Anthropods Attack

Anthropods Attack!

By: Zola

Chief Dieter

Plan Z Diet

I promised myself that if it happened again this year I was going to go see a dermatologist. No matter how stupid I was going to feel I was going to get this checked out. I didn’t care what the dermatologist said. I could handle the minor humiliation if there was going to be some. I just had to know.

Well it happened again.

It originally started about eight years ago. Come late summer and into fall I’d get these huge welts on my body. The location was never predictable. They were all over. No kidding, these things were the size of a half of a golf ball. And red. And puffy. And surrounded by up to a 3” ring of redness. I looked ridiculous. And every morning it seemed like I’d wake up with more. And itch! I was ready to crawl out of my skin! Hydrocortisone cream was completely inadequate.

The welts lasted for up to 10 days or so. As they progressed they’d get hot. Then they’d form sort of a tumor in the middle; a real hard mound that was captured inside. After a few days the top would get sort of crusty and dry. Over time they’d subside but while they were around I’d have these huge itchy fits. Sometimes I’d be in the middle of a meeting and one of them would flare up. In some meetings you can’t just stop and scratch. It’s not very ladylike or CEO of the Plan Z Diet worthy. I just had to hang in no matter how distracted I was.

So when it happened this year I was determined to take action.

Over the years my family sort of got involved. I had remembered that when I was a child my mother would suggest that we repaint a bedroom in fall. She said that’s when the spiders were looking for a warm place to spend the winter and they’d try to come in, but if we painted the bedroom, the spiders would not like the smell of paint so they’d go elsewhere.

So I decided these must be spider bites. The timing was about right. Late summer and into fall.

Instead of painting I did heavy duty cleaning. I’d pull my bedroom apart and start over; cleaning top to bottom. That didn’t work. I got the welts anyway. Maybe it wasn’t spiders. I was going nuts year to year, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. My family started to make jokes about how I had spiders living INSIDE of me that must be biting me from the inside out, cuz there were certainly no spiders in my bedroom. I was the butt of funny jokes and I was covered in red mounds that itched and itched.

So I made the appointment. Even when the receptionist asked why I wanted to come in I was almost embarrassed to say that I thought I might be having a bug bite problem. I wasn’t sure if it was even a bug bite problem or if I had an allergy of some kind that flared up as summer waned. But this was ridiculous so I decided to buck up and face the doctor.

I had never met this man before. He specialized in whatever they thought I might have. He walked in and asked me to tell the story I just told you. He looked at my bug bites and made concerned doctor faces. He measured how hot my arm was where there was a bite. More concerned faces and he even let out a “wow”. He pondered for just a minute more.

The first thing he brought up was the timing. “This started about 8 years ago, right?” I confirmed that he had that timing right. Then he went on to explain to me that he thinks that 8 years ago I was bitten by a mosquito that carried West Nile Virus. He speculated that my immune system fought off the West Nile and that I am left with Arthropod Bite Reaction. My condition actually has a name.

What happens to me now is that any bug bite can cause me to have this allergic reaction. It doesn’t have to be a mosquito and he doesn’t exactly know the total number of the types of bugs that I am allergic to so I am to assume it’s all of them. He says my bites might have been baby spiders but they also could have been those teeny “no-seeums”. The tiniest bug can leave me with a huge welt.

He gave me some suggestions:

From May until September I am to take one Clariton a day. This will help me in that my reaction will be less inflammatory. So far the few bites I have gotten since I started the meds have been small marble-sized instead of golfball. That’s progress.

I am to sleep with my windows closed. Rats. I love a fall evening with the windows open. I am to douse myself in DEET when I go outside. Stinky but I keep it nearby. And he gave me a prescription for a super-duper form of Hydrocortizone cream. This stuff lasts for 8 hours. That’s very helpful for my meetings.

And the rest will just be luck. No one knows why late summer and fall and not spring. Good news is I live in the city now where even in a year like this one, when many communities are cutting back on spraying for mosquitoes, the city doesn’t have as many. When I lived in Wisconsin I was plagued by mosquitoes and other bugs on a constant basis. Instead of being paranoid, now I just need to be careful.

The best news of all is now I know I am not nuts. And I also know I don’t have those mysterious internal spiders my family joked about. It was worth going to the dermatologist just to confirm that my reaction to whatever bit me is beyond normal. Of course I knew it was not normal but I just needed reassurance. And I needed the super-duper Hydrocortizone.

Cheers,


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