Scorpions, cipro, and shitting in a cup! Oh my!

Well, another week has gone by, and that means, you guessed it, another scorpion adventure. Que divertido! At least this one doesn’t involve someone being attacked while they’re sleeping. So a few days ago, Chris called me up to meet a “friend” of his. Turns out, it was a decent sized scorpion at the foot of his bed. It had actually been there for a day or two and Chris had been sleeping next to it. I told him he was nuts. “What? It was outside my mosquito net,” he said. Nuts. Anyway, we decided to take him out with extreme prejudice. We mobilized the family and gathered around Chris’s bed. I grabbed him with my leatherman and Iris the Scorpion Queen looped some string around his tail. We snipped his stinger and lo and behold, we had ourselves a pet scorpion for the night! Everyone took turns walking him around and then, drunk with confidence, we started putting him in our hands to pose for photos. When it was my turn, Consuelo, aka Yoda who is always right, suggested I put him on my forearm. Thinking it would be a cool shot for Steve to have a scorpion crawling across my ALS wristband, I did it. Well, before I knew it, the f*cker made a break for my sleeve! If only you could have heard the girlish scream I let out. Especially when I could feel him grabbing my skin tighter as I flapped my arm like a wounded bird. Eventually I flapped my little chicken wings hard enough to get him off, but my heart was racing harder than any skydive I’ve ever done.

In other news, apparently I’m a filthy bitch. After a few days of feeling really, really weak, sweating bullets, and not sleeping very well, oh yeah, and a lot of the dreaded D word, I casually mentioned it to the PC medical officer when I went in to get what seemed like my 20th vaccination. Irma, an amazingly sweet woman, smiled as she just as casually asked me to step into the bathroom to sh*t in a cup so they could send it to the lab. Um, skipping over the next part, she said it’d be a few hours for the results. Meanwhile all my PC amigos enjoyed the fact that I pooped in a cup. What, you haven’t? And the results… drum roll please… parasites! But wait, it gets better. A gastro-intestinal infection to boot! Turns out it was some sort of free spirit parasite (actually, it was E. Coli for all you medical freaks) and apparently it got bored of me after a few days and left. But I just finished up cipro for the infection and it’s worked wonders. Plus, I feel like I can eat anything since cipro is like bleach for your stomach. Yay!

In the end, I think these experiences are helping me a ton with my fear of many legged creatures, which can pretty much be traced directly to the Temple of Doom. Thanks Dr. Jones!

By the way, I LOVED hearing from you guys last week. Keep sending what you can and letting me know how you're all doing.

Okay, signing off for now.