Ticks and Tests

Today we had a wonderful surprise.  Rascal had turned on his belly for a rubbing and we noticed small red and black spots all over him.  They looked irritated, so I worried that he had gotten a small skin infection or some sort of allergy.  Upon closer examination however, I discovered that the black spots were not scabs like I had thought.  They were dozens of seed ticks.  I was confused at first.  We have him on a preventative, and our yard is fairly clean.
I was told that yesterday Rascal had snuck into our neighbor's yard.  My guess is that he picked them up there.  I had just discovered them when I needed to leave for work, so I left Mammaw to take care of him.  She gave him a proper back to scrub all those little bugs off of him.  I feel sorry for the poor little guy.  He hates baths to begin with, and I'm sure that scrubbing out ticks didn't help him like it any better.  On the bright side, he seemed happier (and cleaner) when I got home.  We applied an extra preventative that would cover ticks better and they seem to all be off and dead now.  Hopefully we'll be able to keep them that way.

On a slightly different note, I had to go in to my doctor's for a bone density test today.  I wasn't sure what all would be involved, so I was a little nervous.  It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, though.  I waited in a nice little room with a couch for a while as I waited my turn.  When the nurse finally called me, I was escorted to another room with a large black table on it.  I answered some questions for her and then she had me lie on the table.  Once we got the positioning right all I had to do was wait for the machine to finish scanning me.  I was told that I should get results back in a week or two.
Honestly, I'm not sure what the test will show.  I've been on Prednisone for three years for an autoimmune disease.  I obviously don't want to have any issues, but it would be nice if there were some other drug I could take instead.  I know that I need to be on it, but I'm worried about long-term side effects.  I guess we'll just have to wait on the test results and go from there.  Wish me luck!