I was quite surprised to get a phone call early June saying a local doctor was willing to take me on as a patient.  On top of that, it’s a woman, she’s young, and the office is on Pandosy and KLO, in other words, my hood.  I shop right there at Lakeview Market so it’s meant to be.

I met with Doc Bielby and told her I’ve sprouted a small forest of moles on my chest, and she looked at them and said she wasn’t concerned but would refer me to a skin doc to examine them with a more powerful instrument than she has.  She said “It’ll take a while” to which I replied I didn’t care, given there’s likely nothing funny going on.

I then went to Osoyoos for the weekend, and our neighbour Bonnie invited me on their “nature walk” which is a seven-acre piece of wild land below their property.  It’s lovely with grasses, indigenous bushes and lovely ponderosa pines.  There are benches in various areas where one can enjoy the view of the lake and mountains.

The next morning as I was brushing my teeth I noticed a dark mole on my chest that seemed to have sprouted overnight, and I thought wow, good thing that doc is on top of this. I put on my glasses and when I touched it, it moved!  I grabbed and pulled, and a tick came out and I threw it into the sink and washed it down, feeling creeped out.  But I know how these things operate, so I took off my nightgown, and sure enough, another new dark spot on my back.

I tried to phone Lynne who wasn’t home, so I phoned Bonnie and she headed right over.  In the meantime I told mom and showed her my back and she said “come over here” as though she thought she knew what she was doing and I said “I don’t want a blind person grabbing at this tick, I want someone who can actually see it.”

A few minutes later Bonnie arrived and asked for a magnifying glass (we have many due to mom’s eyesight) and a pair of tweezers.  This wasn’t working, so she requested a sewing needle and lighter which she then used to apply to the tick’s ass.  Unfortunately as I later learned from Google, that’s the worst way to remove them, however it did work and she was able to pull it out and put it into a glass vile for me.

When I got back to Kelowna I Googled the kind of tick, and it looks like it’s a ‘dog tick.’  This kind doesn’t spread Lyme disease however can cause Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.  I advised my pal Julie, who’s a nurse, and she said just watch for any symptoms like numbness, fever and some other things that I immediately decided I wasn’t going to get, and I didn’t.

Then today I was at RBC and while at the teller discovered I’ve lost my debit card.  I was in shock as I’m the sort of odd person who very rarely loses anything, so I was completely discombobulated and at one point handed my many cards to the teller and asked her to rifle through, which she did, and still nothing.

I said to her, “hey, I’m here to withdraw money, but it turns out I’m also here to report a lost card”.  She immediately cancelled my old one and we checked on-line for weirdness, but nothing.  So you see, if I had only the tick on my back, I would never have known and God knows what would’ve happened.  If I wasn’t at the bank today it could’ve taken a long time to notice my card was missing.  Sometimes bad luck is a kind of good luck in disguise.