A Pain in the Neck

3. Day Four

This is not like your run of the mill diary. I’m not going to just write down what I did today. That would be worse than Twitter. This is a therapeutic diary. Xanthe hanging out her bacterially dirtied emotional washing. Not even Ariel can get it clean – we need some really heavy duty chemicals to defeat this one. So if it scares you, then turn off now.

My neck hurts. Among other things. It hurts so bad that the orthopaedic doctor thinks it might be a slipped disc. I think it’s those little squiggly bastards up to their tricks, punishing me because I took more medicine to try to evict them. I am giving them their marching orders – time to go, you’ve lived here long enough. You’ve left the place in a mess and on top of that, you’re a pain in the neck.

Today we begin what is called the Shoemaker Protocol. Cholestyramin mornings and evenings to detoxify. Actually, if the truth be known, it won’t actually evict the squiggly ones but just clear up the mess they made. Those are the neurotoxins that they’ve been ejecting into my system for the last nine years. You know – like leaving all your rubbish on the floor and waiting for Mum to come and pick it up. Only this rubbish is worse than half-eaten pizzas and mouldy cups, it is pure poison.

Talking to a friend about it, a picture flashed through my mind of that Russian bloke who was poisoned with Pollonium. That’s how I feel, as though someone poisoned me. And then we set about working out who it might be. BKA? They’re just across the road. The nuclear industry? LOL. No, no. It’s just the resident squiggly ones.

So where were we? Ah yes, on Øland in that godawful campsite. Let me be clear to all my Swedish friends right now that, other than on that island, we had a wonderful holiday in Sweden, both that summer and other summers. But for some reason, Øland was just not our lucky place.

The morning after the tick was found and its life squeezed out of it for having the audacity to suck my blood, we packed our things to leave. At the reception we were told that we were expected to clean the cabin ourselves and that someone would be down to inspect the cabin to see if we had done it thoroughly enough before we would be allowed to leave. Jeez, I thought the Germans were obsessed with rules. So we dutifully cleaned the cabin and then went back to reception to say we were finished and could we go now, please? The woman at reception sent someone down to inspect and we were sent back to the cabin to get our exam results. What awaited us was beyond belief.

The man from the campsite threw aside the mattress and showed me a big patch of fluid on the wood underneath. He claimed it was urine. My urine. Then he pointed at the underside of the mattress, which had a large wet patch on it. Now, I know that pregnant women sometimes have problems with needing to pee a lot but they are usually aware of the fact that they peed, especially if it happened in bed. I could well imagine half of the campsite peeing their beds that night because they were all so drunk, but I was probably the sole person there that had not touched a drop of alcohol. Besides that, the mattress was only wet on the underside which meant I must have crawled between the mattress and the wood beneath to pee, and then developed spontaneous amnesia. Rather unlikely.

So we went back to reception, who demanded the cost of a new mattress (ah yes, that was what this was about of course – money, what else?), and told them in no uncertain terms that we would not give them a penny more than the over-priced cost of staying in their crummy little cabin and if they didn’t like it, they were welcome to call the police, who could investigate the strange case of the woman peeing underneath a mattress. Then we left.

Needless to say, we saw no flashing lights in the rear view mirror. We stayed another week in Sweden and when we left, there was noone waiting for us at the border. And even though they had our address, there was no letter demanding we pay up. They were just petty bloodsuckers, but they never got further than crawling up our legs.

Not like the tick, who had made her way over several hours, through the jungle of my hairy legs and all the way up to that warm, moist spot under my breast and drunk her fill.