4/22
5 a.m. is sneaking past the curtain, making it just light enough for me to watch myself scratch at my side with all the delicacy of an ogre and think nothing of it.
Six hours later I'm out of the shower and my whole left flank is bright red and will later be described as "angry."
After what should have been a really embarrassing emotional snippet at a tutoring section I shuffle, fidget, scratch, and wiggle through three hours of class.
Standing outside Waldo Hall I make the mistake of looking up "scabies" on Google Images. Luckily for me, my torso doesn't look anything like that. It has now spread up my arm and to my right side.
In a moment of itch induced insanity I consider asking the professor if she knows anything about rashes. The blinding panic subsides, and I realize what a severe social mistake I have narrowly avoided.
Later, at home I subject my room mate to at least two hours of more Google searches;
Shingles.
Heat rash.
Ring worm.
A whole website called "What's This Rash?"
Nothing looks like what I have, but I've all ready slid down the slope.
I convince myself of two things; (a) stop looking on the internet and (b) this is a stress induced rash. I lay awake trying to reconstruct my recent past to find some hint to my current state. It's a rough night for sleeping.
4/23
I make an appointment with Student Health Services, call my dad, and withdraw from my biology class.
I procrastinate and worry about the possibility of hypochondria.
At 2 p.m. I am sitting in the lobby of the Student Health building, trying to catch my breath and get my wallet, keys, head phones, cell phone, backpack and helmet to coordinate with each other. I'm not winning at this game when the medical assistant calls me back.
By this point I have settled in to an ominous state of acceptance. I joke with the MA about my shingles/heat rash/worms and he jokes about throwing the blood pressure cuff away.
When the doctor calls me into his office I am still struggling with all of the things I've decided to hold instead of put in my backpack.
I lump them in a pile on the floor.
(Let me take a moment to tell you about the trouble I go through to not be partially naked in a locker room on campus. I mean I change in a stall - a toilet stall - with a towel wrapped around myself as much as possible while trying to change one handed.)
The doctor introduces himself, says something about itching and I say, "Look, this is going to be a lot easier with my shirt off," because I am tactful and patient.
He is not in the least bit phased, which is good because I don't have time to be embarrassed. Soon I will have scratched away what few social skills I have along with the top layer of my skin.
"Ah, that looks angry."
"Yeah, and it's jumped my bra line." Because it has - there's a suspicious patch of not itchy skin right under my not itchy arm pit. My bra is still on, by the way. The rash is only on my sides and the bottom of my left arm. It hasn't progressed since the day before.
"Urticaria." He doesn't even need to think about it. "These are the classic symptoms of contact dermatitis, a severe allergic reaction to something that's touched your skin. If it was something you ingested, it'd be all over, and the same with any lotions or creams you use - it'd be where you put them." He prescribes a three day regimen of two antihistamines and Prednisone.
This is when I finally get embarrassed. Of course my mind would go to the most complicated and unlikely solution. It's not stress or shingles, you diva, it's allergies.
This is why I'm bad at math. If a train leaves a station going at 60 miles per hour and a second train leaves an hour later then there's probably a Russian spy on the second train who has just smuggled a suitcase full of illegally imported wormwood past the border and is planning on sabotaging the first train's induction into the Union Pacific museum. I mean I make things more complicated than they need to be.
Sure enough, after one dose of the prescriptions the itchiness subsides
4/25
A follow up appointment just reaffirms the doctor's diagnosis. I did not feel the need to pull my shirt off this time.
I have narrowed it down to a wool sweater and a bush that lived and died in our front yard.
A big dead bush I wrestled with on the 20th, in short sleeves and gloves.
A nasty bush which I managed to inadvertently get a piece of in my mouth somehow, because I distinctly remember thinking, "Oh, that is probably poisonous."
A stupid bush whose stupid dead branches worked their way under my shirt while I was trampling them into the yard debris cart, and probably left a few scrapes on my side and arm.
These are things I just don't even think of after so many scratches, pokes, dings and what have you. A few scrapes don't even register on the ow-meter, let alone the "huh, I may be severely allergic to this" meter. I don't even have that meter. It didn't come with the factory settings.
To be fair, this will be my first allergic reaction to anything (minus hay fever, of course).
4/28
And now it's Monday at about 1 in the morning, and I am writing too many personal details about an incident that is only slightly funny and/or ironic to me.
I feel like there's an awful metaphor in there somewhere.
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