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tis the jucken season
All I want to do is stick my feet in ice water until the leaves change color. I love nature. I love summer. But nature and summer in Munich seem to be testing this love.
It’s another year, which means, another bug bite battle. And I’m losing it, again. My ‘exotic’ blood is highly prized in Munich’s Englischer Garten. I can imagine these mini Bavarian vampires sipping on another boring bratwurst hemoglobin latte all the while jonesing for some pacific islander plasma coursing through my veins.
I’m so covered with mosquito bites from chest to toe and a horse fly bite on my ankle. The mosquito bites I can handle, barely, but the horse fly bite is swelling. It’s crossed my mind that I might relieve the pain and itching if I bit off my own foot and hope I grow back a new one. Still, you won’t believe that this experience is an improvement from previous summers.
I just have another 2 years to get used to these blood suckers here. Who am I kidding, I doubt I’m safe anywhere now. Still, I really want to be in denial and refuse to be lock myself indoors during flip-flop weather.
toughening up is hard to do
As a child it was never me who got bitten by a unruly wasp, yellow jacket or horsefly. The victims were always my sister or my mom. I looked on in amazement as their skin swelled up like the Michelin man. I received my first deerfly bites near my high-school boyfriend’s house – or maybe they were just Florida mosquitoes the size of deerflies – but the pain was relatively tolerable. I’ve always been an east coast, outdoors sort-of tomgirl: hiking on the AT, climbing Mt Yona, Kayaking the Everglades or Canoing the Alafia, all without being a victim of a insect assault that drove me to the edge of insanity.
That all changed when I moved to Munich. It’s these little things that turn you psychologically against your host country. I must keep in mind that there is a running joke in my family, which is: the greater the content of east Asian blood the higher the likelihood of being stung. My girlfriend Ping and I coined it the sacrificial anode effect. My mom, Ping and sis were my protection in Florida. Apparently I’m the anti-citronella in the Englischer Garten.
Reacting to Munich insects isn’t new to me. But last Wednesday was the first this summer I got the telltale blood mark on my inner left ankle. Damn! I thought the flying bugger dancing around my upper legs gave up. I didn’t realize he had feasted on me until I got home a half an hour later. Even though I cleaned it up and iced it my body’s immune system went straight to Defcon ∞ . My ankle began to swell, heat up, itch, burn. I gave up after two sleepless nights and knowing last year it took about 10 days to recover from the first bite, I finally looked up an allergist Friday morning to get some relief.
The doc to my amazement said it wasn’t an allergic reaction because the ‘reaction’ stayed local to the bite. I had no other symptoms on any other part of my body, no breathing restriction. Mentally though, I was fed up and that called for reinforcements stronger than what the Apotheke doled out. In a nut shell, there wasn’t any sign of infection and I simply had to ride out the battle my immune system was waging. (P.S. he said my German was good for just two years. Does this compliment ever grow old? nay) He gave me some samples of Optiderm and a prescription for Prednitop that finally gave me some relief Saturday afternoon. Now it looks like a hideous boil of sorts, hard underneath and devoid of any feeling. It’s fascinatingly disgusting. If you want to see it click here.
I’m told that it will be about five years before my immune system finally adjusts to my not-so-new surroundings. I just hope in this time I can adjust to this new sensitive side of me and still keep my love for being out-of-doors. But for now, you might be able to recognize me as the girl with arms flailing and running like a ninny from anything with wings.
