I’m a terrible host. Don’t get me wrong - I throw a fantastic party. But when it comes to serving as a host, being a source of food and housing for crawling, scuttling, burrowing, bloodsucking creatures, I mean…I’m not great. I’m not great. I’m not that great, actually.
What I’m most – let’s call it concerned about – are ticks, leeches, headlice, bedbugs. Despite Zika and West Nile, I’ve got no beef with mosquitoes. Mosquitoes I respect. They’re upfront, they announce themselves, they’ve got enough courtesy to whine. It’s a fair fight. The animals I have a problem with are all stealth-ninja-don’t-realise-they’re-on-you-until-you-caught-some-horrible-disease-and-might-have-to-burn-your-clothes-and-furniture types.
Despite being a psychologist myself, I never thought of myself as having a phobia. I only recently realised the things I’m most afraid of in the world cluster into this category.
And as the book of mental disorders puts it, this does cause me clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.
And I’m starting to wonder whether I need to do something about it. Because I love nature, and this separates me from nature. And it affects my social relationships with humans that I love. When I saw head lice on my daughter, I almost threw her off me and wouldn’t let her get close for days – she was four. For weeks later I made my husband check my head constantly, like a chimpanzee grooming ritual. Occasionally, I’d wake him in the night to check again.
For months before I went to Nepal, I researched all the amazing things I could do in this beautiful country. But I kept reading about leech attacks. One person stopped off at a tea hut on the Annapurna Circuit to find her boots filled with blood because leeches can make themselves thin enough to go through the eyelets for your boot laces. In monsoon season Chitwan National Park was full of the mud that leeches love. I’d bought ugly gray supposedly leech-proof gaiters, but I couldn’t trust them. I never went to Annapurna, I never went to Chitwan. My friends went and had adventures. I stayed in Pokhara. I ate lentil dahl in the restaurants listening to Nepalese cover bands, who seemed obsessed with Sweet Child of Mine by Guns & Roses. I didn’t experience much nature.
I can’t remember when I became afraid of ticks, but that’s the big one now, and I cannot cope with it when I come home to this area. I thought moving to England meant that I’d never have to worry about ticks again, but when I ran into a friend in London and asked after her partner, she said he was ‘really struggling with the Lymes,’ and I said, ‘Excuse me?’ Turns out, he’d caught Lyme Disease camping in bloody Wales. The GP didn’t know what the bulls-eye rash was and didn’t treat it. Now he’s living with the consequences. Suddenly I didn’t want to go camping anywhere ever again.
My sister is a vet and obviously can’t be bothered by ticks. A couple years ago I had to lean on her for support in an emergency. I was visiting Louisville, the place from which I hail, and we’d been walking in the woods near Otter Creek. The next day I saw spots of blood where Marcus had been lying. I love him, but I wouldn’t let him come near me because I knew he had ticks. He seemed downcast but I tried to make him understand, from a distance, it wasn’t personal.
I rang my sister’s vet practice. ‘Is she free? Marcus has ticks, they’re everywhere, they’re on his back and hindquarters, I need help.’
I was so distressed that the receptionist went straight to my sister and said, ‘Elaine’s really freaked out and she’s bringing her dog in for you to remove the ticks.’ Sara knows about my phobia but thinks it’s silly, and she’s also a very a busy woman, and she said, ‘What are you talking about, Elaine’s bringing her dog in?’ And the receptionist said, ‘Yeah, if that’s okay,’ and Sara said, ‘I don’t think that’s possible,’ and the receptionist said, ‘Oh, but she’s so upset, maybe she could just drop Marcus off and you could do it quickly?’
My veterinary surgeon sister said, ‘Marcus is her husband, and you need to call her back, right now and tell her no.’
Having something feeding on me or my loved ones connects me, in a way that feels uncomfortable, to my own animal nature. To all the tiny, silent battles involved trying to stay alive. Maybe even to death itself. But my phobia’s been an inconvenience, and it has kept me back. I would like to do something about it. But if I don’t, I think, well, my fear’s mostly affecting me.
But my 12-year-old came home from summer camp in Otter Creek this past summer, saying she’d struggled to sleep much of the time. She imagined things crawling on her in bed. Thanks a lot for that, she said to me. She described what it was like, and I can picture it. My precious daughter at camp, surrounded by nature, but standing panicked and alone, at 2 am, under the electric light in the toilet block…checking for ticks.