Last week Diane took me back to see Jane the (
allegedly not a zombie) doctor, because Jane said she wanted to check on my plantar wart but really I think that was just a giant scheme to get me in there so she could give me a tetanus shot, since apparently there is some rule that everyone has to have one of those. I thought I'd gotten all the necessary immunizations shortly after moving in with Carolyn, but either that one didn't get written down or I never got it or Jane had ulterior zombie motives or who knows.
Anyhow while we were there, I mean before people started attacking me with needles, Jane asked if there were any health things going on and I said no, except my left ear had been irritated, like, super itchy, lately but I thought it was maybe just a zit in there or something. Whereupon she whipped the ear gadget off the wall and looked in the WRONG ear and I was like, okay, maybe she has dyslexia or something. Well, maybe what went through my head wasn't quite that compassionate. I might have thought something along the lines of zombie dementia, although I'm pretty sure I didn't say anything like that out loud. But then, as though she could HEAR me thinking, she said it's normal operating procedure to check the "good" ear first so as to have something to compare the other one to. So okay. Maybe she actually knows what she's doing. Although the part about operating worried me a bit. I mean, I hadn't started the day expecting an ear amputation.
Then she looked in the other ear for half a second and said some complicated medical thing and then when I didn't respond with a look of comprehension she said, "Swimmer's Ear." Which you can get even if you're not a swimmer, and it might be some sort of bacterial thing or some sort of fungus thing and she went on for a bit but I didn't really hear the rest of it because I was too intrigued by the idea of growing a fungus in my ear. Maybe all my efforts to kill off the plantar wart on my heel only caused it to submerge and then crawl up the inside of my skin until it got to my ear, is what I suggested. Which is when Jane got the glazed-eyed look (sort of like a ZOMBIE, maybe?) and Diane gave me the LOOK that means shut up, you're scaring the help. Which kind of pissed me off a little because I think you should be able to have whatever fun you can when you're stuck in a little tiled room with someone who has gone out of her way to inform you that she's not a zombie.
Anyhow then ostensibly not a zombie Jane left and someone else, who would no doubt claim to not be a member of Jane's zombie army so I saw no point in raising the subject, came and gave me the shot and said it might hurt. But you know what's weird? I totally watched her put that needle in and I didn't feel a thing until she squeezed the thing to put the juice in my arm. That's when I felt it. I mean, it didn't really hurt, but I thought it was interesting how you can jam a needle an inch into someone's muscle and it only becomes bothersome when the helpful thing, the medicine, gets involved.
Then we left and went to the pharmacy to get the ear drops, which turned out to be this goopy crap that once you put in you can never shake your head enough to get rid of the feeling that you have a football stuffed in your ear. I was supposed to put them in four times a day for seven days, even if my ear started feeling better sooner. Okay.
Well by the end of that evening, which was last Wednesday, my tetanus arm ached like that time I tried to recreate the
stress-position torture thing that my uncle did, and my head was all lopsided because I hadn't yet resigned myself to the football, and I was cranky and thinking about how Jane never did show much excitement over my healed plantar wart and how the drops and the "tetanus" shot were probably actually her way of trying to zombify me from two directions at once, and I explained all of this to Diane who just rolled her eyes in an unimaginative way. And then shark week of the lady parts came along and this is the hurty month rather than the easy month so there I was, cranky and itchy-eared and achy-armed and menstrual-cramped, hemorrhaging like I thought if I only bled enough all the other discomforts would go away, and probably in the early stages of turning into a zombie on top of everything else.
And yes I was totally faithful about those stupid ear drops. Well, for the first three days anyhow. Then, okay, I admit it, I stopped doing them on a meticulous schedule so it was maybe more like twice a day, and then on the fifth day I sort of, you know, forgot a lot, so I guess I might have only put them in once, when I went to bed. Then I started feeling this weird resistance to putting them in. Like I started really not want to use them any more. Like way out of proportion. To the point where I'd be tired and wanting to go to bed and I'd stall because I didn't want to put them in. And then I'd open the little bottle and hold it over my ear and give it a little squeeze, until I felt the liquid on my skin, and then I'd let go so the bottle would suck it back up, and I'd tell myself it totally counted because the liquid touched my skin. I mean I didn't do that thing where you quit just because your ear feels better. Which I don't even know if it does, by the way, because of all the OTHER stuff which I'm about to explain. But I got through most of the week. Except for the very last day. I was like, I hate this so much I'd rather have a plantar wart in my ear.
Okay anyhow, fast forward to the weekend, when Ellen came over, bringing a yummy chicken sandwich thing for me, which I promptly squirreled away because I like to eat stuff like that in slices in a snacking way throughout the week. Did I mention I don't like to cook? So while I'm here by myself during the day, I'm much more likely to eat if there's something I can easily snack on. The only problem with the chicken sandwich was it had avocado all over the place, which gives me the heebie jeebies, but I'm pretty good at finding all the slimy bits and making them go away.
And then Diane made one of her specialty dishes, curry chicken, which involves using about five times more curry than the recipe actually calls for because Diane and I, we like the curry, yes we do. She always makes a giant batch because we both love it and again, I'm better at eating if I can just heat up leftovers in the microwave.
So all week I've been eating leftover bits of slightly-avocado-tainted sandwich and super spicy curry chicken, happy as can be, when suddenly two days ago I started ITCHING.
I didn't say anything at first because it started in the nether regions, and much as I like to announce every tiny bit of my experience to the entire world, there's not much fun in running around saying your crotch feels itchy. As the day progressed it felt more troublesome, and because I think it's funny to take a small symptom and diagnose it as something lethal, or if not lethal than at least gross, I went online to find all the reasons why one's nether bits might suddenly feel itchy. Then I lay in wait for Diane to come home so I could nonchalantly spring it on her that I might have crabs. Which of course is completely ridiculous but it DID kind of fit the itch pattern and it was awesome to see the look on her face. "I probably got it from the hairdresser's," I added, in a voice like I was confiding useful knowledge. I wish I could show pictures of Diane's face. Because she really does the most horrified-looking blanch you ever saw.
Okay so that was funny. But the itchiness was not fun. I sat in an oatmeal bath and that helped even though I was completely disappointed to discover that an oatmeal bath does NOT actually involve making a bathtub full of oatmeal that you can slither yourself down into like a deadly stonefish waiting for the next unsuspecting tourist to come along. In fact all an oatmeal bath involves is sprinkling some flaky stuff around and then the stuff totally disappears and there are no bubbles or anything. I think oatmeal baths would be improved if every box of flaky stuff included a tiny capsule or two of those little sponge thingees that expand into animal shapes when they hit the water. You could have piranhas and man-o-wars and deadly puffer fish, for example. A hissing or even a screaming sound as they expand would be cool, too.
Anyhow yesterday when I got up the itching seemed okay, mostly, although I did notice that every time I went to the bathroom, which was thirteen bazillion times because did I mention the part about trying to bleed my way into oblivion? I did notice that taking care of business would sort of get the itch going again for a little bit and the only way to prevent a full-on kill-me-now episode was to NOT SCRATCH. Or even move, for that matter. As you might imagine, I'm pretty good at just holding still when there's discomfort going on, but it did kind of get me thinking back to the basement days when every other thing felt like a battle against my own natural urges. But it worked well enough. I'd come out of the bathroom and just sit down on the itch and wait it out and it would eventually subside enough for me to remember that my entire existence is not centered on itchiness.
But then by the time I took my nap yesterday, things had changed. Suddenly it wasn't just my private parts; my legs were itchy. My shins were itchy. My achilles tendons were itchy. And my skin looked kind of ... patchy. Like pink patches here and there. Just flat patches, nothing spectacular. Maybe from my jeans rubbing on my legs? Maybe I was somehow getting oversensitized to any contact whatsoever. So I went rooting around in the medicine shelves, and remind me someday to show a picture of our medicine shelf area because looking at it you'd think we have a houseful of total hypochondriacs, which we don't, unless you count the part where I like to go online or look through Diane's psychology books to find the most outlandish explanations for the simplest things.
So I found some Benadryl gel, like for poison ivy, and Benadryl gel became my new best friend because that seemed to do the trick. I mean, I still felt kind of low-level itchy throughout the rest of the day, but it didn't feel intolerable or like the kind of itch where you want to scrape your way out of your skin.
And last night when Diane got home from work I asked her questions about our laundry detergents and such, because that would make sense, right? I mean, I haven't used anything different, no new bath or skin products or whatever. Had she tried to trick me with the detergent again? Maybe a completely new kind? She likes Tide and I like ... uh ... anything that isn't Tide. Tide leaves a funny smell and I always know when she tries to throw my stuff into a Tide load, but she keeps testing it anyhow because for some reason she doesn't believe my nose is sensitive enough to tell the difference. I admit I might have asked her about the detergent in somewhat of an accusing voice, perhaps.
But she said no, swore up and down. So then this morning before she left for work I tried blaming the food. Had she tried to sneak some new nasty thing into the curry chicken? She's famous for trying to sneak stuff in like that. Last time it was asparagus, cut up really small, in the stir fry. I really thought you wouldn't notice if it were really small, she said. While I laboriously disentangled every offending bit of asparagus and stacked them all on the side of the plate while maintaining a long-suffering demeanor. "I'm the Princess and the Pea of asparagus," I said. Which she agreed with in a not-exactly admiring kind of way.
Anyhow, no to that as well: Diane had not tried to sneak some new ingredient into one of my favorite dishes because new things are good for me. Could it be the avocado-taint? That didn't make sense either. I've eaten avocado just fine before, I mean when it was totally mashed into other stuff and not in giant disgusting slimy chunks. So maybe it was just dry skin. Maybe I just need to moisturize or some girly shit like that. We both shrugged it off. Diane went to work and I went back to the computer to research whether itching might be a known side effect of a slow-growing zombie fungus virus.
Then a few hours later my palms started itching. Yes. My PALMS. I went over near the window to get better light and I could see these pale pink places, really faint, under the skin. Have you ever had itchy palms? It's fucking maddening.
Maddening, and weird enough for me to think maybe it was time to call in the big guns. So before I lay down for my nap, I texted Ellen, who has a regular Thursday bodywork appointment with a client down at this end of the Cape, and she said she'd swing by on her way home. In addition to being a social worker and a bodyworker and annoying in many respects, Ellen is also a doctor, or a Nurse Practitioner, just like little old I-swear-I'm-not-a-zombie Jane. Ellen's not really doing doctorly things so much as social-worker things these days, but she still has a lot of cool gizmos and, I suppose, a useful knowledge base.
Then as I was snuggling in for my midday nap I felt this super intense itchy spot on my ribs. I went running into the bathroom and there were these two perfect little welts. And guess what is better than Benadryl gel? Benadryl spray! I was able to get things under control enough to take my nap, sort of, but while I was falling asleep I could feel myself sort of shivering a little and getting goosebumps. I cranked my heated mattress pad up to its max and still felt cold. There was, however, a thrilled cat with me. Miro loves that heated mattress pad almost as much as she loves Diane's snore pillow, maybe even more. In the end it was a miserable nap, because I simply could not get warm and then every time Miro twitched or flicked her tail around in her sleep, the movement against my leg would set off a tiny itchy feeling.
So anyhow Ellen arrived a while later and looked me over and said what I have is HIVES and it means I'm having an allergic reaction to something. Hives appear and disappear here and there and that's why it seems like it's a new thing in a new location every time. But each of my itchy symptoms is not its own new thing, each one is just an example of the underlying reaction. She was a bit alarmed until I reassured her I've had absolutely no trouble with my breathing feeling tight or my tongue swelling out of my head or my ribcage growing a parasitic twin or anything like that. "Well, I'm kind of disappointed to hear you're not growing a parasitic twin," she said gravely, when I mentioned that part. Sometimes I totally adore Ellen.
We went back to the medicine shelves looking for Benadryl pills and what is the one thing we don't have? But I did find some Claritin, which has the word "antihistamine" on the box, and she said that should help. I didn't tell her the box says it expired in 2007, because she might have wanted to make me wait until she went out and got some updated pills and by then I was feeling so crazy itchy I would've swallowed a fossil mammoth if I knew it had eaten an antihistamine before it died.
Then Ellen grilled me on every single ailment or rash I've ever had (none) or can ever remember Serena, Allison, or my uncle having. Did I remember any of them having funny-colored patches or anything? Okay this was a loaded question because I've always had a strange way of looking at people and I've always imagined I see colors on them that aren't actually there. It's just a way I came up with, I think, of interpreting intuitions into a vocabulary that used colors instead of words. So yeah, I can remember lots of times when I saw funny-colored patches on them.
But I tried to think past or through that to times when I might have seen things on actual skin, things other people would be able to see, too.
Well Serena was full of rashes and oozy parts and crusty bits, especially towards the end, but that didn't seem signficant since that's kind of what happens when you have crappy personal hygiene, self-mutilating tendencies, and a raging heroin addiction. As for my uncle, I remember him in a weirdly idealized way, as sort of smooth and pale and flawless. (Skin-wise, I mean, obviously. Like, I know the guy was seriously otherwise flawed.) And the only thing I could come up with for Allison -- and I had to really dredge it up from the back of my brain -- was a single moment of an image from forever ago, when I remember seeing a lovely color of rosy reddish pink on her. I remember it because she had pale skin, and it was so distinct. It went down the front of her in a V from her shoulders to the middle of her chest. This image is completely out of context, just a thing in itself, but it's clear in a frozen-snapshot moment way.
And as I was describing it, Ellen's eyes lit up and she yelled "That's classic!" in a voice like a game show host announcing a winner. I guess she thought this mattered because Allison and I share the same gene pool, which means there's some precedence for my having an allergy. But since I have no idea why Allison had that rash, it didn't do much to help us narrow down what I was being allergic to.
So we had to go through all the same stuff I'd already gone through, things I'd eaten or been exposed to and blah blah blah and then I said maybe it was the tetanus shot! Maybe Jane the yeah suuure she's not a zombie doctor had her minion inject me with zombie juice after all, and I'm allergic to it, which would mean it's a good thing because when the zombies come, itchy or not I want to fight them, not be one of them. Ellen totally ignored me because clearly she doesn't know how to think outside the zombie box and also her gears were going in there and then her eyes got gleamy again and she asked me if I still had the information sheet for the ear drops.
Long story short: Ellen thinks I might have an allergy to sulfa-based antibiotics. Which the ear drops contain. How one gets hives all over one's body as a result of ear drops is a bit of a mystery to me but Ellen assures me it's possible.
She says it's not a hugely rare allergy to have, and that hives and fever can go with either a mild or a more severe reaction, but that I need to make sure to call the doctor's office tomorrow and explain what happened. And I need to stop using the ear drops immediately. "Is last night soon enough?" is what I asked.
Remember the part about how I had kind of stopped being faithful about the ear drops? Okay, fine, how I totally decided partway through that the drops were the worst thing on earth and I'd rather grow ear mushrooms than use them? Ellen thinks maybe that was my body's way of trying to protect itself. She has lots of theories about how bodies know things that our thinking minds aren't consciously aware of.
"I'm not condoning you refusing to use the meds as prescribed," she added, somewhat lamely, in my opinion. "But it's good that you stopped when you did. Drug allergies are weird, and they can be dangerous."
"So I had a close call?"
"Well, I don't know. Maybe. Sometimes an allergy is just what it is and other times it can escalate with continued exposure. What I'm saying is it's good your system isn't still having to deal with new exposures to the drug." She tilted her head a little. "And it's good that your first reaction wasn't a severe one, like anaphylaxis."
"Anaphylactic shock? Can't you die from that?"
"You can die really fast from that."
"Oh my god! I almost died! Jane tried to kill me! I can't wait to tell Diane. I knew Jane was bad news the minute she started going on about how she wasn't a zombie."
"Well you know," she said thoughtfully, "eardrops ARE a commonly-used vector of the zombie virus establishment."
Have I mentioned how much I love Ellen?
So anyway, there you have it. It's five hours later and I'm still itching but that fossilized Claritin seems to have taken the edge off, or maybe the zombie juice is working its way out of my system or whatever. I'm still popping hives here and there, but with the antihistamine it's easier to just feel the hive happen and then be like, okay, if I just wait a bit it will go away. And it does. But Ellen still seems to want to keep an eye on me, I guess. Like, she's going to stay here tonight, just in case.
And then just a few minutes ago she shows me her emergency lifesaving device, which she calls an eppy-pen because there's a chemical involved whose name starts with that sound. I ask if we can try it out on me just once, just to see, and she rolls her eyes and says no, you only get one try with it. The way it works is if someone stops breathing and starts turning purple, you jam it into her thigh.
"Like this," she says, making a stabbing motion. Oh I want to do the stabby lifesaving thing so much.
"Why do you have one of those anyhow," I ask. "Is it something all nurse practitioners carry around as a matter of course?"
"Only if they're severely allergic to something," she says.
"What are you allergic to?"
Turns out she doesn't know! All she knows is one time she had scallops at a restaurant and had one of those reactions where your throat closes and you die unless you're lucky enough that someone else at the restaurant happens to be carrying an eppy-pen. She'd had scallops before, though, and she's had them since, so she knows it's not scallops. But it's something that sometimes goes into food.
"Could be zombie virus juice," I say. "I'm having a close call with that as we speak. I'm fighting the undead even just sitting here. Look!" And I show her my arm, where a new little hive has just poked out.
"Well, I will feel a lot better once you stop sprouting hives," she says.
Won't we all.
