When I flew home from Taipei last Thursday, my hair still smelled of the hot springs of Beitou, of salt and sulphur. The scent of my holiday faded fast, however, when a rash erupted on my limbs. Soon all I smelled of was medicated oil, ointment, insecticide and desperation.
On my last night in Taipei, I had some wild boar stir-fried with basil. It was fresh boar, fresh from the mountains of Taitung, fresh from a hunt by an aboriginal friend of a friend who had brought the pig back to Taipei. It was the wildest boar I ever had. Later, I would report to my mother I had just "one, two bites". But between you and me, it was ten, twenty bites - maybe many, many more - and it was yummy. So now I have a rash, an angry, itchy rash that looks like a pox or a Pollock - I am trying to be positive - and feels like an attack by guerrilla ants.
In Chinese medicine, I am yin and boar is yang, too yang for me. It has made my breath fiery. It is making fires break out here on my arm, then there on my leg. "Let it come out, let it all come out," says my physician, who has given me a potion for the purging of the so-called heaty poison. What she seems to mean is the rash has to get worse before it gets better, so for a few days now, it has been furiously worse. The rash - I can't call it my rash. I do not own it, it owns me. As the itch inches up and down, I have counter-attacked it with medicated oil, menthol ointment and a made-in-China cream that smells like insecticide. The latter, labelled Shun Feng Kang Wang Compound Ketoconazole and Clobetasol Propionate Cream, is lethal. It not just kills the rash - the rash has more than nine lives though - it also kills my skin a little, leaving it tingly and unnaturally tight. Ageing-Hollywood-actress tight. No thanks. Sometimes I give up and give my arms and legs a good scratch, even making myself bleed; I give thanks for pain; painful is better than itchy. Or I sit on my hands. Or I sleep on the floor, the cool, cool floor. I don't sleep, actually. I snatch some shut-eye between attacks. Today I have tried tough love (body scrub), then tender love (moisturising cream) - I will be all out of love soon.
Will I have boar again? Yes! But maybe not as many bites next time.
2 comments:
yelo, hope that your rash is better now. or that it's run out of lives. otherwise, please kindly give up on TCM, tough love or tender love and head for the National Skin Center. or at least tak some antihistamines. take it from me - I'm a great rasher.
am better now, thanks. i'm a hiver, i've been to the national skin centre, they didn't do much for my hives that time. this time though, after a wretched, itchy, scratchy week, i remembered the antihistamines they gave me that time, and have been taking them.
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