Guide to Southern Bugs

When I first arrived in Savannah, I would regularly see these strange bugs all over the city. They hang out in pairs, and appear to attach to each other at the butt and then fly off together. I find them disgusting and creepy, and they have an annoying propensity to fly into peoples' faces, but somebody from Florida informed me (and another student from New Jersey who was commenting on the strange, gross bugs) that these are called Love Bugs. My initial reaction was along the lines of "really? Love bugs is a real thing?" and apparently, the answer is yes. I haven't seen them recently, which indicates that they probably are gone for the winter. Fine by me.

Then of course, there's chiggers, or mites. It's not an uncommon sight to watch tourists ooh and ahh over the Spanish moss hanging in the trees all over Savannah. One evening, I watched an elderly couple stop to admire the Spanish moss, even stuffing it into the lady's bag. According to Margo, an acquaintance I made thanks to her grandma's connection to PLU and Trinity, collecting Spanish moss in such a way is a surefire way to inflict a chigger problem upon oneself.

Savannah is also home to cockroaches, which I have never seen in person before, and some sort of large, hideously ugly beetle which I noticed one day outside the dorm. It was utterly repulsive, and I'm thankful I've only seen one such creature. I also frequently see dragon flies flittering about which I enjoy, as they always make me think of home. The dragon fly is, afterall, the state bug of Washington.

These bugs and I were happily coexisting until last Thursday, when I woke up with a bug bite on my foot. Coming from such a mild locale, where the worst thing we have to worry about are irritating mosquitoes or the occasional (harmless) spider bite, I initially considered the bite to be a simple annoyance and ignored it. I did look online for home remedies to relieve itching, which led me to treating the bite with an ice pack and aloe vera lotion (in lieu of calamine lotion).

Unfortunately for me, something odd bit me, or the climate and I don't get along, or my immune system simply isn't quite on par these days. Whatever the cause, the past week has been a rather frustrating adventure for me. Within a couple days, my bug bite grew to the size of a nickel; no cause for alarm, but clearly not a standard mosquito bite reaction. By Sunday, I had developed a faint bullseye rash around the bite. It still didn't look that bad, but I decided it was time to see a doctor (and make a trip to the pharmacy for calamine lotion). So Monday, in I tramped to the student health clinic during walk-in hours to see the nurse, who took a look and said the bite was healing fine, and the rash was probably an irritation from my shoe, as the bite was located on the side of my foot. She suggested I buy over the counter hydrocortizone cream to treat the rash.

Between mid-terms and the inconvenient hours of the local haunted CVS, I didn't acquire the hydrocortizone cream until Wednesday, when I had to make a trip to CVS for some school supplies in order to complete my mid-term. Naturally, it was just my luck that in this time period, my rash decided to get worse: bumps started popping up around the inner circle of the bullseye, and the outer ring was spreading.

This leads us up to today, when I decided it was time to see the doctor again. Unfortunately, the student clinic at SCAD is appointment-only on Friday, and they're closed all weekend. Instead, they directed me to the urgent care clinic. I attempted to find a general practitioner in the historic downtown area, but to no prevail. There aren't many options to begin with, and getting in without an appointment is impossible. So SCAD res life called a taxi for me.

Oh, if only my adventures ended with a smooth ride and a quick diagnoses. But I think we're far enough into this story to know that it's not going to, aren't we?

The taxi driver was a caricature; every negative southern stereotype rolled up into this odd man. He showed me a picture of his (now dead) 10-foot rattle snake, griped about every driver on the road, and complained about Obama. The ride itself was complicated, as traffic reached a stand-still and we were stuck sitting with no end in sight. Turned out, a tree had fallen across the street and nobody could go anywhere until the cops and tree-removal service managed to work through the traffic and remove the tree. 45 minutes later, I arrived at the urgent care clinic, where I got to wait for just over 2 hours before finally being seen. By this point, I hadn't eaten in 6 hours, and was operating on 4 hours of sleep. The more I had to wait, the crankier I was getting, and the more eager I was to finish up and go back to the dorm.

The doctor took a look, said it looked like a bad rash and prescribed a steroid cream and an antibiotic to avoid infection. Of course, with the haunted CVS being the only pharmacy within walking distance, and the amount of time I spent waiting for everything, it was closed by the time I returned to the dorm (this time driven back by a Russian taxi driver who kept wanting to take me to Oglethorpe Mall, instead of Oglethorpe Ave...about 15 minutes apart).

So this brings us to tonight, where I'm stuck with a blistery rash that is irritated by every single pair of shoes I owe. I don't know what caused the problem, whether is was some sort of venom in the bug which bit me, or an underlying problem that was simply aggravated by the bug bite. I've certainly been a very good girl and haven't touched my foot - even when the itching was driving me absolutely mad. Hopefully, things will go back to the way they were the first month here: with the bugs and me ignoring each other.