Homegrown Medicines

Greg's recent entry got me thinking about some of my own experiences. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, and Boy Scouts is a great way to embue young men with a little knowledge on a great many topics; among these is First Aid. I don't have much call to use First Aid - other than cleaning the occasional cut - until I was on my mission.

For the larger chunk of my mission, I served in the office with three other elders. We all lived together in an apartment in Northeast Budapest, and we spent a great deal of time together. During the winter, many of our preparation days were spent in the apartment playing Risk or Monopoly (both of which became extremely intense games filled with intrigue and under-the-table deals and negotiations that ultimately ended in betrayal). During the spring and summer, though, we would occasionally get out to see some of the sights.

After one of our excursions, we discovered that one of the elders had a tick embedded in his leg. This was a call to arms for three elders who had never actually seen someone with a tick before and had garnered a little knowledge from Boy Scouts and rumors on how to remove them. Our subject was a patient, slow-to-anger Canadian elder who must have been suffering from a bout of insanity to consent to allow us to treat him.

We all agreed that trying to pull the tick out would separate the body from the head, leaving the head in the leg to spread deadly lyme disease. Someone or some-two had heard that ticks breathe through their backs (or somesuch) and that covering them with a thick substance, like vasoline, would suffocate them, so that they would remove themselves from the host. We didn't have Vasoline - the substance of choice - so we grabbed some vegetable oil and put it on the tick, which didn't budge an millimeter.

Well, it was a long shot. So, what next? Heat! Yes, heat will make it move. Somebody ran to the kitchen to grab some matches (every kitchen had some, since you often had to use them to light the stove). Carefully now, one elder lit the match and drew it close to our subject's leg. He gritted his teeth and bore the pain as the flame first singed hair, and then cooked the tick.

Now he had a dead, charred tick in his leg. We knew that we weren't going to get it to pull itself out. Another elder insisted that if you grabbed the tick gently with tweezers and turned them in one direction - clockwise or counter-clockwise, I don't remember which - the tick would come right out. So, we got a pair of tweezers and gave it a shot. Either we didn't do it right or the rule doesn't apply to charred ticks, but in either case, the body snapped off leaving a little tick head embedded in our poor elder's leg.

We had to get it out, but how? I don't know why he let us do this, but someone decided that we could use some toenail clippers to cut out a little chunk of skin containing the tick's head. I'm hoping we at least "sterilized" them before use. We gave the tweezers to our victim, who did the job himself, after several painful clips.

Now, you may ask, "why?" Why did we do this? Why didn't we just go to an emergency room? Well, first and foremost, we were in Hungary, and although that's far from a third-world nation, the hospitals still leave much to be desired. But probably the real reason was that we had all been Boy Scouts, so we figured we knew what to do. Yeah, this from scouts like me who used to sit around the campfire at night, shaking up soda cans and tossing them in the fire to watch them explode - that's a whole different story.