Flick the Tick! 5K Supports Lyme Disease

The Paugwonk Courant 

 

1. Register now for “Flick the Tick!” Registration is just $20. All race proceeds will be donated to the Lyme Disease Association (LDA). The LDA is the nation’s leading advocacy group for Lyme Disease awareness and research. Help us beat this disease, scourge of humans and horses alike.

2. Chip-timing will be provided by Last Mile Racing.

The Treasure Hill Farm 5K Course

 

 

 

Let’s do the IV before the food arrives, he said. I’d driven in from Connecticut, our other brother was on his way down from the Upper West Side with Indian food. The gauze wrapped around Marc’s arm was stiff with iodine and dried blood. Don’t worry, he said, the cannula is clean. What the hell is a cannula, I asked. This, he said, pinching the plastic dongle hanging out of his vein.

 

His skin was dry and crinkled like tissue paper. He hooked up the line and adjusted the drip. We sat on the couch in front of the Xbox. In our twenties, we played Halo, online and a lot of it, when he lived in California and I in Connecticut. It was how we talked, for free, while splattering each other across the universe. Now in our thirties, we sat in silence, side by side on his couch, half-assedly picking up weapons and dropping them. I didn’t want to shoot at him. What I wanted, desperately, was the color to return to his skin.

 

Frankie arrived with the food. Marc pulled on the IV pole to help himself stand and he rolled it over the table. As we ate, we talked about the Farm and the challenges of its construction. Marc had designed the building, but his weekend trips to Salem to oversee the project were getting rarer–blacking out on the sidewalk was one thing, blacking out behind the wheel on I-95 quite another.

 

We cleared away the cartons and spread a copy of the blueprint across the table. The weather the previous winter had set us back a few months, but we were pleased with the progress that summer. The barn was nearly finished. We discussed the design of the lockers and the wall in the indoor arena. Those last few months, the details consumed us.

 

Marc had always been the athletic one–the tallest, the most coordinated, a star pitcher on the Gardner Lake Little League team. My shining moment on Round Hill Road was a solitary excuse-me triple because the right fielder was sitting on his glove. What I was, was the eldest. It was my job to protect him, protect them both. Watching Marc sit, exhausted, in a white t-shirt, skin like parchment and his eyes tired, I felt like I’d failed him, that when he first started getting sick years ago I should have insisted it was Lyme Disease. I mean, Christ, we went to East Lyme High School–Lyme itself sprang from our woods, our fields, our trails and yards. Of anywhere in the nation, we probably knew the most about ticks and red rings and the fallacies and mysteries of its diagnosis.

 

The bag of Doxycycline was empty. Marc unhooked the rig and scattered its components on the table. Screw Lyme, he said, defiant rather than angry. I knew the look on his face. I’d seen it in our backyard, I’d seen it at the baseball fields, I’d seen it on Lake Pattagansett with an oar in his hand, and I’d seen it on the golf course. I knew better than anyone when Marc was about to win.

 

Two months later, after an aggressive course of IV treatment, my brother beat his Lyme Disease into remission. Now, it’s time to help others do the same. It’s time to Flick the Tick.