LET ME INTRODUCE MY STAPH…

This is ‘L’ week…laundry, library, and laying around lazily.

In other words, not much getting done, but I have a viable excuse.

I been sick!

In the jungle, there is no escape from bugs of every description, and I am the next best thing to a free buffet for them.

10-hour bug repellent lasts about 2 hours on me; after that, I become irresistible again to any biting insect in the vicinity.

I think there’s a contest on to see which of them can eat the most of me on any given day.

First prize winner gets the chance to fly up my nose and bite me on the septum…

About a week and a half ago, I woke up to large painful welts under both armpits which burned and itched magnificently.

Whatever bunked down for the night in Jungle Dave’s Underarm Motel not only trashed the room but left me a parting gift in the form of a staph infection.

I took pictures but they are too gruesome to post.

The glands under my left arm became the size of a small apple and a lovely shade of blood poisoning began to spread like wildfire from my pits to my parts.

Felt about like wildfire too.

Movement was a tad painful, and that ugly flu-like aching slowed me waaaaay down. I couldn’t lift anything with my arm and any action requiring both hands was excruciating. You know how a bad canker sore feels at just the wrong spot on your mouth? It was like that, only in my freakin’ armpit.

I have it under control now, but it’s been a week of amazing discomfort, even less fun than cancer was and conceivably more life-threatening because the distance from the infection to the heart is VERY short.

So I began taking two thousand mgs of Vitamin C every few hours, and started to apply a very potent vinegar a friend of ours makes, as a wound soak to disinfect and help cauterize the tissues.

In the meantime, I felt like I had been beaten with a bamboo cane, and exhibited all the energy of a sloth in the middle of hibernation season.

But the Vitamin C is doing its job fairly well, and has helped neutralize the poison from the wound while preventing the fever and dizziness that I’ve experienced before from blood poisoning.

The vinegar took the heat out of the glands and helped to release and drain the poison from the bites. Now THAT was gross.

Good vinegar is absolutely amazing in its medical usefulness; the stuff I used was distilled from banana tree vegetation and had a ‘mother’ the size of a small dog.

I mixed it with organic apple cider vinegar and the combined effects were salubrious.

(Sorry, I just always wanted to use the word salubrious, and since I am sitting in a library at the moment I figgered this was the time…)

So today, I am continuing my rehabilitation in the Hilo library, whose pleasures I used to take in when I lived here forty years ago.

This quiet little library looks basically identical to its younger self. And I mean, exactly the same down to its ‘government green’ paint color and pink/blue tiled ladies and mens restrooms.

The only changes I can detect have been the addition of a row of computers that occupy one row of study tables, and several bookshelves that hold the library’s DVD collection.

Other than that, the interior courtyard, its wonderfully-crafted koa-wood furniture, and the meticulous lawn and garden have been frozen in time, waiting for my return.

Sitting out in the courtyard is like being immersed in a framed painting of the world’s bluest sky and whitest, fluffiest clouds.

Completely relaxing, quieter than a church, and the only sound to be heard is the occasional librarian’s cart rolling down a distant linoleum aisle.

Ahhhhhh.

Libraries love me, and I always return the sentiment, if not the books…

I’ve always heard that if writers ever did bring their purloined books back that we’d have to build twice as many libraries to hold them all.

So I have actually been saving the taxpayers money! Um-hm.

Anyway…I am sitting here happily perusing the library’s magazine collection waiting for my laundry to dry and my armpits to unswell. Life is good.

And there you have an account of my most recent adventure; they are not always fun, but as long as I live to tell the tale, I am up for whatever is next.

My eye has not improved at this point but is not overly painful, although it weeps copiously and has swollen considerably. I will be seeing an ophthalmologist soon and may be heading for a little surgery.

But I fear nothing, and have learned to turn my worries over to my creator.

There is an old saying I like: ‘Don’t worry about things you can’t control, because if you can’t control them, why worry? And conversely, don’t worry about what you CAN control either, because if you have control, why worry?’

And that about sums up everything it’s possible to worry about…

Besides, MY friends know how to pray for me! And I for them.

Beats worry hands down.

Well, it’s nearly story time in the kid’s section, and that cute Polynesian librarian is going to be reading again, so I gotta go, but will write more after I find out who wins the big race – the Tortoise or the Hare.

The suspense is killing me!

ALOHA!

(Pics are Laundry and Shower Day…once a month whether I need it or not; also, a shot of the Blue Sky With Clouds from my corner perch at the Hilo Library Courtyard)