When I arrived in Bangkok, there was a bug convention, and they all got together and geo-located me. I have been in SE Asia for over 3 years now, and never a bug-bite free day have I lived. But the first year in Bangkok was the worst.
I am the person bugs bite if they are anywhere in my neighborhood. I came here from 25 years in desert climates where flying bugs do not live.
I grew up in wet climates with lots of bugs, and still have the scars from that time.
After 40 hours of travel and 12 hours of sleep in a lovely Bangkok hotel room, I woke up to find my fresh meat had drawn a hungry crowd. These bugs and I were unacquainted, and I have no immunity to them.
Some of them swarm me and I do not know it and some of them look like this, only bigger, all black and more scary.
This beedrill guy hurts when he gets you! Source
Fleets of these big guys would come in my room and hover. The hotel staff gave me an electric tennis racket-like thing, but my arthritic hands can't manage that.
The maids were horrified, and gave me all kinds of salves to rub on, and potions to drink. But nothing stopped the bugs from biting anew. Each day brought more festering lumps of itching madness. Only the experience of my youth could help me.
“Don’t scratch.” said my dead mother from her grave, just as she had told me in childhood. "Get vinegar and yogurt to rub on the bites. Ignore the itching. Don't let the bites get infected, or they will be worse”
And so I mostly tried. I let the housekeeping ladies put their goop on me, and once it was gone, I put on mine.
But sometimes you can’t help but scratch.
Sometimes you scratch while sleeping.
I have autoimmune disease now. What took six weeks to heal in my youth, takes six months now.
A few months into my time here, I had very bad bite above my inside left ankle. It just kept getting worse. It doesn’t help that I sit working all day and edema comes and goes.
By this time I was wearing knee socks to try to fight edema and reduce bites to my lower legs.
But his one bad bite would not go away.
After a long day of working, I was miserable, cold and feverish. As I was getting ready to go to bed, I looked down at my leg to see a big stain on my sock. A big wet stain.
My sock took off a layer of gunk with it.
Looking down my first thought was, “I’m going to lose my foot.
It was that bad.
My canva poster using a model’s leg shows you what was involved.
A deep hole the size of a kennedy half dollar.
Surrounded by a beet-red area bigger than my palm.
A red zone extending to my ankle bone, and way above the wound.
Swelling
Cellulitis
Edema
Pain
Heat
Yellow, chunky liquid flowing out of the wound hole.
My scar today – over two years later, is as big as the black circle in the middle of the photo and is still healing.
I lost “half my size" using natural methods in 2007-2011. Most of the weight was lost during the time I hired a fitness trainer to help me for all of 2011. He was supposed to help with exercise but after seeing the mess of processed food and handfuls of Rx I took daily, he intervened.
With his help I learned to remove toxins from my life. I got off all the Rx when none of my four doctors wanted to reduce even one of my meds after I lost 135 pounds. I weaned off all of it with their help for the year of 2013, and then said goodbye to Western medicine.
In 2016 I was fully committed to the non-toxic life style and still am.
So I recovered from the shock of seeing my dying leg and went to work.
First up, I set my phone alarm and put my feet on the wall 10 minutes each hour - my natural edema remedy.
This is a photo of my leg on the wall in Bangkok. I'm fighting edema with lots of bites, but before I got the big one I am talking about in this post.
How many bites do you see here? This covered most of my body then.
My coach was also a surfer, and he once told me that when you scrape over sand or rocks in a surfing accident, you can get really bad wounds that do not want to heal.
His method to avoid going to the doctor was:
- keep the wound covered at all times
- do not let a scab form
- goop it up with what you’ve got
- change the dressing a few times a week and wash it good while it’s open
- let the wound dry for 30 minutes to an hour
- re-goop the wound
- re-cover the wound and leave it alone until next time.
By this method, the wound heals from the inside to the outside and leaves less scarring.
I decided this was what I would try.
I had:
- bentonite clay
- activated charcoal
- grapefruit seed oil
- turmeric
- Lugol's iodine
- colliodal silver
- 20 Mule Team Borax
- sea salt
- apple cider vinegar
- baking soda
- coconut oil
For the next months I kept that going. I had a thick paste of ever-changing goop and covered a big swath of my leg with it.
After it would dry, the part with the actual wound would pop out on its own, like a cork. The clay would still be on the rest of my leg. The hole would be oozing and running with gunk. Then I would run shower water over it, let it dry a bit and pack more goop into the hole.
The first couple of weeks saw almost no improvement. I played with the ingredients and tried to make it as strong and thick as I could. I did not want to burn my wound. I wanted to heal it.
I had the dread of fear that I was really going to lose my leg.
I rarely get the dread of fear, but here is my video telling you what it is like when I do get it.
Breaking through or breaking down come next.
I broke through and did not give up.
And slowly, slowly, I healed.
My post today is for the Natural Medicine Story Contest
