One of the words in the title is not an actual word, but you know what?  I don’t frickin care.  Really, I don’t

Why?  Can’t you read???  I’m itchy!!!  And Scritchy!!! And that makes me kind of bitchy.

Well, not so much bitchy as just kind of whiny and I complain a lot.

In short, I have hives, a mild case, but hives are hives.

Why do I have hives you ask?  Well it goes back about 10 years ago when I got my first ever outbreak of hives and had NO idea what they were.  I wanted to rip my skin off…  If you’ve never had hives you might not quite understand how it feels to have itchy bumps all over your body, on your scalp, in your pants.  Hives suck and when you don’t know what they are and you are already in a heightened state of stress you may think that you’re suddenly dying from some horrible flesh eating bacteria.

Luckily I had health insurance at the time and a nearby doctor who was able to tell me that I was not dying from flesh eating bacteria… I was just allergic to something.  Sadly the doctor was kind of a dumbass because he determined through a series of questions that I had a strawberry allergy and I should not eat the little red devils ever again because clearly they made me break out in flesh eating bacteria… er… hives.

I told him that I was under a lot of stress and asked him if that could have anything to do with it.  He told me it was very unlikely.

Unlikely my ass…  I spent years avoiding strawberries because I thought I was allergic to them.  I still broke out in hives every 6 months or so even without the damn strawberries.  Every time it happened it followed a time of intense stress.  That means there were  years I could have been eating strawberries, they were wasted because some quack with a medical degree didn’t bother to test me for allergies or talk to me for more than 5 minutes.

Ahem.

Eventually we (me) figured out that I was not allergic to strawberries, but that I didn’t deal with stress very well.

When I have an emotion I deal with it, but stress is just… stress.  It’s not an emotion, it’s just a mess.  I don’t want to take that out on anyone so I just eat it.  Not literally.  I’m not a stress eater.  I’m actually a stress not-eater.

I used to drink Cherry Coke when I was stressed, come to think of it.  Can’t do that anymore so I’ll just have to break out in hives instead.

Deep breaths.  Deep deep breaths.

Okay, that’s better.  Now someone get me a backscratcher.