Did you ever feel an itch so bad, you scratched yourself bloody to make it go away? If not, consider yourself lucky. Consider yourself damned lucky!
I don’t know when or where I exactly got it from, but I’m sure it was during this shitshow of a vacation in Thailand. My best friend and I had saved up part of our measly earnings from our student job, and decided it was time for a little break. In early January, before university kicked back in, we treated ourselves to a brief vacation. I left the booking to him. I don’t know how he did it, but he always found those insider tips, as he called them. The trip he’d booked promised an exclusive hotel on a beach in Thailand, surrounded by beautiful, unclaimed nature.
What we ended up with was nothing but a cheap room in the middle of nowhere in an area as underdeveloped as our hotel. Still, we made the best of it, and enjoyed the few days we spent there the best we could.
Once I stepped back into my cramped student apartment, winter raging outside, I had to admit I missed Thailand.
The itch started a few days later. I was looking through the pictures of our trip when I felt an itch on my chest. I shrugged it off at first. Nothing but a minor irritation. A few scratches and it was gone. When I looked more closely, though, I found a reddish rash spreading across my chest. I told myself it wasn’t too bad, just a few irritated spots that would be gone in a few days. Yet I couldn’t help but think back to my childhood. My skin had always been sensitive, and I’d often suffered from severe eczema. Memories of long nights scratching inflamed skin and relentless discomfort returned to me. For a moment, I felt lightheaded, but then I took a deep breath. No, it was probably just an irritation from those cheap, dirty beds in Thailand or that new laundry detergent I’d used. Still, the memories persisted, and I could only hope it would clear up soon enough.
A week later, my girlfriend, Susan, came over for a movie night. We’d just snuggled up on the couch when she noticed me scratching my chest repeatedly. By this point, the itch had gotten way worse, but I’d forced myself not to linger on it. At first, she ignored it, but after a while, she spoke up.
“What’s wrong with your chest?”
“Dunno, probably some skin irritation. I’m sure it’s gone in a few days,” I said, shrugging, trying my best to convince not only her but also myself.
“Are you sure?” she asked, looking at me with a worried expression.
“Yeah, it’s nothing,” I said, laughing.
Susan, however, didn’t laugh.
“Show me!”
With that, I lifted my shirt.
“See? Just a stupid allergic reaction.”
“I don’t know… that looks pretty serious. It might be a fungal infection or something.”
“Oh, come on, it’s just a rash!”
“Honestly? No, that doesn’t look right. What if it’s infectious?”
I watched her get up and slowly gather her things.
“Susan, what are you-?”
“Look, I don’t want to risk catching anything, okay? You really need to get this checked out,” she said heading for the door.
With that, I was left alone with what she’d called a fungal infection. As her words echoed in my mind, I found my hands unconsciously scratching over my chest again and again, trying to fight the annoying, spreading itch.
That night, I lay in bed tossing and unable to sleep. I felt hot, was covered in sweat, but tried my hardest not to scratch myself. The memories of my childhood crawled back into my mind yet again, and I almost felt like a little boy again; lying in bed, desperately scratching his inflamed, almost bloodied skin.
The next day, at university, I was a mess. Lectures became nothing but pure torture. I was fidgety, nervous, couldn’t focus at all, and every attempt to fight the urge to scratch my chest was met with failure. I could feel the eyes of my fellow students, their judgment a mixture of worry and disgust, as they inched away from me. Eventually, I couldn’t take it anymore and fled from the lecture hall. After I’d left, I went straight to the local pharmacy. I was embarrassed, but desperate, and explained to them I was suffering from a severe fungal infection. The pharmacist recommended a cream and suggested a visit to a dermatologist. I bought the cream, hoping it would do the trick, and told him I’d consider his advice.
Once I was home, I applied the cream, but it did a whole lot of nothing. If anything, it seemed to make the itch even stronger.
Before long, even scratching didn’t seem to help anymore. It almost felt as if this itch was coming from somewhere else, somewhere deeper. I shook my head. It’s an itch, you idiot, just a fungal infection, nothing else. Then I applied another layer of cream. It still didn’t help.
By that point, the itching had grown so intense it almost felt like it was spreading and moving all over my chest. It wasn’t painful, just irritating, seriously irritating, and however much I scratched, it didn’t go away. When I couldn’t take it anymore, I attempted to distract myself with a few drinks, but before long, the itch came back in full force. My hands scratched over my chest desperately, clawing at the fabric of my shirt, almost tearing it apart.
Eventually, I tore it off and wandered to the bathroom to check myself in front of the mirror. By now, the rash or fungal infection had spread to cover almost my entire chest. I saw long reddish marks all over it, a testament to my relentless, constant scratching. For a moment, I stared at it with a mixture of unease and anxiety, wondering if that was really all it was, but then the itch came back again. I could do nothing but scratch vigorously over my skin to fight it. My fingernails tore over my chest, upward, downward, leaving half-bloodied trails behind. As I did, I noticed that in certain areas, the rash appeared… swollen.
My mind filled with a mixture of disgust and fear as I scratched right over it. The itch intensified, and it almost felt like something was… there. I scratched it again, then once more before the skin tore open. Some blood and pus leaked from the wound, and then I saw a… hole. It wasn’t big, barely the size of a pinhead. An enlarged pore, I told myself, but I wondered if they could get that bit. Why was it so swollen? I went closer to the mirror to get a better look. It looked almost as if… something was moving in there.
“What the fuck?” I cursed as panic washed over me.
Then, slowly, carefully, I put my fingers against the skin around the hole and squeezed. First gently, then harder. I waited for pus to burst from the hole, but something else did. Something long and thin slithered from the hole. The moment I saw it, my hand jerked back, and I began shaking uncontrollably.
“What the fuck?! What the absolute fuck is that?!”
I stood there, shaking, panting, almost crying. With sweaty hands, I rummaged through the bathroom drawer. It took me minutes to find them, and another to pick up the small pair of squeezers I’d been looking for. I told myself to calm down, took a deep breath, but it seemed to take ages before my fingers had finally stopped shaking.
Once more, I squeezed the hole with the fingers of one hand while I held the tweezers in the other, ready to pull out whatever that thing was. I still tried to tell myself it was nothing but an enormous blackhead. Only moments later, however, I knew that wasn’t it, and the hole wasn’t an enlarged pore. When the whitish thing’s end slithered from my chest, I put the tweezers against it and pulled. There are no words to describe the sensation I felt when I pulled it from my skin and flesh. There was almost no pain. Instead, all I felt was an itch, a terrible burning itch that seemed to originate from deep inside my chest. I watched in utter horror and disgust as I pulled bit after bit of the thing out of me.
When I held a wiggling, bloody worm almost four inches in length between the tweezers, my vision grew blurry and I almost passed out. I staggered, hit my head against the bathroom wall, and had to grab onto the edge of the sink to steady myself. That’s when I saw them. For the first time, I saw the faint outlines of all the worms beneath the skin on my chest. My heart began pounding in my chest, my legs buckled, and I stumbled from the bathroom. I managed to put on a shirt, and thinking of only one word, hospital, I rushed from the apartment. Everything else was a blur: rushing down the street to the tram station, sitting in the car shaking, panting, and scratching my chest repeatedly.
When I arrived at the hospital, I was a mess. A nurse noticed me after a few moments, but all I could do was to ramble about parasites. After her initial shock and confusion, she immediately called for a doctor. As he led me into the examination room, I was still in a state of panic, barely registering his words. All I could understand were bits and pieces: serious, and need to be removed.
Hours later, when I awoke in a hospital bed, my chest bandaged, the doctor returned to me. When I asked him what exactly had been wrong with me, he explained. I’d indeed been infested by a rash, but that was only part of it. The rash hadn’t caused the itch.
No, the itch had been caused by a dozen hookworms that had buried themselves deep into my skin.
