I'm an indoors kind of gal. Always have been. Don't get me wrong. I have enjoyed many an outdoorsy weekend with Second Best Friend and her husband, Hunter. Give me a campfire, some s'mores, and a dark sky speckled with an unfathomable number of stars, and I'm a happy girl.
But, I don't really seek outdoorsy activities. Sure, I'll take the kids on a nature walk. But given the choice between a board game and a hike, I'll take the board game.
And you know what? I don't think the outdoors like ME very much. This summer has provided stacks of evidence.
The first weekend in June, I went to my goddaughter's 10th birthday party. It was a pool party. I LOVE swimming. But there was not as much swimming as there was keeping my small children afloat. One particularly daring 18-month old required that I make a diving catch to keep him from cannonballing into the pool. Said diving catch resulted in me scraping the bejeesus out of my shin. And, once I climbed out of the pool, I apparently walked past a bowl of Ebola, because this tiny, centimeter-square scrape turned into a red, puffy, hot mass of annoyance within a day. It took TWO WEEKS to heal, and I STILL boast a stupid purple scar.
Two weeks later, same house, different daughter, another pool party. Another great time. And another random patch of allergic reaction to something. I'm thinking bug bite. But, seriously, I've never reacted like this to a bug bite before. I had a coffee-mug sized angry patch on my chest. So, maybe people weren't staring at my astounding cleavage for once. Perhaps they were just horrified by the monkey bite decorating my sternum.
Two weeks after that, I'm chilling in a park with my family, awaiting the fireworks spectacular that a suburb of Cleveland will deliver to me and mine. A couple of days later, something unpleasant and...bumpy...decorates my hip. Okay, if we're being COMPLETELY honest here, it decorates the crease where my belly, if it gets ANY BIGGER, will start to fold over. I am not in total FUPA territory yet. But I'm getting close to Scary Weight. So, at first I'm thinking that it's one more depressing sign of my absolute need to commit to the gym more regularly (like, maybe TWICE per week), and is just some kind of friction blister.
To confirm my suspicion, I do the absolute worst thing possible. You might think the worst thing is to ignore it, but no, good soldier! The worst thing is to Google your symptoms. Know what Dr. G. told me? That I had ovarian cancer. Or, second best, I had an STD. My third string diagnosis was that I have shingles.
Stupid Google.
But, all of this Doomsday diagnosis prompted a visit to the urgent care facility, and I am one hundred percent sure that the physician's assistant and doctor who tended me thought that I was some ridiculous housewife crafting terminal illness out of a bug bite.
Which, by the way, is what I was diagnosed with. The doctor assured me that they see this around this time of year, and that the bug bites so deeply that he* pushes bacteria from the surface of my skin into my bloodstream, causing an infection.
NONE of this made me feel any better, by the way. Oh, omnipresent bacteria all over my skin, you say? Delightful!
We are going to totally IGNORE that I felt no bug bite, and that this can't possibly be some eruption of a heretofore undiscovered unpleasantry.
I am now the proud owner of a three-day cycle of Augmentin. So, for those of you with kids, my infected bug bite is about one-third as bad as an average kid's ear infection. I am tough, eh?
*No female would do this to another one of it's kind. Had to be a jerk male.
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