Tickmageddon
Laura Finney
8/22/2026
There was a time in my life when a tick was just a tick. I’d find one crawling up my leg, scream as if I’d found a tarantula in my bed, remove it, dispatch it and spend the next 48 hours feeling like I had bugs crawling all over my body. Those were the good old days.
I’m not saying that, thanks to Alpha-Gal, I am now an expert on all things tick. But I will admit that I spend more time thinking about those little buggers and what fresh hell they might deliver next than I spend thinking about dinner. And I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about dinner.
I suppose that’s like most of life. You don’t consider something until it has a direct bearing on your existence and then it becomes all consuming. Such is the way of the tick – creeping silently into my world and then acting like it owns the place.
So where did they suddenly come from? Were they always there and I was blissfully unaware? Can I please go back to that blissful stage? Pretty please? Because all of this ‘awareness’ is frankly exhausting.
I don’t want to have conversations about which to apply first, sunblock or tick spray. (By the way, it’s sunblock.) I don’t want to do a check every time I cross the lawn. And there is no universe where I want to tuck my pants into my socks as if I’m morphing into Steve Urkel. I mean, could suspenders be far behind?
A lot of the blame is currently being laid at the feet … hoofs … of deer. I’m not sure when they went from adorable woodland creatures to mass transit systems for parasitic implements of destruction but here we are.
In the early part of the 20th century, white tail deer had nearly been hunted to extinction. When I was a child in the 70’s, while driving through the west, we stopped to photograph a tiny brown speck about ½ a mile away. A deer! We’d never seen one! Today they come right up to my back door demanding coffee to go with their breakfast of my garden.
I’m not saying that it’s the deer’s fault. They are the victims here too. But a single deer can play host to hundreds and possibly maybe even one thousand ticks at a time. The ticks hop on board, enjoy a meal, meet someone special and see the countryside. Quite honestly, throw in a cocktail and most of us would sign up for that.
And what comes of these all-inclusive trips? Children. Thousands of them. The common deer tick can lay up to three thousand eggs while the lone star – ever the overachiever of the group – can lay up to five thousand or more. And quite honestly, I get why these suckers are so aggressive. They have abandonment issues.
There is no nesting, no coddling, no bedtime tick stories. The mother lays an egg mass – sometimes described as looking like misplaced caviar (which would be an excellent name for a band) – roughly the size of a dime and then wanders off to die. Leaving her children to eventually hatch and find their own way in the world. Which seems rather cold to me.
And that brings me to the tick bomb. Yes, this is a real thing. My friend recently happened through one and spent the next week coating his bite riddled legs with topical steroids. He had over 50 tick bites. I was going to go into detail but I’d like you to keep reading so delete, delete, delete. Google it if you’d like to know more about tick bombs but trust me, you probably don’t want to do that.
Which brings us to the real question … can we stop tickmageddon? Is anyone even trying? Increasingly I see news of the explosive rise of ticks. Call me crazy, but when I see “explosive rise” I want it followed by “so we are declaring war on the ticks.” What we are actually hearing is “so treat your clothes and your skin with tick repellent.”
I’m sorry, the answer from the powers that be is make yourself harder to eat?
Have we learned nothing from B-movies? When the blood sucking creatures begin to multiply by the thousands you don’t issue wardrobe recommendations to the townspeople. You eliminate the blood sucking creatures! I’m just saying!
I’d love to end this on a high note. Something along the lines of “as of this writing, a task force has been formed and rumor has it, they have created a way to eradicate the ticks and reverse the effects of tick borne illness.”
But I can’t … yet. So until that day, I will continue to make myself the least appealing meal out there, check myself with the vigilance of a woman who has learned that freckles can move and treat the great outdoors like the minefield it has become.
But tucking my pants into my socks? That is a bridge too far.