Ankle Biters

This is a follow up to yesterday's post about the hike in Harris Lake Park.

What can I say? These pictures say it all.

The sandflea bites itch like crazy. I read online that it hurts when the buggers bite you but I didn't even notice. The biting was going on between 8:30am when we started hiking and 11am when we finished the hike and brushed off the fleas before getting in the car. Cheryl was bothered by the bites immediately but I didn't feel any itching until around 3pm, hours after I'd gotten home.


I might have started late on the itching thing but I'm making up for it with longevity. Damn but these things itch. I'm typing this at almost 11:30pm on Tuesday, two and a half days after getting bitten and the bites are still horribly itchy. And that's with lots of 2% creme on the bites and antihistamine tablets in me.

Evil, nasty sandfleas!

But even with all that, I'd still love to do that hike again. The next time I go there I'll wear something that the sandfleas won't be able to get through. Maybe my neoprene kayaking socks. Only thing is, the sandfleas would probably just keep crawling upward until they reach flesh. I don't want to guide them too far up! Damn sandfleas.

Comments

Thumper said…
Ow. Ow. Ow ow ow ow...
2:04 AM
rosemary said…
Those are nasty looking. Had the same thing when we vacationed in Jamaica a decade ago. Do you think the pharmacies there had plain ole cortisone cream? No. I ended up getting the Jamaican version of hemorrhoid cream that worked OK.
12:09 PM
Teresa said…
Cortisone cream never helps with me... other than rubbing it in serves to help scratch the itch. Mostly, I swab (or sometimes POUR) rubbing alcohol on effected areas or sometimes ice to numb it for awhile. I could speculate as to why you didn't feel the bites as they happened, but that would be mean. I'll just hope that it clears up soon and you are comfy once more.
11:54 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nitroflex at home

Image
I mentioned a few days ago that I'd purchased off of Craig's List an exercise machine. A Nitroflex, to be more specific, for the grand sum of $75. The boxes you see to the left were bought by the seller as discontinued merchandise over a year ago and stored in his back yard storage shed. You might be able to see some of the bugs and such that had made their homes on these boxes. I left them out on my deck for a few days before opening them to allow the insects to leave gracefully or die in the sun. The picture to the left is the pieces from the box, unboxed, and up in one of my upstairs bedrooms. For the most part it wasn't difficult to move it around though two pieces were heavy and a number of them were kinda long and bulky to be wandering about the house with. Surprisingly, this kit didn't require any extra tools. There were two allen keys and one combo wrench included in the boxes and that was all it took to put it together. The whole thing only took about half an h
Read more

flea!

Image
Yep, that's one of those damn blood suckers. Renee's revenge on my neglecting her feelings, no doubt. We guys just have it so tough! LOL This here is a picture of my ankle and while it's not very obvious, I guess, there's a bunch of flea bites on there. Itches a bit, dammit. The annoying part is that the damn fleas can't use my blood--fleas are mostly species specific and don't have the proper enzymes to make meals out of blood from other critters--so they're not getting anything out of biting me. It's just frustration and starvation driving their biting. Well, I guess the real annoying part is the bites themselves, but I wanted to seem a little sensitive there for a moment. But no more of that. Kill the fleas! While most of the bites are on my ankles and calves, there's an occasional bite up higher like these 4 on my thigh. They're kinda hard to see through the hair but I wasn't able to focus on the skin with all the hair in the way. Sorry.
Read more

ankles: the sequel

Image
I've heard rumors that one post about my sprained ankle wasn't enough so here's more pictures to satisfy a public hungry for swollen flesh... This was taken the morning after I sprained the ankle. There's starting to be a black and blue mark from the blood vessels leaking At this point the swelling is still very localized to the lateral side of the left ankle and presumably that's the tendon that was affected (very likely since I really screwed it up 15 years ago and it's got extra play in it) In this picture, taken on Sunday evening about 25 hours after the injury, you can see the edema, or swelling, has spread out over the top and entire lateral side of the foot. There's also more evidence of hematoma at the skin above the metatarsals. At the same time, there's still significant swelling at the original site to the point that it totally eclipses the left ankle. Here's a lateral view taken at the same time as the photo above to show the hematoma bet
Read more