Yesterday morning I awoke to find the mosquito bites I had all but forgot about were now flared, red, perfectly round, and about the size of a quarter each. This is the bugger between the pinky and ring knuckles of my left hand:
The curious spread I figure is from the the fact that I use my hands typing all day, so whatever my body doesn't like is getting to spread out a bit there. My brother does not have the same symptoms.
SO WTF? I understand that a toxin in the mosquito saliva causes the original bump, redness, and itching and affects different people different ways. But I got these bites 14 days ago. And they reacted like always: itch for a couple days, then go away. They hadn't bothered me in a week. What would make them all go nuclear 12 days after being bit?
Don't worry, I'm not being a typical stupid man about it either. I've already been to see the doctor if for no other reason than Cortizone10 was doing dick for the itch and I was either going to scratch them all until bloody or go absolutely mad thinking about scratching them all until bloody.
The doc said things like "weird," "I've never seen anything like it," and "Thanks for being my freak of the day" (we have a pretty casual relationship). And so it's antibiotics because of the timeline and off-chance of infection, topical steroid for immediate relief (knocks that itch down about 60%), and an oral steroid for overall inflammation control.
But it's all generalized guesswork, so I turn to you, my dear readers: Have you ever heard anything like this? Bites following a natural fade then BAM! 12 days later they get as big as quarters and itch 3 times as badly?
Posts
6 comments:
Nope, never seen that before! Crazy!
The area in which I live (the Canadian prairies) is legendary for having gazillions of huge, hungry mosquitos every summer. Having lived with them for 50-plus years, I can categorically say -- NEVER have I seen or heard of a reaction like yours. Perhaps you were bitten by a mutant mosquito, all hopped up on nuclear waste or something.
Republican mosquitos. No proof of citizenship (Cali) you're free game. If they were big fat ugly and annoying as hell then it was probably the Glenus Beckus strain.
Maybe you'll get lucky and it'll turn out to have been radioactive mosquitoes, then you'll have superpowers.
Could be the 'roids or the antibiotics, but they're fading. Only about 1/3 as bad now.
Unfortunately, no mosquito powers. Flying would be awesome, and my daughter would think me living on blood would be cool, but a giant mosquito proboscis shooting out of my mouth would be weird.
...or would it? Ladies?
When we were kids we would convince someone to let the mosquito suck out as much blood as they could when we saw one land on someone's arm. We would tell them to squeeze the skin around the bite so that the mosquito couldn't pull away and had to take more of it's fill and exploding as a result. If we got the person to that stage we would tell them that the massive itchy bite had resulted in a condition called the 'dreaded LURGY'. If you got the 'lurgy' you basically had 24 hours to live. It was great fun. I think you might have the LURGY. Time to put your affairs in order.
Post a Comment