It's been an eternity since I last posted, so I apologize. I have about six huge posts saved up for you guys that I've just been sitting on. They'll be beautiful, I promise!
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I just moved home, and I've been cleaning out the attic. It's boxes on boxes under boxes beneath rugs that conceal yet more... well, you know. So I'm throwing away old college Japanese tests and three copies of Homer's Odyssey when something tiny and brown jumps out of the box, on my leg, and scurries away.
Needless to say, I woke up today on a road trip to the Kushi Institute to find my calf swollen, red, itchy, and angry. A patch about the size of an Oreo cookie was raised like a welt with a big red mark in the middle. It was a spider bite.
I just got bitten by a tick a month ago, and had another, much scarier spider bite in high school, so I knew what I wanted to do. I took a road trip pit-stop at the Waynesville, Virginia Super Walmart. It was a lovely Super Walmart. It has probably never seen a Hillary '08 shirt, an organic tomato, or anything portraying Barack Obama in a positive light.
At the Waynesville Super Walmart, I snagged myself a green cabbage, making sure the darker outer layers were still hanging around. Organic would have been ideal, but it worked. At this point, the spider bite had gotten really uncomfortable, hot, and really swollen.
I applied a cabbage poultice for four hours, trading the leaves once an hour. I didn't see any difference after one hour, a small difference after three, and a remarkable difference between hours three and four. The area directly targeting the bite on the cabbage leaf had actually wilted and partially dissolved.
Six hours later, I can still see a small round circle, but the swelling and redness are almost gone. This is the second time cabbage has really helped me out with a painful bug bite.
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I would recommend going to the doctor's office for ANY bug bite that looks bad. Spider bites in particular can be really nasty if left untreated, and can result in surgery or limb loss, so I say it's ALWAYS better safe than sorry. I resorted to the cabbage because I was in the middle of rural Virginia and was desperate, and just wanted to share my story.
If the doctor OK's it and says it's not dangerous, but I'm still feeling discomfort from swelling or itching, the cabbage really helped me.
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