Bitten

This morning I find myself awake freakishly early (7 for me is like 3 a.m. to most normal people especially when I’ve been out late the night before; it’s just insane), the limits of my itch tolerance being pushed by the 49 mosquito bites I procured over the weekend. I am not exaggerating; I just counted. Sloppily; concentrating on each bite long enough was painful because bites start to itch once they remember that they exist. There is one smack in the middle of my wrist. I don’t scratch that one.

These bites are all I can think about. They’re all I can talk about. The poison has spread to the conversation lobe of my brain and just makes me yammer on in astonishment about them.

I mean, my veins might be coursing with West Nile virus, and my West Nile virus might have malaria. I just don’t know yet. What’s the incubation time for that shit?

Wikipedia, that’s your cue.

The second, febrile stage has an incubation period of 3-8 days followed by fever, headache, chills, diaphoresis (excessive sweating), weakness, lymphadenopathy (swollen lymph nodes), and drowsiness.

Excessive sweating, huh? I am going to die.

That would be hilariously poetic, considering I acquired these bites while traipsing around in an overgrown cemetery over the weekend while hunting for a geocache with Sarah. We ended up not having the sheer stupidity and strength of will to go the whole way and actually get the cache; it was stashed at the base of a tree nestled at the back of the “wild” part of the cemetery, meaning we would have needed machetes and thigh-high boots to get back there, not mini-skirts and flip-flops.

The cemetery, if you’re dressed appropriately, is a pretty amazing place, even though the city has let it get so overgrown that many of the graves are effectively lost. It’s estimated that there are 23,000 people buried there, and thousands of graves have been lost to nature. There have been cleanup efforts, but there’s still a lot of work to be done. It’s the city’s oldest cemetery, and the site where Tennessee’s first black female physician is buried. (We looked for her headstone but couldn’t find it.) It’s so sad but typical that a place like that would suffer such neglect.

I’m going to let these battle wounds heal (god, how awesome would it be to scratch them all furiously and then sit in a bath of rubbing alcohol?), but I’ll be back to Zion. Maybe when the weather’s cooler and the snakes are sleeping and the undergrowth isn’t quite so, uh, vibrant.