some of my more stranger health problems in China

This is really embarrassing and disgusting: I got a weird, blotchy, red rash all around my eyes. It looked like I was wearing a pink mask. When I freaked out and showed the girls at school, they told me it was because I wasn’t getting enough sleep. I said, NO it’s because I touched something that a nasty person who hadn’t washed their hands for the past thirty years had touched and then I was stupid enough to touch my face. They laughed at me and told me that I just need more sleep.

This is ALSO gross and embarrassing: one morning all four of us woke up and saw that the skin on our hands was peeling – big time! It looked like we had terrible sunburns on the palms of our hands and that they were peeling. It was so gross – the skin just kept sluffing (I HATE THAT WORD) off. I guess we most have touched some terrible chemical and had a reaction – it was so weird!

I once woke up with a super-puffy eye. It was almost swollen shut. It looked exactly like I had been punched in the eye but without the black/blue color. It didn’t hurt, it wasn’t red and there was no pink-eye grossness. Anyway, I panicked because I had no idea what was wrong with me. I ran downstairs and asked all of my Chinese friends what it could be. “Ahhhh, you’ve been drinking too much water!” Yup, they were all 100% sure that one of your eyes will swell up if you drink too much water. Great. They insisted on taking me to a doctor but I refused because I know that the treatment would be something like: drink two cups of ground up chicken toe nails and frog brain paste, mixed with donkey blood and cat placenta.

It ended up that it was a bug bite. The bite itself was so swollen that I couldn’t tell that it was a bite until it got itchy and the swelling started going down. And thank Buddha that it did go down!! Brandon was looking for a new, non-deformed girlfriend and Josh was screaming Quasimodo at me constantly.