April 21st, 2008
Just got home from dinner and drinks with Husband’s good friend Z. I am a serious lightweight so my two drinks have pretty much ruined me for useful purposes. Such as talking, walking, et cetera. When did this happen?
I used to be hardcore. At one time I worked for the Vancouver Food Bank (data entry – not recommended). I was friends with the guys who were in the shipping and warehouse departments, and every Friday we’d be off work by 3 or 4 – and down in the Ivanhoe or the pub in the Patricia Hotel within half an hour. I know. Super classy. But at that time it seemed like there was a certain cache in drinking at the scuzziest bars the downtown east side had to offer. Now I’m just glad I didn’t get hepatitis. Anyway, at that time we were always ordering pitchers and I always ended those Fridays staggering and barfing – but I earned it. I drank a lot of beer, cheap beer, and staggering and barfing is what you sign up for when you drink cheap beer at the Ivanhoe. It’s not what you sign up for when you have one pint and one highball at a reasonable pub, but now that I am older and more reasonable the result is the same. Less liquor, same punishment.
No wonder I don’t drink often.
Anyway, I am nervously monitoring my internal processes for barf-sign. You know what I’m talking about. The grumbling tummy, the weird physiological disombobulation, and finally, the mouth sweats. When your salivary glands kick in you know it’s all over. So far I’m okay but having imbibed two whole ounces over three hours is, if you are me, dangerous. So I wait. And blog! And hopefully don’t get sick. I will, as always, keep you posted to my gross bathroom habits. You know you love it.
Oh! I totally forgot about the bites! Oh man! About five days ago I put new sheets on the bed (green, to match the summer duvet cover), and I guess there was some kind of biting insect folded into the linens because I woke up with NINE bites. A cluster of five on one thigh, a pair on my ankle, and one on each hip. And holy shit did I have a bad reaction to them. The bite zones swelled up, turned blotchy purple, itched like fuck, and grew a red, inflamed rings all around them. They look like big, swollen hickeys. Seriously, my thigh was puffed out about a centimetre, in an area the size of a baseball. And all purple. Totally gross. Husband has been monitoring them and giving me dire warnings about skin infections, but finally they seem to be abating. I tell you, if my digital camera hadn’t just bit the biscuit I would post pictures because the insane reaction is hard to imagine without a visual. It looks like I got bitten by a nuclear tarantula. What the hell was in my sheets? Gives me the creeps, I tell you! And – overshare coming – I sleep without underpants, and have serious heebie jeebies imagining whatever it was having access to, you know, my private bits. Yecch!
Husband just didn’t want to admit that they were all hickeys given while you slept…
Mouth sweats! eeew! Here’s to feeling better quickly and no barfing!
And holy heebie jeebies, batman! That bug(spider?)-in-sheets thing? That’s seriously disturbing!
You always were a bit of a lightweight, but now you’re one literally! You have less fat on your body these days, and higher body fat helps with alcohol absorption.
So, what’s my excuse?
Those bites sound suspiciously like the spider bites my wife got in the Okanagan a couple of years ago. Same swelling – though not quite as big an area (toonie sized red area)and only two bites.
The doctor who examined my wife said that they looked like Hobo spider bites. The venom constricts the blood vessels, causing the swelling & starving the tissues of oxygen. They can leave you with a lesion.
He treated my wife with a Nitro patch on the bite site, which opened up the blood vessels to prevent necrosis. No scars for her – but the doctor saw her the next morning.
Rory