At 2:30 this morning I woke up with the palm of my left hand itching tremendously. Even before I was fully awake I was scratching it so hard that welts were forming. It was the most amazingly itchy thing I think I've ever felt, and as I woke up it passed through merely itching and moved on to itching plus burning. I stumbled into the bathroom and turned on the light to look at it.
The source of the itching that was covering more of my hand every second was a tiny, probably 1/8" diameter, white circle. It was just the slightest bit raised, and bright bloodless white, and my god was it itchy. By this point I'd scratched myself into puffy irritated redness over my entire hand and wrist, save of course for that tiny white circle. I put some After Bite on it -- you know, that ammonia stuff that's supposed to make mosquito bites feel better -- and got back in bed.
It's hard to sleep with that much itching. I sat in bed for a while considering the possible species, size and whereabouts of whatever bit me. Spider? They outnumber us in this household by about 25 to 1 and I'm allergic to their grubby little teeth. On the other hand, I get huge puffy bumps from spider bites, not tiny white circles. Mosquito? Same problem, though; the bite just looked wrong. Maybe some kind of mutant mosquider, or spiduito, or a dust mite magnified to terrifying size. At this point I'd been thinking so hard about it that I imagined I could feel the burning sensation traveling slowly down my arm. Three inches past my wrist, four, five, halfway to my elbow, and so on. I wondered if I'd been injected with something poisonous that was slowly approaching my heart. In that case, I figured, yawning, I may as well get a few last hours of sleep.
When I woke up this morning, my hand wasn't itching. It wasn't puffy, and there wasn't any little white circle. There was a faint pinkish blotch where the circle had been, like what you see when you're looking at a blood vessel through your skin. There was no burning sensation. To my knowledge, I wasn't dead either. Jacob helpfully suggested that I'd been bitten by a radioactive spider and would now have super powers.
"Hold still," I told him, "I want to see how hard I can punch now."
"No, you can't," he said, "I was bitten by a radioactive... no-punch."
Posted by dianna at August 9, 2005 11:17 AM