I HATE ticks! I hate that they are so hard to see once they attach to your or your pet's body. I hate that they suck blood, but I hate even more the diseases that they carry and this story is so super scary because it happened so close to home and it happened to a three year old girl.

I have friends who have been stricken with Lyme disease from tick bites that weren't diagnosed in a timely manner. Tick bites in the east have been causing deadly brain swelling and death.

And now this story of a little girl from La Grande, just a few hours drive from Boise is scaring the hell out of me.

In a post on Amanda Lewis's Facebook page she describes this horrific and scary situation:

" Evelyn started acting a little weird last night around bed time. This morning she was having a hard time standing. She could barely walk, or crawl, and could hardly use her arms. We decided to take her into the ER right after we took this video because her symptoms were getting worse.  We got into a room quickly, thank God, and were seen almost right away. The doctor talked to us for a minute and said over the past 15 years he had seen about 7 or 8 children her age with identical symptoms and more than likely she had a tick. They looked her over, combed through her hair really well and sure enough found a tick hiding in her hair."

According to the American Lyme Disease Foundation, tick paralysis is a disease that attacks the use of a person’s muscles causing partial paralysis.

Symptoms like numbness of the legs and muscle pains begin after a tick has attached itself to the person or pet. The good news is that once the tick is removed, normally symptoms typically improve.

Lewis posted an update on her Facebook page about her daughter's recovery, saying "she is doing much better."

“Evelyn is doing much better. It took her until the next morning to start acting like herself again,”

According to Wikipedia, "Tick paralysis results from injection of a toxin from tick salivary glands during a blood meal. The toxin causes symptoms within 2–7 days, beginning with weakness in both legs that progresses to paralysis. The paralysis ascends to the trunk, arms, and head within hours and may lead to respiratory failure and death. The disease can present as acute ataxia without muscle weakness."

 

 

More From 107.9 LITE FM