So...
Saturday afternoon, after feeling for a few hours like I had a rope burn across the upper part of my neck near the hairline, I asked my husband to take a look.
After all, occipital pain is found just a bit higher than that, perhaps an inch higher than the hairline, so I figured for awhile that I was just experiencing more occipital pain.
My husband found a tick firmly embedded in my skin on my upper neck.
He plucked, carefully, the little feller from his homestead claim (the tick's, not my husband's) and we looked it over closely. It looked like every part of the tick had come out.
But I felt a real painful tenderness in my right lymph node under my jaw and also above the site (the bite site). And it wasn't getting better.
So, at 8 pm, I asked my husband to drive me to the ER at the hospital just a mile or so from our house. After a long wait to get in, spent enjoyable visiting with a young woman who checked in right after me with a bug bite reaction on her back (!), the doctor saw me and said that the head of the tick was still in my skin.
She dug it out and gave me a prescription for Amoxicillin. Saying I should fill it and take it only IF I felt there was infection going on.
She told me, when asked, that our ticks here do not carry any nasty things like Lyme's or Tick Fever, but the only concern is infection, especially given I am having surgery at exactly (!) this same area in 10 days.
On Sunday, the pain in the lymph node was worse and also lots of pain around the area of the bite. That little bugger really emptied some poison into me! So, I got the ABX (antibiotics) and started taking them yesterday afternoon.
This morning, I felt very nauseous and more weak and sick than usual (if that's possible). But, after taking a short nap at about noon, I started feeling a lot more like my normal self, meaning I'm weak, I hurt in every cell in my body and especially occipitally, BUT not sick to my stomach stuff.
I will have to let someone at TCI know about this and pray hard that it will not interfere with my surgery. IF my surgery is a "go" on June 4. After all, infection with these fusions happen pretty often, they are the one thing I'm most concerned about, and me getting a tick bite infection at exactly the site of the incision (!), well, I know I have to be careful.
Well, at least it wasn't a rattlesnake bite!
