Brush with Discomfort!
a TRUE STORY of extreme itching
Two weeks ago on Sunday, I drove out to Fred Meyer and bought a bunch of rolls of duct tape and tennis racket handle grip. Spent most of the afternoon making boffer swords with the University of Oregon Gaming Club. It was fun. We hit each other a lot. Then I had dinner and watched cartoons on the local Fox affiliate.
As I was responding to emails and checking to see if my favorite websites had updated (no) before I went to bed, I realized that my left hand itched a bit. There were two barely perceptible little bumps over the far knuckle that looked like mosquito bites. Really small mosquito bites. I didn't scratch them. I put some hydrocortisone cream on them before I went to bed.
I had the hydrocortisone cream because my previous roommate would open the window at night. A mosquito crept in and bit my right foot a month ago. It itched like hell and kept me up nights after that. What I learned from that experience - and this is an important life lesson to remember, kids - was that if you soak an itchy appendage in incredibly hot water for as long as you can stand it, it won't itch for a couple of hours. Long enough to get to sleep.
In my nightly State of the Blemishes check, I noticed a similar bump on the upper bridge of my nose. It also itched, but not as much.
Monday morning I woke up and found the bumps surrounded by angry red swelling. There was a sickly pink blotch the size of a Kennedy half dollar between my eyes and a lump the size of a hotel soap under the skin on my hand.
It itched like crazy. I went to class, during which it itched like crazy. Then I went to my other class, during which it itched even more. It started itching up the side of my arm as well, so I rolled up my sleeve and looked. There was a lot of angry pink on the underside of my arm as well.
I went home for lunch and decided to call my mother and ask if I should be concerned. Mom is a nurse and gives good health care advice, although it's biased towards the "see a professional NOW" kind.
"You should go to the health center. Right now." Mom was adamant. Eventually she let me hang up so I could make an appointment. They could see me after my last class.
I went to class and looked at my arm some more. It really, really itched a lot. I noticed the pink area was in a line, starting from my knuckle and spiraling down my arm. I guessed that the spider had walked down my arm, biting all the way.
After class, I went over to the health center and the nurse practitioner looked really worried. She asked me if I injected anything into my hand. I said, "Heck, no. But I am an insulin-dependant diabetic so I do inject things elsewhere."
I don't like to just tell people I'm diabetic - I have a hard time believing it makes a difference most of the time. I try to work it into the conversation like that.
She expressed doubt that it was insect bites. I pointed out the really bitey-looking things on the back of my hand. She showed me how the redness was moving along where the vein was. She really looked worried. After looking at me for a minute or so, she left and came back with an actual doctor and his actual half-full cup of coffee.
"Whoa," said the doctor, sipping his coffee, "Does it hurt?" I explained that it just itched like a motherhubbard and that it didn't hurt or anything. Together we established that I didn't stick my arm into any woodpiles yesterday.
The theory they came up from was that the redness did spring from the bites, whether an infection or a reaction to the venom. Because it happened to hit a vein, it spread down my arm. My nose was also bitten, but there isn't much in the nose so nobody cared.
They drew around the red bits with a ball-point pen, so I could track its progress. If it got redder, more swollen, hurt more or looked at me funny, I was supposed to go to the emergency room. That or cut my arm off at the shoulder.
They gave me some incredibly expensive antibiotics and some off-brand Benadryl in case I'd rather be sleepy than itchy. I made an appointment to come in the next day.
Having been to the doctor and tentatively diagnosed, I scratched the hell out of my arm. It felt better. Either the venom got diluted enough or the antibiotics stopped the infection, because by the next day the line had shrunk and it was a fainter pink.
No sign of an enormous spider, and I still have yet to develop super powers. It was kind of creepy to have a foreign substance traveling up my left arm on the expressway to my heart, but the pink line didn't last long enough for me to convince people I was a dashing spy infected with a time-release poison.
Even though I didn't die or even go to the real hospital, it was still the most exciting thing to happen to me in a while. At least since the HPL film festival or the time Jack Black kissed my sister.