Really? Chicken Pox look like acne? I don't see it. |
I had never got chicken pox as a child, I waited until my first year in high school to go ahead and do that. I was in the shower on Monday morning and I noticed spots all over my body and was actually pretty excited that I got to miss some school. I had a plan to speed up the disease and get over it in no time. That was because I had unreasonable confidence and a profound naivete about the power of my will versus a pretty nasty pathogen.
To start my plan, I switched up the shower for a bath tossed in some salts and thought I would just make the sores come out and then soak them off. Easy. The sores did come out and then they kept coming and I was getting more miserable and itchy by the hour and I started to doubt my plan. I called it a day a few hours into my accelerated recovery scheme and napped the rest of the day.
By the next morning, I was in full bloom and I thought I would move my plan into phase two and lance a couple of the biggest juiciest ones. This was not a good plan because they still had some growing to do and some proliferation still in the tank. I popped and popped and was not making any headway so I went back to bed instead. Days turned into a week and my sores itched all the time before they finally popped and scabbed over. I was starting to think that chicken pox was not as glamorous a respite from school as I had thought.
After ten days even though I was mushed up scab hamburger I was too bored to stay at home. Teen body image shame notwithstanding I decided that even though I had what looked like a world class case of acne I had to get out of the house. I had convinced myself that it didn't look too bad anymore, but it did, it really did. I knew that about the time I got onto the bus and everyone was looking at me weird.
It got worse at school and I tried to keep to myself and snuck out to the outside math building. I sat down and a girl, a cute girl, asked me why I had been gone for so long. I told her it was on account of me having chicken pox. She told me that I just looked like I had a bad acne. Oh, dangit.
As it happened it took almost a month more for all the sores and scabs to heal up. I guess I had to go back sometime. I was only embarrassed about my face for the first day or so, but I am not too hung up on looks so I got over it. As a note on the effectivity on my willing the poxs to stop - did not work.