A Tick Put My Husband in the Emergency Room Twice
And we run a pest control company.
Overview
My husband J.K. is the COO of U.S. Pest Protection. Our family has been in the pest control business in Middle Tennessee since 1985. We spend our working lives thinking about ticks — where they live, when they are active, how to keep them off people.
Last week a tick bit J.K. Within five days, he had been to the emergency room twice.
I am writing this while he is still recovering, because if it can happen to him, it can happen to anybody reading this, and because there is one part of what happened that I need people in Middle Tennessee to understand.
What Actually Happened:
J.K. had been walking through some untreated farmland. After coming inside, he found the tick and did the right thing. He went to a doctor and had it removed properly. No folk remedies, no waiting to see. For the overwhelming majority of tick bites, that would have been the end of it.
Yet three days later, he was in the emergency room with a high fever.
They ran tests. They could not find anything definitively wrong. They sent him home — which, I want to be clear, was not a failure on their part. Early tick-borne illness is genuinely hard to identify. The bloodwork often looks unremarkable in the first days, and the symptoms look like any summer virus going around.
Two days after that, it was back to the emergency room again.
The fever had never broken. By then he had severe back pain, a headache unlike anything he had experienced, red, irritated eyes, extreme sweat, urine gone dark, and a rash spreading on his stomach around the place the tick had bitten him.
J.K. is now on antibiotics. His lab work has not come back yet, so we do not know exactly which illness this is. What his physicians do know is that it is tick-borne, and that it was not something to keep waiting on.
The Part I Need You to Hear
The doctors started treating him before they had a diagnosis.
That is not a shortcut. With the tick-borne illnesses that occur in Tennessee, physicians are advised to treat on clinical suspicion rather than waiting for laboratory confirmation because the tests can lag behind the point at which treatment needs to begin. Waiting for certainty is how these illnesses become serious.
So, if you take one thing from our week, let it be this: after a tick bite, do not wait for a rash, do not wait for a test result, and DO NOT talk yourself out of the second visit because the first one found nothing.
The first ER visit finding nothing is the most dangerous moment in this whole story. That is the moment where a lot of people go home, decide they are being dramatic, and try to sleep it off.
What to watch for after a tick bite
Generally, in the two weeks following a bite, you should promptly call a physician if you develop:
- Fever or chills
- Severe headache
- A rash anywhere on the body, including at the bite site
- Deep muscle or back pain
- Unusual fatigue, or simply feeling profoundly unwell
- Any change you cannot explain
Tell them three things: that you had a tick bite, roughly when it happened, and which type of tick, if you know. That last piece is why we tell people to seal the tick in a bag or photograph it before disposing of it. Thirty seconds at the time is worth a great deal later.
And if you have already been seen and are getting worse — go back. Go back the same way J.K. did.
Why I am writing this as a pest control owner
It would be easy to turn this into an advertisement. I am not going to, because the honest version is more useful.
No treatment eliminates every tick from an outdoor property. What we can do is substantially reduce how many ticks are living in the places people routinely walk — the wood line edge, the leaf litter, the tall grass at the fence, the wood pile, the shaded spot where the kids play. Fewer ticks in those places means fewer bites. Fewer bites means fewer chances for a week like the one we just had.
That is the whole claim, and it is a real one. It is prevention, not medicine.
It is also why our tick programs run twelve months a year instead of a few applications in the spring. Ticks are active in Tennessee any day it gets above roughly forty-five degrees, and the different life stages are out at different times of year. It’s why we treat with outside rigs rather than foggers — so the material goes down into the leaf litter and along the tree line where ticks actually are, instead of drifting wherever the air takes it.
None of that would have provided a 100% guarantee that J.K. would not get bitten. But it is the difference between a property that produces ticks all season and one that does not, lessening the chances of bites significantly. And after this week, I am not going to apologize for believing in this treatment.
The simple things, which we did not do well enough
- Check yourself every time you come in from tall grass, brush, or the woods. Scalp, hairline, behind the ears, waistband, groin, behind the knees, between the toes. A nymph is the size of a poppy seed.
- Shower within two hours of coming inside.
- Tumble dry clothes on high for ten minutes. Washing alone does not reliably kill ticks.
- Treat clothing with permethrin and use an EPA-registered repellent on skin.
- Check the dogs. They are the most common way a tick gets into a house.
- Keep the grass cut, clear the leaf litter, and put a barrier between the lawn and the woods.
We know all of this. We tell customers all of this. And it still happened, because you only have to miss once.
Where things stand
J.K. is on antibiotics and being followed closely by his physicians. We are waiting on lab work to tell us exactly what this was. When we know, I will update this post, because the specific answer matters less than the pattern — and the pattern is what I want people in Middle Tennessee to recognize.
A tick bite is usually nothing. Usually.
But if you start running a fever a few days after one, take it seriously the first time. Do not wait for it to look like something on a chart. And if they send you home and you get worse, go back.
U.S. Pest Protection is a pest control company. We are not medical providers, and this account is personal and descriptive only — it is not medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment, and it is not a substitute for care from a qualified physician.
If you have been bitten by a tick, or you are experiencing symptoms you believe may be related to a tick bite, contact your physician or seek medical care. Do not delay medical care based on anything you read here.
Our services reduce tick populations on your property. They are a prevention measure. They do not prevent, treat, or cure any illness.
