House

Sometimes being in Rwanda is like being in an episode of House. Wild exaggeration but bear with me.

Saturday I woke up very early in the morning. I wanted to bathe my leg in calamine lotion. I'm still unclear why Peace Corps wouldn't include that in our medical kits.

*Tangent alert: Peace Corps gives each volunteer a medical kit that includes first aid stuff, basic medicine and things we would need to take immediately before traveling into the office. Essential things to any Peace Corps med kit: anti-diarrhea pills, stool sample kit, malaria test kit. But there's lots of normal things too, like off brand of advil, tylenol, antacids, bandaids, benedryl. And a perk of visiting other volunteers - we all have the same kit so if something comes up we can use each others' kits.

So back to the point, woke up wanting to rip my leg off and then scratch it against the bark of a tree to make it happy. I was wide awake so I assumed it the standard 5am wake up call my body gives me. I got up and started doing things before realizing it was 3:30am! Oh boy. This was the wee morning hours of our Thanksgiving celebration so it was going to be a long day.

After my little volunteer posse woke up at a more reasonable hour (6am), I had them take a look. I had some suspect red blotches around my ankle area. Plus a bunch of regular mosquito bites. The suspect ones were determined to be poison ivy, something I've never experienced before. There was some question of the existence of poison ivy in Rwanda and our resident plant expert went out to the garden to search for the evil plant. But we found nothing. I continued wanting to rip my leg off and let 20 people scratch it at once. I settled for taking Benedryl and trying to distract myself with some fabulous food.

The next morning I woke up with the blotch becoming a massive blister. There was more medical questioning from the group. Thank goodness we had Google. The poison ivy diagnosis was stuck with.

Thinking the medical saga was almost over because the blister had drained. But it seems another one wants to start in the same place. So I emailed details to the PC doctor. We're going to keep an eye on it and maybe in a couple days make sure it wasn't a spider bite.

It goes without saying that in Rwanda you will probably be covered in bites that are questionable. For example, earlier in the Thanksgiving festivities we had a conversation about fleas, bed bugs, and ringworm. And all the afflictions were present with examples to be shown and horror/success stories to be shared. Tips: keep the animals out of your house, keep the children out of your house - both eliminate fleas. Bleach all the wood and mattresses in your house and set things out in the sun for bed begs. Plus the injustice that some things create horrid reactions in some people and latent reactions in others.

So what is my blister/itchy/blotch issue? Hard to say. Maybe my Dr. House can figure it out. Or it will just fade away and I'll stop thinking about it.