...and while I was inside the owner's French bulldog nipped Maddy's leg. I didn't notice the skin was broken until I got her back home and she was licking it.
The only downside is that while you're learning to jump-rope, you inevitably end up whipping yourself in the same place over and over. There is no better incentive to improve than mortifying the flesh.
...I was trying different kinds of niacin (experimenting to see which kinds increased my ability to remember dreams!) and the new kind I'd just purchased made my face immediately swell up and get all puffy.
Here's me a few hours later after my new board clocked me in the face. I buried my nose, went over the front of the board, and when I came up for air, the edge of my board bonked me in the forehead right above my left eye and the sharp-edge of one of the fins when into the meat of my nose where the bridge meets the brow. I saw stars and had those few moments where I was afraid to take my hand away from my face because I was expecting a lot of blood. All things considered, I got off relatively unscathed!
Meredith didn't bother to put on any sunscreen before she spent three full hours floating face down while snorkeling and got CRAZY severe sunburn. Ouch.
(But it's not very awesome when you get hit at close range). Here's Nataniel showing off two close range shots he took in the arm in the 3rd match we played.
After my delicious "Bread Mac" I stopped off at a pharmacy. The pharmacist didn't speak English, but after my awesome pantomime of "I rode a camel for four hours today and my thighs are really bumpy and itchy," he laughed and produced this tube of cream for me!
This was the third time I've had to do this pantomime in another country - I've had to do it in Hungary, where they gave me the same tube of cream and Japan, where I ended up paying $23 for a tube of insect-bite cream! Doh! See, I always knew all that time spent playing Cranium would have a pay-off!
Ouch. I went to the doctor and it turned out to be another staph infection. He hypothesized that I picked up a different type of staph bacteria in Thailand from scuba equipment that hadn't been properly sterilized. Divers, take note! (After you're done marveling at my Rudolph-red nose, if you look at my jawline, you'll notice that one of my lymph nodes is so swollen that you can actually see it!)
By midnight, the "irritation" on my nostril had turned into a swollen, painful, honking nightmare. I texted my doctor and told him that I needed to see him first thing in the morning. Ouch.
When we got back to the hotel, I had to shower and milk the wound (*retch*) on my side. My side felt a lot better since having been lanced by hand in a hotel lobby by the proprietor's daughters earlier that day. It looks really red and terrible in this photo, but it's mostly from me squeezing the skin to get all the pus to come out.
A couple months later, back in NYC, I got another one of these EXCEPT ON MY FACE and when I went to the doctor I found out it was a staph infection! Apparently, people always have staph bacteria under their skin, but somethings can cause it to infect a pore and then this happens. My doctor thinks I probably got it from diving in a bunch of wetsuits that weren't disinfected properly. Blech.
We woke up on Monday to another rainy day. Since another day cooped up in our hut on a remote island in the rain would have likely resulted in us killing each other, we made the executive decision to catch a ferry from Phi Phi back to the mainland.
My mysterious side wound was getting hard and swollen and hurt pretty bad. While I was in our hotel's lobby checking out, I asked the owner, an older Thai gentleman, if he had any antibiotics (you can get them over the counter in Thailand) and showed him my inflamed, red side.
He got really excited when he saw the infection and started yelling out to the rest of his family (it was a family run business) to come and check it out. His wife and two teenage daughters surrounded me and after a brief inspection, whisked my shirt off right there in the lobby and started chattering excitedly in Thai.
While his two daughters giddily poked and prodded my side, miming the universal sign for "we're so going to pop that thing like a huge fucking zit," their father temporarily ran to get an Thai-English dictionary.
While I watched him thumb through the pages, I had to keep swatting away the long-nailed fingers of his two daughters who were getting bolder and bolder in their unauthorized attempts to squeeze the hard lump on my side. Eventually, their father found the entry he was looking for. He proudly spun the book around and pointed to a some Thai squiggles that translated into English as "PUSTULE."
"Pustule? Are you sure?" I asked him. "Yes, pustule!" He answered with a smile. "Now, my daughters will...", he paused while he looked up another word in his dictionary, "lance it!" I reluctantly agreed and the owner and his wife held my hands as his two daughters went to work on my side. After two or three minutes of serious work, I was covered in a sheen of sweat and tried to get the daughters to stop. They told me they were "almost to explode" and went back to work. Sure enough, about thirty seconds later, my side literally exploded and the whole family cheered as a giant wad of pus went everywhere.
The whole family then proceeded to clean my wound and dress it and sent me back to my hut to try to explain to Meredith what had just happened and why it took me 45 minutes to check out. Hahaha. Don't forget, this whole scene happened in THE LOBBY OF THEIR HOTEL while other guests wandered in and out horrified. Thailand rules. Here's a shot of my freshly lanced pustule.
Before going to bed, I redressed my mysterious spider-bite thingy which was starting to look like it was getting better, and then we called it a night.
Leigh shows off her huge, still-developing bruise from when she was "doored" while riding her bike a few days prior. (That's when someone flings open a car door - usually a taxi door - without looking over their shoulder to ensure that no one's traveling in the bike line).
She ended up accidentally crashing into some drunk girl, and the drunk girl's girlfriend tried to start a fight with the Tins. Tins ended up getting into a little fisticuffs and ended up breaking her index finger! Hahahah. Look at her swollen sausage finger!
John shows off his sweet English Village t-shirt and the HUGE purple on his tricep he got after made the mistake of riding on "the ride" after us the previous night. Hahaha. We tried to warn him!
The rest of the day was such a whirlwind of craziness, I didn't even manage to take any more pictures! So let's fast forward to the hotel later that night...
On Wednesday morning, Leigh called me and told me that she'd been attacked by a guy while trying to get into her apartment the previous night. The guy grabbed her by her purse, and dragged her down her building's (marble) front steps, but she screamed at the top of her lungs and kicked him (with stiletto heels on!) and in the end, he ended up running away (with a badly punctured leg) before he could manage to get her bag. Leigh showing off her battle scars!
So on my way up the mountain for the second time, I dumped my scooter! Boooooo! I was going around a hairpin-turn that was really steeply inclined and while I had my wheel cut to navigate the turn, my scooter started to stall. I overcompensated and revved my engine too hard and the bike shot out from under me sideways, dumping me on the pavement. Luckily, I was only going like 20mph and didn't get banged up too badly. Just ended up with some roadrash here...
...and here! Hahaha. The rest of the trip was pretty uneventful. Having had already seen Doi Suthep and photographed the shit out of it, I don't even think I took my camera out of my backpack!
Siege nursing his swollen nuts on the subway ride out to Brooklyn for the surprise party (which he'd totally figured out was coming. I mean, c'mon, birthday or not it's always suspicious when two of your friends are like "Let's hang out in Manhattan for an hour and then go back to your place in Brooklyn.").
However, she also managed to get a pretty severe case of heat hives on her legs. (Despite her dark-as-coal soul, Meredith's lily-white skin is crazy photosensitive.)
By the time we left the pub, the shoe store that we were going to stop at on the way back to Grant's parents house was closed. Mr. Stoddard offered to lend both Chris and I pairs of his dress shoes so that we'd be able to get into the club with everyone else later that night. This worked out well for Chris, who like Brad wears a size 9, but didn't work out so hot for my size 12 tootsies. Check out the side by side comparison - I had to keep my toes curled to walk in them.
Shortly after Grant tried to brain me - I woke up and we threw around the frisbee. That is until a "mysterious little gust of wind" caused the frisbee to dip right as Grant was about to catch it and it whacked him in the forehead. A "mysterious little gust of wind" that I call PUNISHMENT FROM GOD! Hehehe.
I spent most of Monday in meetings for work. Tara spend most of Monday getting incredibly sunburnt at the hotel pool. Ouchie. After meeting up, we set out on the strip to explore some more.
Okay, in fairness to Tim I'm including this picture of his ass-stitches. Earlier in the week, he'd had a cyst removed from his tailbone and he was popping Vicadin prescribed to him for the pain. Vicadin and 15 drinks = Vomit. (by the way, look at those ghetto-ass stitches. It looks like a mis-laced sneaker for fuck's sake. Ew.
Yep, that's right, going right towards seeing Bob's big belly broken out in rashy, ingrown-hair, hives from an amateur waxing gone awry. What's up, ouch!
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