Does that dog have rabies?
I thought this coconut was my friend.
by Azure
When we were in Thailand in 2006, I thought I had contracted Rabies. We were sitting at the port, waiting to be picked up and this golden lab came over to us and started looking at us, tail wagging. I had just spent $1200 getting all sorts of crazy vaccines and was super paranoid. The dog circled a few times, looking at me in particular. It finally made its approach from behind and came in for a lick. (read more)
I totally lost it. I jumped up and scared the dog away. Mike laughed and I shot him a look of death. “That happy dog licked you!” he said. “Shut up!” I yelled. I instantly rubbed Purell all over my arm. The skin was not broken from this offensive lick, but the rabies’ symptoms started immediately. I stared at the spot and of course it started to redden. It burned, some shooting pains radiated the area of the assault. It was all in my mind, of course. The Purell probably added to the problem, but I was convinced I had rabies.
We were staying on a sailboat in Koh Samui at the time and I was trying to keep my fears in check around our hosts. By the time we got off the sailboat a week later, I was living on borrowed time. I had read that there were only a few reported cases where somebody lived with rabies for more than a few days, a week tops, but I was obviously one of those freak cases and so I prepared for death.
Mike was so good to me and only made fun of me a little. We headed to Bangkok on an overnight train and for whatever reason I decided it was a good idea to read Tuesdays with Morey, a book about a man dealing with his eminent death. I could totally relate. I spent the entire night crying and planning for my death away from my loved ones. I called my mother and told her I had rabies and that I was probably going to die (not the first time I had called her with this claim, sorry Mom).
When we got to Bangkok, Mike took me to the hospital to get treated. I think he was relieved to put an end to my nonsense, but, I walked in to the office and straight-faced, asked about the chances that I had rabies. I explained the situation to the doctor and she just looked at me like I was an idiot.
Was the skin broken? No. Was the dog angry? No. She was confused.
She paused for a minute and leaned back in her chair, trying to figure out the best way to give me the bad news. “People aren’t stupid,” she said, “They aren’t going to let a rabid dog run around biting people. And, the dog clearly didn’t have rabies.”
Oh. Mike was vindicated. He had been trying to tell me this for weeks.
When we decided to come back to Southeast Asia, I was expecting more fear, but surprisingly I have changed. I didn’t get one booster vaccine and forgot to pick up my travelers diarrhea pills from the doctor before I left.
When I got diarrhea almost immediately after arriving and it didn’t stop until, well, it is ongoing actually, I realized this meant I can eat whatever I wanted. I obviously already have something, so even if I got something else, one thing will eat the other thing and I would deal with it when I got home. It actually opened up my options, like the tasty veggies that have been sitting out for days that carry a 100% chance of sickness, or the mystery street meat and chicken balls that taste good, but occasionally have a bit of something else in them.
On the day we left for Munduk, Mike noticed a large burn on his inner arm at the joint. He remembered rubbing it when he had lime juice on it and it stung even more. He was a little nervous and asked a few people what they thought it was. I thought it was probably from where he carried his helmet when he wasn’t wearing it, and he confirmed that it was in the right location for that.
We got to Munduk and I noticed that my arm now had a burn on it too. It didn’t look exactly the same, so I thought maybe mine was from where I had forgotten to put on sunscreen on the ride up to the mountains. I was convinced that that was my issue, completely separate from Mike’s.
Fred and Raini asked if we burned easily. They are both dark and I’m sure think of us as light weights because we are so pale, but no, I don’t burn like this. Not even when I work outside all day. So if it wasn’t a sunburn, what was it? The burns were in a weird shape and they were huge. Mine were streaks, they could have been liquid. Fred mentioned that brake fluid could take the paint off cars. Where had we gotten in contact with break fluid!?!?! What would happen to our arms?
For 2 days the burns got worse. They darkened and started swelling. This time Mike was the one getting nervous. We had no idea what it was, so we had to suspect everything. We were lucky that it was on our arms and not our faces. For this reason, we couldn’t trust any of our creams or ointments or any mixture. We were planning to go back to Ubud eventually, but realized that since we did not know what the culprit was, we couldn’t do anything that we had done before.
Mike started to question why we had come to a third world country. All of the horror stories that we had heard were rushing in to our thoughts. Could someone had thrown acid on us? Is this a disease we didn’t know about and hadn’t prepared for? Was this what leprosy looked like?
With no real answers, we were left to wait and worry. After about three days, it had stopped getting worse and peaked out as a series of dark red streaks for me and a large red patch for Mike.
On day 4 I put my hand on my wound and realized that it matched. It was a hand print, the darkest areas where the thumb and forefinger had sat for a moment, then 4 streaks for the 4 fingers that had touched my arm. Mike’s hand roughly fit as well, so we knew it had to be chemical, but which one. On day 6, mine started to blister and Mike’s had already begun to peel.
Even though it was healing, we still didn’t know what had caused it, which was the worst part. We went through all the events of the day in question. Mike kept going back to the lime. I remembered squeezing some lime into a coconut that morning, had it reacted with one of the lotions that I had put on to burn me? I remembered using lemon juice in my hair as a kid, trying to lighten it. We started thinking that if it could bleach hair, would it have a similar effect on skin? We went to the internet with this and Googled, “lime burn sun” and it popped up with an answer we were satisfied with. Apparently it is common, the easy term is Margarita Burn. Apparently, when lime sits on your skin while you are in the sun it intensifies the burn. I probably had second or third degree burns from this. I was only in the sun for an hour without lotion and it was filtered mostly.
That fucking lime burned my skin!
We breathed a sigh of relief and laughed at all of the things that had gone through our heads, but the thoughts are unavoidable. When you are in a new place with so much time to think, you think the worst.
This morning, Raini woke up with some blisters on her lips. They look like burns, which make sense because she remembers sitting in the sun (after eating lime!) and thinking her lips would burn. Even though she remembers the thoughts, she is still freaking out a little. It doesn’t look that bad to us, you can barely tell, but for her, it it all consuming. She didn’t even come down to breakfast because it was so “bad”. It really is nothing, the rest of us can see that there is nothing that she can do except wait for her lips to heal. It won’t happen again if she wears protection, but she’s already made an appointment with the doctor.
