A family day of berry-picking in the Swedish countryside turned into a medical ordeal when a mother discovered a tick clinging to her daughter’s eyelashes.
Alessandra Paiusco (@la.tuttologa) from Uppsala, Sweden, shared the find in a post on TikTok, with a close-up image showing the insect lodged in her 1-year-old’s lash line.
The 33-year-old told Newsweek the family had been on holiday at a farm about an hour outside Uppsala with her parents, Marco, 63, and Lea, 57, along with her children Leonidas, nearly 3, and Olympia.
“We went to the woods to pick blueberries—actually we were hoping for chanterelles,” she said, referring to the sought-after yellow–orange edible mushrooms. Paiusco continued: “I was melting looking at the children bonding while eating berries.”
Once the family returned home, she checked herself and the children for ticks but didn’t notice any until the next morning when she noticed one “right away” in Olympia’s lash line.
Ticks are small, blood-sucking parasites that latch onto humans and animals, often hiding in skin folds, hairlines or even eyelashes.
Common in wooded and grassy areas, they can transmit serious illnesses such as Lyme disease (caused by Borrelia bacteria) and tick-borne encephalitis (TBE), a viral infection affecting the brain and nervous system.
“I was honestly shocked and, to be completely honest with you, grossed out too,” the mom of two said.
Unsure what to do, Paiusco asked the farm’s owner to confirm what she was seeing. They recommended she drive to the nearest healthcare center in Tierp, about 45 minutes away.
While tick removal is common in Sweden, the location of Olympia’s tick made at-home extraction impossible.
She took the picture featured in her social media post to show her parents the tick’s “perfectly hidden” location.
“Even if I took the necessary precautions to avoid ticks, it must’ve been jumping around maybe from clothes or the car onto the baby’s eye overnight,” she explained.
At the hospital, the ordeal lasted two hours. “Olympia was understandably terrified, so we had to hold her still,” Paiusco said.
“First, I was holding her, but she was kicking, [so] two nurses tried to use a kind of ‘lasso’ but it didn’t work. We tried this way three times, with many tears and breastfeeding breaks in between. In the end I had to literally wrestle her on the soft patient bed, and a very determined nurse named Irena managed to remove it in one piece with old school doctors’ tweezers.”
Though the experience was difficult in the moment, Olympia quickly bounced back.
“[She] didn’t notice until we needed to take it out, but she got a cute zebra from the nurse so she was over it quickly,” Paiusco said.
By posting about her experience, Paiusco hopes her story raises awareness about tick safety.
“Ticks can carry diseases that can show symptoms later on, so if you present symptoms and you’ve been enjoying the outdoors, it’s important to remember to tell it to your GP because it could be a tick related illness,” she said.
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