Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Job decision and skin disease

I am going to be a popcorn breeder after graduation! Leila and I really agonized over the decision, well I have at least. Leila has felt good about this from the beginning. I have been unsure, mostly because the potentiality of the Bayer position was so good, but it just didn't look like it was coming to pass.

So last Thursday I called Ag Alumni and accepted the offer. Within the hour, my face and neck were burning and red. My eyes had been itching earlier, but now I looked like I had a sunburn across my face. Then in a few hours it had spread to my chest, arms, legs, feet, hands, etc with a burning itch like poison ivy complete with tiny blisters. I went home early and went to bed. The next day it was worse and I went to the doctor. He told me it was an allergy and probably not rubella, unless I had been exposed in the last 72 hours, and gave me antihistimines which made me very tired and ferociously grumpy.

My logical conclusion to this was that I was allergic to my new job and I had made the wrong choice. I stewed and worried, while trying not to scratch, for three days. Then, I decided, while lying in bed that I would turn back down the job, but I still needed to hurry and start to write. Deadlines are here and I have been anxious about writing my dissertation for a long time and it has been building like pressure inside of a geyser. At that moment, as I lay in bed thinking about what I needed to finish my proposal and get started on my first chapter, The rash spread like fire ants across my body and I could feel the blisters swell. The itching was tremendous.

So from that fun experiment, I decided that I had better get up and start writing. So I got out of bed, plastered myself with calamine lotion and headed for the computer. The closer I got to the computer, the worse the itching. By the time I sat down at the computer my hands and fingers were so swollen that I could barely type and couldn't concentrate. I gave up and went back to bed.

So either I am allergic to my new job or to writing my dissertation. It could also be the Cashew fruit I ate for dinner the previous night. I use to eat it in Nicaragua, mostly in Villa Venezuela, where I did break out in a nasty skin rash also come to think of it. OK, so I am either allergic to cashew fruit, popcorn breeding, or finishing my PhD. Let's hope it is cashew fruit since I can cut that out of my life with little pain or sacrifice.

I guess it all could be a psychosomatic anxiety attack. Some people hyperventilate, some people get dizzy, I break out in leparous rashes.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

How odd that accepting a job resulted in Job-like afflictions. It reminds me a little of the Ghost in Hamlet, who described a "leprous distillment, whose effect holds such an enmity with blood of man that swift as quicksilver it courses through the natural gates and alleys of the body, and with a sudden vigour it doth posset and curd, like eager droppings into milk, the thin and wholesome blood. So did it mine, and a most instant tetter barked about, most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust all my smooth body."