We built this because we needed it.

Tickortreat was started by a family in southern Vermont — a place where pulling ticks off your kids after a day outside is just part of life. We run a farm. Our daughters play in the fields and the woods. Our dogs bring ticks in from the pasture. We know the drill.

One evening, after finding an engorged deer tick on one of our girls, we did what every parent in tick country does: panicked a little, Googled a lot, and tried to figure out how to get a single dose of doxycycline before the 72-hour window closed. Our pediatrician's office was closed. The ER felt absurd for something this simple. The telehealth services we found were generic, clunky, and clearly designed for acne and UTIs — not a parent standing in the kitchen with a tick in a ziplock bag and a clock ticking.

We thought: this should be one thing, in one place, done in one visit. So we built it.

Toad and Hen

Every good story needs characters. Ours are Toad and Hen — the doctor and the protector. Toad is calm, no-nonsense, and always ready with a prescription. Hen is a fluffy white silkie who gathers everyone under her wings and teaches them how to stay safe.

Hen is based on a real bird.

One spring, a wild turkey nested in our goat pasture. When our livestock guardian dog scared the mother off, we rescued the clutch of eggs and slipped them under a broody white silkie in our coop. She hatched every one of them and raised them as her own. The turkey poults grew to twice her size but still followed her everywhere — she was their mother and they knew it. When the law required us to bring the turkeys to a wildlife rehabilitator, he actually asked us to lend him our silkie to keep mothering them until they were old enough to be released into the wild. We did. Once the turkeys were ready, he returned our hen. She came home and went right back to work.

That's Hen. She takes care of whoever needs it. She doesn't care if they're hers. She just does the work.

Hen the silkie with her mismatched brood of chicks

The illustrations

Everything you see on this site was illustrated by Louisa Conrad, a visual artist based in Townshend, Vermont. Louisa works in watercolor, pencil, and ink, and her work draws from the landscapes, animals, and daily textures of the farm where we live. The costumed ticks, the watchful Toad, the fierce little Hen — they're all hers.

You can see more of Louisa's work at louisaconrad.com.

Why this matters

Lyme disease is the most common vector-borne illness in the United States, with an estimated 476,000 cases per year. A single dose of doxycycline taken within 72 hours of a deer tick bite can reduce the risk of Lyme by up to 87%. After that window, prevention becomes treatment — 14 to 28 days of antibiotics, with all the side effects and anxiety that come with it.

The difference between one dose and twenty-eight days of dosing is the difference between a five-minute problem and a month-long ordeal. For a child, it's the difference between one spoonful of flavored medicine and weeks of struggling with pills.

That's why the 72-hour window matters. That's why speed matters. And that's why we built Tickortreat.

One and Done.

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