Blood sucking creatures love me.  If there\’s a mosquito, leech, tick or vampire bat within a 3km radius, it\’ll find me. 

Until I moved to Australia I\’d never come across ticks, in fact I don\’t think I\’d ever even heard of them.  They\’re nasty little creatures that are related to spiders and they burrow their heads into your skin to suck your blood.  If you\’re unlucky, they can also pass on diseases such as Lyme Disease, although thankfully that\’s fairly uncommon.  What is more common is an itchy skin reaction that may also become infected, especially if you don\’t manage to remove the entire tick.

For a couple of weeks last autumn, I couldn\’t step outside without getting a tick (sometimes more than one) and one of them, on my lower back, turned particularly nasty.  It swelled up, becoming extremely itchy and also caused a hot, red itchy patch in my groin where the lymph nodes were.  I ended up freaking out a bit and went to the doctor after a couple of days.  She prescribed me antibiotics and told me to have some blood tests done to see if I\’d contracted any yucky blood borne diseases.  The antibiotics worked but… I don\’t like to take them if there\’s an alternative.

So when exactly the same thing happened a few days ago I decided to take matters into my own hands and headed to the medicine cupboard aka my pantry.  I mixed up a paste of chopped onion, turmeric, apple cider vinegar and lavender oil (recipe below) and popped in on as a poultice.  The anti-itch effect was immediate and lasted a good couple of hours before the bite started itching again.  I left the poultice on overnight and then cleaned the area and put a fresh one on in the morning which I wore throughout the day.  By the end of the day, the itching was barely there, the swelling had significantly reduced and the inflammation around the lymph node had gone.