This little piggy went to the ER

I get it. I understand how my middle toe could be confused with a healthy, pink, tasty, tiny sentient being. So I don’t really hold a grudge. If I were a carnivorous spider, raring to transfer some deadly poison from my fangs to some fluffy, Disney-eyed mammal, I would not think twice before latching onto someone’s delicious toe. Especially a fresh, immaculately clean toe, temptingly swaying back and forth in the quiet night.

Like I said, I don’t really blame the arachnid. What happened is I woke up in the afternoon with at least eight microscopic welts on my confused toe, itchy welts at that, and I wondered what kind of mentally retarded mosquito would strike with such fury in such a reduced area. I walked downstairs and found my sister Foolia. “My toe itches,” I told her. “Why?” she asked. “I think a mosquito bit me like a million times while I slept,” I said. She laughed and shrugged.

If I may digress here for a second, there’s something you should know about me and mosquito bites. The truth is, if we’re going to be perfectly honest here, I don’t hate them. Yes, it’s annoying to get bitten. No, I would never want to be stung simultaneously by a cloud of ravenous bloodsuckers. But, hear me out. You know when one mosquito stings you just a single time, say, in the forearm or the ankle? And it takes you a few minutes to come to grips with the fact that yes, you’ve been stung, and there’s nothing you can do about it now? Well. Once that’s done with, I find the act of scratching the welt so pleasurable, and I find such comfort in the certainty that I will wake up the next day and the bite will be gone, that I don’t find it to be a particularly irritating situation. I kind of enjoy it. Sitting in front of the TV, occasionally digging into the wound. Maybe I just like being in control, even briefly, of my brain’s pleasure centers.

Point being, I was almost looking forward to scratching that toe for a couple of days. But then I woke up the next day and the toe looked scarlet and puffy, like it was angry at me, so I left it alone. And a day later, I could barely walk on it. I poked at it and found that a large blister had developed. So I cut a tiny hole in the blister and applied pressure. A fountain of clear liquid sprouted. A few hours later, the toe began losing its shape, now engorged on one side, flat on the other.

I limped downstairs again and ran my situation past a more useful human being, my mom, who took a single horrified look at the toe and informed me that we were going straight to the emergency room, right now, because that thing was hella infected. I’m sure she didn’t say hella, but I just wanted to pay homage to No Doubt’s hit song “Hella Good”. Anyway, I slid into some flip flops and the moms drove me to the hospital, gripping the wheel so tightly that I finally got to personally witness the term “white-knuckled” in real life.

I showed the on-call doctor my ailing toe. “Do you know what bit you?” she asked. “No. I was hoping you would tell me,” I replied. “No idea,” she said. “I figure it must have been a spider, right? What else could it have been? Unless there’s a cobra loose inside my house,” I suggested. “Yes, a spider’s a possibility,” she said, noncommittal. Then she scribbled something down on her prescription pad and shoved it at me. “Take these every six hours till they run out, and these other ones every 24 hours.”

Needless to say, the prescription pills severely disrupted my sleep cycle. But I diligently took them, even the giant ones that I was unable to swallow, so I had to chomp down on them and break them up into smaller pieces in my mouth and wince and recoil at the horrid taste. After about a week, the bruising faded and the swelling subsided and my toe was looking almost normal again, except that with all the unexpected activity, the skin had expanded and then shriveled up like a raisin, making it look like it belonged to Joe Biden.

This is where this story should end. But it doesn’t. This little bastard toe, this spoiled little piggy, might I add, the one who had roast beef without having to go to market, began swelling up again. I gave it a day, but you see, now I’m an improved human being, able to tell an infected digit from a healthy one, and I realized on my own that it was time to get back to the emergency room. “You know, sometimes spider bites result in ulcers,” said my new doctor, which baffled me. First, I thought ulcers only happened in stomachs. Second, she refused to elaborate on how my toe could potentially become ulcerated, and how I’d be able to tell, so essentially she just scared me for no reason. Then she criticized my first doctor, saying that I should have been taking pills for at least twice as long, and wrote me another prescription for the same damn medication. “Is there something that I can take every 12 hours rather than six?” I asked. “I like to sleep.” There was. So here I am, back on antibiotics and antihistamines, but at least sleeping through the night.

And no, I didn’t gain any superpowers, thanks for asking.