Frozen with contamination OCD for hours - please help

[alwaysalwayssomething]

I’m in the early stages of treatment and know that I’m unwell. But that’s not helping me tonight so looking for a handhold please and some voices of logic.

We’re just back from travelling in an area which is endemic for tick based encephalitis, basically an untreatable form of meningitis from a tick bite. I have been obsessed with ticks the whole time. Now that we’re back, I showered everyone and just put the towels in a 90degree wash. Now I’m convinced there are ticks in our washing machine, in the pipes and that they will infect future clothes washes etc.

In theory, I know that this is a very unlikely scenario. In reality, I am absolutely immobilised with fear for hours. Any advice from anyone who has this kind of OCD would be really helpful as I just need to get through this and don’t have the skills to yet!

thank you.

See it this way if you had the tick in you - you would be having meningitis by now

Ticks live outside not on towels

Could you run a few more washes and maybe get some washing machine cleaners as well.

Sometimes the safety behaviours are still crucial while seeking help.

And well done for going somewhere with that level of fear.

@Quitelikeit thanks for being there. In my head there might be ticks on the towels from drying after the showers but your point that they’d probably already be attached at that stage is a good one.

@rivalsbinge It’s my first serious episode which was only triggered while reading about the tick viruses in the taxi to the hotel from the airport!

Good point on running more washes, will do that now.

Why did you go somewhere that has that? It sounds horrific.

@Overthebow it was our first holiday in years, skiing in Austria and didn’t read about it until we were there! It was awful.

Ticks are dormant in cold and will have drowned in a wash. If you had been hiking in forests in hot humid weather wearing t shirt and shorts you would be at theoretical risk, but you weren't.

go ahead and run another wash

then try distracting your brain for a bit. A favorite of mine is picking a random object and explaining its function to an alien. It’s surprisingly difficult because every thing you say has to be defined. At least you can make it difficult and thus force your brain to refocus.

then my best method is to find something healthy to obsess over. For me that is typically planning a new art project that I’m not sure how to execute or exactly what I want it to be. I can go about my day running that as my commentary and jotting down notes instead of something that harms me. I don’t always have time to make everything I imagine, but I’ve still got my notebooks for a day when I have more free time.

They can only live for up to 24 hours without a host.

OP snow on the ground is one of the best defences against ticks. They are not digging their way through snow to find a host. They are certainly not digging their way through snow, salopettes, thermals, ski boots and socks...

If you were walking bare-legged through the Austrian mountains in summer then yes you'd be reasonable to take extra precautions and do extra checks, but the likelihood of encountering a tick is so, so, so vanishingly small on a ski holiday that you've already done much more than enough.

Also it’s so unlikely that you would be befallen by the very thing you read about in a magazine on the flight. It’s just your brain being a dick, OP. I can almost guarantee you that you will not get ill this way. I always try think of it this way, if my brain worked the other way and I suddenly became convinced I was going to win the lottery or even find 50 quid, how likely would that be to happen? What’s going on is your brain has switched to high alert that something bad is going to happen then looked around for what the danger might be and landed on this. It’s almost completely arbitrary. Sorry if none of that helped. Nothing really does with ocd, it’s a hideous bitch mistress (to paraphrase a quote from Bart Simpson). Hope the anxiety passes soon, if you can just try to distract yourself and relax. It will pass.

Even if you did have a tick on your person, that doesn't necessarily result in disease. My partner found a tick on his leg, he thought it was an ingrowing hair that had been there for a while (he gets ingrowing hairs sometimes) but turned out it was a tick. It was probably on him for 2-3 days but we have no idea. Could have been longer. No subsequent issues. I read they can't survive drowning so I would have thought one wash of towels etc would be fine. But also I don't really see how you would have picked one up when skiing - surely you'd have been covered with lots of thick skiwear? How would they actually get onto your body? It's more common to get these things in the summer when you might picnic on grass etc.

Once a month I 'clean' my washing machine (an engineer told me to do it 20 years ago!) Just add your usual amount of cheap bio washing powder to the drawer and set the empty machine to the hottest wash setting. Walk away. When it's finished everything will have been flushed through - and at 90° (mines 95) nothing will survive! You can then satisfy yourself that you've cleaned your machine which is good for it as well as you.

Thank you all so much for being there. It’s horrible - my brain just won’t accept any logic, it’s just obsessing away. My brain being a dick is such a perfect way of putting it.

Have taken the practical suggestions and put back on another 90 wash with bleach for a couple of hours and will do another one later.