"Welcome to Switzerland! You got Scabies"

I feel as though I've shared this story a million times, but Rachel believed that I should add this to the blog so here it is. I got Scabies while in Geneva. It was pretty bad. My mom and Naoni thought that they were just spider bites or something, but I knew something wasn't right. They were overly swollen, oozing, and SUPER itchy. I showed my program director, and she told me to go to the "English-speaking Clinic." I went into the clinic and asked if I could speak English and the nurse told me she didn't know any. I was internally screaming because I could barely even tell her my symptoms because I feel like these aren't situations that the classroom really prepares you for and on top of that I didn't have Google Translate, so I really had to rely on the little medical French I knew. The old lady nurse was very accommodating and nice to me and I appreciated it, but the front desk nurses were some heauxs. The best part of the visit for me was Doctor Pablo Bueno. A freaking legend. So he comes in wearing a t-shirt and jeans and looks at me and luckily he speaks English, but not that well imo (which is a lot of people here like if they don't think I can speak French they will painfully mispronounce things and switch word orders, but confidently say that they speak English, idk it's something that kinda surprises me because I feel like I speak more French than they speak English, but they are so much more confident than I). Anyway he looks at my bumps and says he's never seen anything like it before for he asks (more like tells me) that he's gonna take some pictures and send it to his colleague. He then starts to text his friend and then decided to look at the bump on my ear is like "OHHH!!! I know what this is." He then tells me to come to his office, and he can tell me. Once I walk in he's like "Welcome to Switzerland! You got Scabies"

I don't suggest looking it up online it's ugly

I literally never heard of it before, but they are these nasty bugs that dig into your skin and then burrow across laying eggs as they eat. This explains why my bumps were so large and red and so painful, they were eating me alive! At this moment DOCTOR Pablo Bueno started itching himself and said that just being around me is making him itchy :'). He then prescribes to me this toxic anti-parasitic medicine that kills cats and rats. As you can probably guess because I'm a germaphobe I completely freaked and poisoned my self with the medicine. I'm supposed to take the medicine once a week for three weeks I decided to use it three times over the course of two days because I could "feel" them under my skin. In hindsight, I was obviously being dramatic, but the idea of something inside you just eating at you can make you do some wild things. Anyway, Pablo told off my residence place because they were trying to tell him that I bought it over to my dorm, but Pablo was like "Impossible" and proceeded to tell them that they need to do something asap. So the next day at 8am they woke me up and took all of my things and put it in a Sauna for 8 hours at 90 degrees Celsius. The only thing that got damaged within those 8 hours was my suede hat and my pride. Overall, according to Pablo, my bout of Scabies was minor since I caught it early and since I don't touch people I was able to prevent it from spreading without even knowing! They are all gone now I just have to take the medicine for the next two weeks just in case in the eggs hatch and mature but other than that I'm cured. Naoni told me that only 1.5% of people in the world get this and when they do it's typically from skin to skin contact and rarely from beds. So of course it would be just my luck to get it from a mattress. I don't know though like I'm not more cautious about diseases and germs, but it did make me learn to make light of things more often because I feel like if I didn't laugh this off and write it off as a learning experience I would definitely be mad and sad. All in all I'm glad that I'm better.

Unfortunately, due to the Scabi I tried to not go out too much to avoid spreading it, but I did have fun with hanging with friends. Also, the night scene here kind of sucks I'm hoping that once school starts it'll get better. But until next time, America!