The next morning I woke up in a pool of my own sweat, rain water, and blood, both mine and the mosquitoes’ I massacred. I put my wet clothes back on and packed up. I immediately started crying and when I hiked out my pack was at least five pounds heavier from how wet everything was.
I charged down the trail full of rage at the situation and how powerless I felt. As I passed the shelter I had intended to reach, the one I could have slept in if I wasn’t too scared to night hike, I yelled “FUCK YOU!” at the three walled wooden edifice.
As I walked, I started feeling itchy. REALLY itchy. Mosquitoes have always loved me so I was used to resisting the temptation of an itch but this was unbearable and I was most itchy in the last place on your body you want to be. Every few steps I stopped and furiously scratched my vagina. From my bellybutton down and back up to the small of my back, my WHOLE vagina was achingly,
incomprehensibly, unrelentingly itchy.
I had never felt an itch like this before. No matter how much I scratched, it wouldn’t stop itching so I started crying and literally running down the trail. I cried and ran, cried and ran and scratched. Why was it so itchy?
I jumped and stomped and screamed and cried for the next four miles until the trail spit me out at a parking lot. There was a bathroom so I bolted inside. Everything was covered in little itchy red bumps. Did the mosquitoes get me? Is this what a yeast infection looks like? Is this what poison ivy of the vagina looks like? How did it get just there? I had no answers to any of these questions and in a particularly low moment I just sat pants down on the toilet and cried.
Eventually I got up and kept walking because what else could I do? To this day, I have no idea what made me so violently itchy but by the end of that day it diminished enough that I only had to stop and scratch once per mile and I could sleep at the end of the day.
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