Things That Grow Bumps in the Night

Or, Doing Science in the Shower

You're in the shower lathering up with your favorite lavender soap when your fingertips notice some little bumps in your flesh, high on the right side of the torso, bumps that weren't there yesterday. You stand there for a moment, letting your fingers glide over these bumps, feeling the hardness of their centers. You wonder, for a moment, what the bumps might be, exactly, and it takes you a little while to process this wonder because it is morning, after all, and you have not yet had any delicious coffee. So you feel around the bumps again, and you wonder some more, and then, with an awful realization, your cancer-patient heart sinks. They're nodules, you think, and feel them up some more. Yup. Definitely nodules. The magic new clinical trial cancer medicine isn't working after all, you think, and the lymphatic adenopathy, which until very recently had been shrinking, has spread its ugly metastatic blooms to this very spot. This, despite the fact that JUST YESTERDAY you had blood work drawn at the oncologist's, and everything looked great. This despite the fact that yesterday there were no nodules. And now you are going to have to call the oncologist and probably will have to have surgery or radiation or extra chemo or all three of them at once. Dammit! Just when it seemed things might be going well.

Then, instead of just feeling the evil, metastatic nodules, it occurs to you to actually get out of the shower, wipe the steam off the mirror and have a good look. And...yup...your skin bears the tell-tale markings of what quite clearly are three really big, pink, welting insect (probably spider) bites. And while it's true that those pink swollen spots are probably, technically, nodules, you realize they are only making their appearance as part of a healthy immune response to the spider toxin, and that they are not, in all likelihood, metastatic. And this is the first time in your life that you have ever been grateful for spider bites.