I've Got An Itch

It all started this morning. I had fallen asleep on the couch last night, as I often do, and woke up around 6:00 in the morning. I turned off the television and went to bed to sleep for another hour until the boys got up. The area around my waste itched and I chalked it up to the elastic waistband in my shorts. But when I got up to take a shower I was amazed to find about thirty nickel sized welts all over my torso.

That's when the itching started. I figured I had picked up some chiggers at Stone Mountain the day before so I sat down at the computer to read about them (God bless Google.) The article dispelled a bunch of the myths surrounding chiggers but I found out that some of the information in the Wikipedia article wasn't true to my case.

So here's my guide to chiggers separating fact from fiction:

1. Chiggers burrow under the skin and poop. The poop is what causes the itching.

FALSE - Chiggers don't burrow and it's their saliva that causes the itching. They don't drink blood they drink liquified skin cells. How do I know? Well, I read it and the picture to the right happens to be an actual picture of one of the chiggers on me (I used Ben and Luke's Eyeclops electronic magnifier that they got for Christmas last year. It came in real handy since you can't use a magnifying glass to see something on your waistline that's 1/150th of an inch.) The chigger is the larval stage of the harvest mite. It has six legs but when it matures it will have eight.

2. You can get rid of chiggers by putting nail polish over the area. The nail polish will suffocate the chigger.

FALSE - Nail polish might kill them but it won't stop the itching. That damage is already done by the time the welt appears. Rubbing alcohol and a really hot bath of epsom salts doesn't kill them either. Nope the Eyeclops doesn't lie. Those bad boys were still moving their legs after all of those treatments.

3. You can get the chigger off with a piece of scotch tape.

FALSE - Not scotch tape, duct tape, electrical tape, razors, or a dried patch of Elmer's glue. None of those pulled the chigger off of my skin. The only thing that did was some hair removal strips that I found under the bathroom sink. The wax on the strip is gooey enough to get into the microscopic crevices of your skin and attach to the chigger. The picture at the right is of one of the wax strips with the bugger trapped in a honey grave. On the plus side you get baby soft hair free patches of very itchy skin.

4. A warm soapy bath is all you need to rid yourself of the chiggers.

FALSE - I tried a hot soapy bath and with the Eyeclops found the guys unmoved. I then took a scotchbrite scouring pad and scoured my whole body in a very hot shower. No luck. A bath of very hot water with epsom salts. Still no luck.

5. Chiggers are not transferrable.

TRUE - Once a chigger bites it uses its feeding tube. If it's dislodged before it finishes the tube breaks off, thus the chigger larvae is doomed to die an early and hungry death. And besides, as you can see above it's really hard to get them off of you. If you don't believe me just ask Ben and Luke who are completely unaffected even though they were all over me the rest of the day. Ben even climbed into bed with me in the early morning.

So what have we learned? Well....

1. Wikipedia isn't always right (there's a newsflash.)

2. Don't sit on a lichen covered rock in the shade near the tree line at Stone Mountain.

3. The Eyeclops is a really handy toy and oddly unsettling.