Jenna O’Conner MD Facebook ad: “A School Nurse Pulled 9 Ticks Off Kids in ONE Week”

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Meta Ad Library ID

1510450720236507

Platforms

Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Threads

Relaunches

2

Niche

Parenting & Kids

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The school nurse texted our mom group in May: "Pulled 9 ticks off kids this week. Nine. Usually I see that in a whole spring. Check your babies." That was May. It's worse now. I've known that nurse for nineteen years — first professionally, then personally. I'm a physician two towns over; she sends me her worried mothers, and our kids grew up trading birthday parties. So when her message landed, I read it twice. School nurses don't rattle. Nine in a week rattled her. You should have seen the group chat that night. Fourteen mothers typing at once. One had found a tick on her toddler's neck at daycare pickup and assumed it was a scab until it moved. Another posted a photo from her back porch: three ticks on a paper towel, collected in a single afternoon, from a lawn that gets mowed every week. And at the bottom of the thread, one mom asked the question the whole chat was circling — "what are we supposed to actually do about this? because I'm already doing everything" — and it just sat there. Nobody answered her. Including me. I want to be honest about that, because I'm the doctor in that chat, and that night I had nothing better to offer than the same pamphlet advice already failing everyone typing. Hold that thought — because the real answer was in the chat too, keeping quiet for a different reason. ER visits for tick bites just hit the highest number ever recorded for this time of year. That's the CDC's own tracker — I pulled it up myself the morning after the nurse's text, hoping she was exaggerating. She wasn't. There are news segments about people finding ticks by the dozen in mowed suburban backyards. These aren't trailhead stories anymore. The swing set. The bus stop. The kiddie pool that sat on the grass overnight. I've caught myself saying the same four words to parents in my exam room all spring: "This season is different." Here's what's actually happening — and I'm going to say it plainly, because this is the part that makes me angry: none of it is a mystery to anyone who reads the surveillance data. Winters stopped getting cold enough to kill ticks off. The mild ones let almost all of them survive, so each spring starts with more ticks than the last, and this spring started with the biggest hatch anyone's measured. On top of that, the lone star tick — the one behind the red meat allergy I'm now seeing in children — has spread into whole regions it never lived in before. The map from ten years ago is fiction. Your backyard is on the new map. Two more things, because they changed how I look at my own lawn. The spring ticks are mostly nymphs — the size of a poppy seed — and those are the dangerous ones, because nobody spots a poppy seed in a kid's hairline. And a mowed lawn buys you almost nothing: ticks pile up along the edges, the fence line, the leaf litter under the trampoline, the shady strip where the bikes get dumped. A tidy yard is a moat around the exact places kids actually play. And every parent I know — me included, medical degree and all — was running the old playbook: spray them in the morning, check them at night, hope. I ran it harder than anyone after that text. June became a security operation at my house — spray at 7am, re-spray at noon on weekends, socks pulled over pant legs for the walk to the bus, full-body checks at bath time with a comb and a phone flashlight. I kept my kids off the back half of our own yard. At some point I caught myself telling my six-year-old not to lie down in the grass. Lying down in grass is his entire job. That was the week I admitted what the playbook really was: surveillance, shrinking my kids' summer one rule at a time. I know exactly why the playbook fails, because I watch it fail in my office. Sprays wear off in four hours. Checks find ticks after they've been attached — the ones I remove have usually been feeding since the day before, and the family never felt a thing, because tick saliva numbs the skin before the bite. And hope does nothing against a bite that can mean Lyme, or a bullseye rash you catch too late, or a kid who can't eat a hamburger at his own birthday party. That last one is alpha-gal. I went years without seeing a single pediatric case; this spring I've seen several — and this spring also logged the first death on record from it. So what does the school nurse do for her own kids? Because that's the only review that ever matters to me — the same way I watch what surgeons choose for their own families. I asked her. Privately, off the group thread, because we've been friends since our oldest kids were in diapers and she'll say things one-on-one that she won't broadcast to fourteen mothers. I texted: "Real talk. What do you actually do for yours?" She sent back a photo. A red backpack and a purple backpack hanging on mudroom hooks, and clipped to each strap, a small triangle the size of a guitar pick. "These. Since April. Best thing I've bought either of them." I asked her why she hadn't put that in the group chat back in May, when she told fourteen mothers to check their babies. Her answer stuck with me: "Because I'm the school nurse. If I recommend something and one kid still gets a bite, that's my name on it. You asked what I do for mine. That's a different question." Then three dots, then: "It's the right question, for what it's worth." I recognized that answer immediately. It's the same professional hedge that had kept me quiet in the chat — the fear of your name on someone else's bad luck. She clips a small ultrasonic device to each kid's backpack. That's it. That's the whole routine. And two women whose jobs are other people's children both sat on it. It's called TickBlock. Here's the medicine of it, since I'm done hedging: ticks hunt through Haller's organ — a sensor in their front legs that reads heat and vibration — and the clip pulses a frequency that jams it, so instead of climbing onto your kid at the ankle and crawling up for hours looking for the hairline, they turn around at the shoe. Nothing on the skin. No chemicals. Nothing to remember at 6am. One charge runs the entire season, and it's waterproof, so it survives everything a nine-year-old does to it. Her exact words when someone in the group chat finally asked if it works: "I haven't found a tick on my two since they started wearing them. I find them on everyone else's." I FIND THEM ON EVERYONE ELSE'S. Sit with that sentence the way I had to. She checks other children every single day. Half the school walks past her table between May and September. Her sample size is the entire building — and inside it, there are exactly two kids she never finds a tick on, and they're the two wearing the clips she bought. I read studies for a living. That one didn't need peer review. Ours arrived in June. Two kids, one dog collar, one clipped to the stroller because the baby lives at ankle height, where the ticks are. Nine weeks of the worst tick season on record: zero ticks on my family. The unclipped neighbors have pulled off six between them. I can give you the whole arc, because of course I tracked it — charting is a hard habit to break. Week one: I trusted nothing, ran double checks, found nothing. Week two: Fourth of July at the lake, eleven cousins, waist-high grass along the water line — the other families pulled three ticks off their kids that weekend, and mine came home with nothing but mosquito bites and a sunburn. Week five: my son's clip went through the washing machine in a backpack pocket and came out working, which is more than I can say for anything else that child owns. Week nine: still zero, and I've finally let him lie back down in the grass. Week seven deserves a mention too — the school sent home its annual tick-safety flyer, the same checklist I've personally handed to a thousand families, sprays and checks, and I read it at the kitchen counter feeling like someone reviewing a fire drill from inside a fireproof house. The 4-pack is the one to get — covers every kid plus the dog, comes out around twenty dollars a clip, and it keeps selling out for exactly the reason you'd expect in a record year. There's a 365-day money-back guarantee: if a tick latches on anyone wearing one, you get a full refund. A company doesn't offer that on a product that doesn't work. The group chat looks different now, by the way. The mom who asked what we're supposed to actually do — her set arrived two weeks after ours, and she posted a photo of the clips on her kids' backpacks the way other people post honor roll bumper stickers. At last count, nine families from that one thread. The nurse says her tick tally at school is the lowest she's seen all season, and she doesn't think that's a coincidence. Neither do I — and this time I said so in the chat, with my name on it. The season doesn't peak for another month. The nurse's advice from that first text still stands — check your babies tonight. Then clip something on them so there's nothing to find.

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