little friends into the house -- though they get to have an annual shot, so perhaps they should worry about being close to us!

This thread is oddly making me feel a whole lot better about the scorpions we have to watch out for here. Creepies seem to just be a way of life here, that you become accustomed to and become part of the routine. You guys have your long-sleeved clothing and careful woodland walks and daily body checks for attached black specks; we have no bare feet in the garage ever or the yard after dusk, and scanning the floor of a room as you walk about barefoot in the house, and regular scorp black light hunts in the yard after dark.

This thread is giving me serious second thoughts about moving

Luckily all i get at my house is crickets. I keep shoes in the garage. But i've seen Arizona bark scorpions around the office.

Personally i'd be more concerned about a brown recluse spider bite than a scorpion sting. Or maybe the excruciating pain of a gila monster bite, because once they bite you basically need to pry its jaw open with a screw driver to get it off.

And I'm never out hiking the trails after dusk because that's when the mountain lions start hunting

Hmm, there's 127 worse things about the northeast United States than deer ticks.

Just always wear stout boots and long pants tucked into your socks in PA to minimize risk of being bitten by rattlesnakes, endemic in PA as in NYS. Incidentally this should keep out the deer ticks.

Hubby's been scorpion stung twice, my 10 yr old daughter twice (the first when she was 7) - we're quite casual about scorpions now! Which is lucky, as we currently have one in the sticky trap in my bathroom, and one in the trap in my daughter's bedroom (she has an external door).

Haven't seen a brown recluse yet; the black widow over the weekend was the second one we've found on the property (the first was in an irrigation valve box, when we took the lid off to check for snakes, having found a small dead one just by it).

Haven't seen any mountain lions around here, but we have had a skunk on the front doorstep. We had a coyote in the last house's backyard, and would often hear them howling. That house was in NE Mesa, on a road that's the furthest possible to go in Metro Phoenix without hitting desert on the way to Fountain Hills. It was on flood irrigation and each time we used it, we had to go into the overgrown empty lot next door to open a sluice gate first. The times I had to do it at 1am in the pitch black scared the willies out of me; I used to wear hubby's wellies against snakes in the long grass, and whistle along swinging a torch to scare off all the creatures I could absolutely, definitely hear rustling in the bushes, honest...

Using willies and wellies in the same sentence can cause confusion for Americans since most don't know what a welly is and assume you are referring to a willy.

Finding a katydid on the curtain in the lounge freaked me out enough, glad suburban Virginia is relatively benign on the creepy crawly front.

We have plenty of deer, hoping to pull a tag this year, came across 3 walking the dog today, but I have never heard of Deer Ticks being an issue.

We came across a couple of Moose last week, big and fast buggers, Moose Ticks would probably be more interesting.

Yeah, I knew there was a reason I pay someone to spray the house every two months.