Deeper Shade Of Seoul

The bar was so packed last night! I didn't get out of work until close to 3 in the freakin' morning! Of course the smart thing to do would have been to go home and go right to bed but, as we all know I don't always make the smartest decisions so I opted to go to a friend's house for a little "extracurricular activity" instead. This normally wouldn't be a big deal except I had to work at the shelter at 8 a.m.
Needless to say, I was a little late this morning, and more than a little tired. Now I do not wake up without coffee, and I am definitely no joy to be around before I've had at least 2 cups. I'm pretty sure my coworkers know this, since I've worked there for 8 years and whenever I arrive for a morning shift they immediately start making fresh coffee and refilling my cup. Anyway, I get to work this morning, my eyes barely half open, pour myself a cup of coffee, and before I can even take a sip the other counselor hits me with this: "The girls are complaining about blah, blah, blah...and based on their symptoms and blah, blah, blah...it's almost definitely scabies and it's extremely contagious so if they have it we have it, too. Have you been itchy lately, cause that's one of the first symptoms?" Naturally, whenever someone says the word "itchy" you immediately start to itch and while I cannot remember what I had for dinner last night I was immediately overwhelmed with memories of every single time I have had to scratch an itch in the past month. Have I been really itchy lately? How many itches per month is considered normal? I haven't even had my fucking coffee yet, and what the hell are scabies anyway?!?
Well, boys and girls, let me offer you a little advice...DON'T LOOK UP A MEDICAL CONDITION ON THE INTERNET!! As it turns out, the web is full of pictures of the worst possible cases of scabies and I'll spare you the details but it didn't look pleasant. Scabies, apparently, are little mites that burrow into your skin, leaving eggs and feces everywhere which then causes a horrible looking, itchy rash. It's extremely contagious, spreads fast, and they can live without a host for up to 3 days so just sitting on the same couch as someone who is infected pretty much guarantees that you'll get it too. Imagine that mess in a house with 13 kids! Treatment is fairly simple, but explaining to your roommate that you have infected his entire house, his car, and probably him and most of his friends can be a little tricky.
Those of us who are (un)fortunate enough to work in the human service field are used to being exposed to all kinds of gross things that no one in their right mind would ever consider to be "appropriate working conditions." I used to visit families in their homes to teach parenting/life skills and I can remember being eaten alive by fleas and God knows what else, having roaches crawl across my shoes and into my bag and coat pockets, being attacked by every animal from dogs to lizards to the drunken pedophile living next door, having to ask my friends to check my hair for lice...the list of benefits goes on and on. Most of my friends, however, were wise enough to choose a career path that offers humane working conditions, a decent amount of financial compensation, and a general assumption that one won't be infected with some strange illness/parasite/insect so there was no way they were going to be sympathetic to the fact that I may have given them all a nasty case of scabies for the holidays. The counselor I was working with had previously worked in a hospice for HIV/Aids patients, and had been lucky enough to pick up a case there. She knew what it was like to go through this, and she was not looking happy. It tends to start in certain areas of the body, which is exactly what these girls were complaining of. What a great morning it was turning out to be.
Anyway, to make a short story long...we oh-so-maturely work through the "i know they need to go to the hospital but they're not getting their scabies infected asses anywhere near my car" argument and eventually we find out that whatever the kids are itching from is...NOT SCABIES!! Woo Hoo!! No scabies for me, which means QNL has one less reason to kick me out of his house!! And now I know from experience that I will never again handle a possible scabies outbreak without first having several cups of coffee.

posted by Jes @ 02:35