Okay, so I go to the doctor yesterday after a week of scratching my legs into a bloody pulp. I was hoping the red bumps would magically disappear, but after waking up yesterday with new bumps on my thighs and going crazy scratching the patches behind my knees, I decided it was time.
I made the call. I went in. The doctor looked at my legs. "You don't have poison oak, you have mites."
What???!!! ARRRRRGGHHHHHHHH!
"Mites? Creatures actually living on me, chomping on my skin?"
"Yep. They're oak mites."
"So they're crawling on me? Are they in our bed? On our cat?"
"Well, I don't know about your cat, but you might want to call the vet about that."
Turns out David and I are the victims of oak mites, (aka itch mites), that have been plaguing the Chicago area and munching on Cicada larva.....and humans. Like us. We're hosts to microscopic parasites. They fall from the Oak Trees, and are tiny enough to blow on the wind until they land on a hospitable human.
The kind Dr. Ettner, after I was finished screaming, wrote me a prescription for Scabies medication. More screaming ensued.
"Scabies?"
"Well, they're not Scabies, but I figure if this stuff kills Scabies it will kill Oak Mites."
So last night David and I covered ourselves in Scabies cream and went to bed. This morning we washed it off. Then I dumped my entire bed into the washing machine.
Now I'm hearing tiny screams of dying mites. Our pro-life stance on bugs has been thrown out the window.
5 comments:
BUGS MUST DIE, at least the ones trying to eat you. A girl's gotta have some boundaries.
I had not yet read this when we had lunch yesterday! Yikes. I was teasing you about getting poison oak residue on my dining room chair, not BUGS! I had a couple of those mite bites a month or so ago. One developed a welt like an 1" long.
Ack....that sucks (well, it bites, actually.) I've never heard of oak mites, dang...and avoiding TICKS was one reason I wanted to move out of the country and back into the city...oy.
So sorry about the mites! HOwever, thanks for making me laugh my head off. - JenS
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