Venom

It started out as a small, red dot. A small, red dot on my ankle. A small, red dot on my ankle which I blamed on John. How dare he shield himself when I try to kick his head?! =D (Well, not so much a kick, really, as a tap with my foot...) That was on Monday.

By Tuesday, the small, red dot remained, but was surrounded by a huge (the size of a quarter!), angry, pink swelling. Not to mention it itched/burned like bloody murder. And as all of you know from experiencing my year of poison-oak-hell, I have a very low itch-tolerance.

The worst thing is that I have no idea what caused it. Well, I can narrow it down pretty conclusively to some kind of bug attack, with the little, red dot being the spot of the actual bite. But none of the usual suspects seem guilty this time. It's definitely not poison oak. Poison oak I know oh too well. Plus, poison oak isn't a bug. And it also doesn't seem like a mosquito bite. I am also intimately acquainted with those. (How intimate? Try belly-button intimate =P. And to make matters worse, that was when I developed my allergy to calomine lotion. So my itchy belly-button became surrounded by an itchy rash.) Mosquitoes love me. And while I definitely sometimes get hugely swollen mosquito bites, they never stay that huge. They typically shrink to normal sizes pretty quickly after occuring, and certainly never stay huge for 2 days and counting, like this one is. They also don't generally have a small red dot.

My favorite hypothesis is that it's a spider bite. I suppose it's also possible that it's a bee sting. I've never been stung by a bee before, so I don't know how one would manifest itself on me. But I prefer spider bite. Spider bites seem so much more exciting than bee stings. More spooky. More death defying. Sure, some people are killed by bee stings. But since I haven't gone into anaphylactic shock yet, I'm guessing I'm not one of those people. And all people are killed by spider bites. Or the bites of some spiders, at any rate. Besides, I haven't noticed any bees lately (perhaps a stealth bee?), while I know there are spiders living in my house. I accidently touched one once, as I tryed to liberate it from my room and release it into the wild. It was one of those hairy spiders, and was amazingly soft and fuzzy. If I didn't have soft, fuzzy cats, and it hadn't been a spider, I might have kept it as a pet! But it was a spider, so I screamed and dropped it into the fish tank. Oops. It got released to the wild slightly damp...

So anyway, wish me luck with my mystery spider bite, and a speedy convalescence. It still isn't clear that I'll survive this ordeal. Sure, it doesn't look like the venom will kill me, but I might just itch myself to death. Or maybe I'll get off light, and merely be driven crazy by my itchy-burny ankle.