OMG

Last night we had tornadoes blow through town, knocking out power at the Moo's school and around Mom's work, so Mom was late getting home due to insane traffic. She has to stop by the store to pick up cake and ice cream for the Moo's end of the year party, and after doing that got a call from Dad. Dad reminded Mom that for the past four days the Bean has been complaining that her ear hurt her. We looked and did not see anything. Mom cleaned her earrings just in case, and that did not stop the complaining, so Mom became convinced that this was an attention getting issue. Apparently Dad did yet another, more thorough look, and he found a deer tick very firmly embedded within the upper interior folds of the Bean's ear. We are fairly sure that this tick has been there since the Pierre le Bear tick incident.

Mom got home, Dad called the Doctor, and Mom and Dad tried very hard to extract the tick from the Bean's ear. Given it's position, tenacious grip, and the fact that the Bean was having none of it, we were unsuccessful. Dad packed up the Bean and headed out in the middle of the awful squall to the emergency room -- at this point it was about 930 at night. Mom put the very cooperative Moo to bed, started filling to first of 100 water balloons for her party, and tried very hard not to worry. Dad called and said that given all the accidents and injuries caused by the storms, he and the Bean were going to be there awhile.

When they were finally seen, about 2 am, the ER docs were also unsuccessful at extracting the tick. They got the body but not the head. They numbed the by now screaming Bean's ear, put her in a "papoose" to constrain her movement, and dug out the head. They took blood through an IV to test for Lyme disease, gave her two shots of antibiotics, and gave Dad prescriptions for three different medications to treat for Lyme disease (we are proceeding with treatment as if she had it, given the probability that the tick was in her ear for six days and the prevalence of this disease in Loudoun county).

When Dad and the Bean got home at 4 am, the Bean crawled into bed with her anxious Mom and said: "Mommy, I was very brave, but I cried a little bit." Mom assured her that brave girls cry, too, while poor Dad tried to get two hours of sleep before he had to get up at 6am for work.