Liz says that each Fall I have weird medical problems. She has a point. Last year my list included pneumonia, torn achilles tendon, and some other minor weird stuff. This year I got a new thriller - a wart growing very fast between my little toe and the next one. There isn't any extra room in there, so it was growing into me like a plantars wart, and it hurts! I could barely walk for a while. It is on its way out via a strong formula of salicylic acid that is supposed to burn off warts within 3 weeks. So what if it's been 6 and still has a way to go? At least I can walk again.
The latest is an encounter with a lurker in my garage. I have been aware I was sharing my work space with these sneeky little predators for several years now, but I haven't worried about them. They are affectionately known as brown recluse spiders and they mostly keep themselves out of the way. I was even aware that one of them had a web about a foot or so away from where I stand when I work at my lathe. That should be plenty of space, right?
Apparently not. Last Monday evening I worked out there and when I got inside my leg started to itch. There was a little red spot right at the top edge of my sock, and I thought it was a mosquito bite. It looked like a mosquito bite, it itched like one, and it acted like one for a couple of days, except that it itched like the dickens! Then I noticed that the red spot was growing.
It seems that a spider crawled onto my shoe and up my leg until it found a place to bite, and it probably crawled off again to watch and see if it was going to get the biggest hunk of meat it had ever tasted. At least, I think that's what happened because I never saw the actual offender. I suppose I will have to spray noxious poisons in my workshop and kill everything in there. Oh the agony!
The wound area was strange because the little red spot where the bite was, was right at the edge of the larger red area. By Friday it was so painful it kept me awake at night. Saturday I realized the red spot had grown to the size of a quarter or a bit larger, so I used an old Indian trick for measuring such things - I drew a circle around the red area with a pen. Good news! This morning it was clear that it was shrinking - not growing. However, there is a much larger area under it where there is swelling and that whole area is quite sensitive and itchy. I also drew a line around that area, with a green marker. I have concluded that I will likely survive another weird medical issue.
The question underneath all this is simply: What weird, obscure, seldom heard-of thing will crop up next in my Fall weird medical problems season?
The dark red spot - the source - is at the top-left of the general red area. Ink marks where the red extended Sat. night and you can see that it has retracted a bit, although there are now small red spots just outside it, too. The green marks the underlying swelled area. Photo taken Sunday night.
1 comment:
As long as it's just *little* weird medical problems!
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