If you see a roach crawling across your kitchen floor, you do not go to the medicine cabinet to take a pill to make it go away . . unless you are imagining it – then you’ll need to be debugged by a mind doctor. Maybe stomp on it, wack it with a fly swatter, or spray it with Raid Max for chemical warfare.
What do you do when your body is infested with “thousands” of aliens? Humans who suffer from normal Scabies have only about a dozen – not more than a hundred. Advanced Scabies aka Crusted Scabies aka Norweigen Scabies result in thousands of them invading your body, knocking holes in skin, liver, kidneys, and heart. A special pill and topical prescription cream is used to kill normal Scabies, but those drugs don’t work on the advanced kind because the drugs can’t penetrate the hard crusty ridges built by the mites on skin surface in a nest that looks like a bruise surrounded by a red rash that feels more like a severe sunburn. I read the adult male mites spend more time on the skin surface while the females go deep for nest building. I could not see them but I felt them crawling on the already damaged skin on my back.
It reminds me of dialog in the 1971 movie and novel The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton…
- Burton: I’m going to try a 2 micron filter.
Male Technician: This one’s big, I’ll have to get me a fly swatter.
Although beating myself with a fly swatter might be entertainment for some people, I doubt it would get the job done. Taking care of some cats in the past, there was an invasion of fleas, for which I bought a can of Hot Shot Flea, Tick & Lice killer spray – and still had some in the can. Act of desperation. Perhaps thinking outside of the box – the medicine box. I ignored the warning on the can. I sprayed it directly on the rash caused by the Scabies mites. The pain from the spray on damaged raw flesh was . . . extreme . . . and my scream probably awakened the dead on Mars. The redness from that at first made the rash appear worse. Bugs fighting back. I took a Tylenol for the pain, and a Benedryl, covered my body with medicated body powder, and then took a nap. Healing is better during sleep. I awakened 90 minutes later with intense itching. Sometimes such itching can be a sign of healing. I looked at it in the bathroom mirror. At least 90% of the rash had vanished. Not a cure, the crusty ridges were still there, but I believe the insecticide killed all of the adult mites on the surface instantly on contact. So far, nothing else tried by my former doctor and me has worked as well. Using insecticide to kill insects. Perhaps that should have been obvious, but medical science would never have considered it.
For a possible cure, I’ve been referred to a specialist dermatologist who I’ll go see this coming Friday November 4. He might have to refer me to another kind of specialist for the damage to my internal organs caused by the mites. Other symptoms include swelling of ankles and feet, severe chest pain with severe coughing and nausea as the thin skin on my chest plus top of forearms and hands turns blue – the heart not pumping enough oxygen.
I still don’t know for sure how I caught them. Not from sexual contact, known to be the most common means. The mites can live on other things away from a human host for up to 72 hours. The neighbor downstairs had a similar problem. What did we have in common? The cats. Human mites don’t target cats, but they can catch a ride on cats for transfer from human to cat to other people. It is known bedbugs can travel and spread that way too. Advanced Crusted Scabies is so contagious that a customer paying with paper money could infect a store clerk who in turn gets them them, and could then pass them on paper money on to thousands of customers – pays with a $20 bill, gets a few dollars back in change – gets infected by the mites on the paper money. I used my debit card all the time now, and have otherwise quarantined myself as much as possible. Those killer mites are making a comeback here in the United States like the bedbugs have, so it is important to trace the sources and stop them.
Jim Lantern
LANTERN TIMEGLASS JOURNAL
Monday 31 October 2016
Lantern Timeglass Journal 