Burning Shins, Bubonic Boils and Going Down the Plughole

I had a friend in primary school who was often cranky and cried for no apparent reason. I could never work out why this was, especially when she owned what I considered to be the Holy Trinity of Sylvanian Family buildings: the Country Manor, the Bakery and the Treehouse.

(The treehouse was a particular source of envy with its little plastic ladder and swing; it served as both village school and home to the teacher owl, Aristotle Treefellow, who had a mortar board and teeny wire spectacles. You could also buy a triplet of baby owls who each wore a different coloured felt waistcoat, if you really wanted to go OTT on the owl front.)

I digress. This friend had something mysterious called eczema and sometimes had parts of her limbs wrapped in bandages, which I found mildly alarming at the time, I remember. Mainly because I went to catholic school and therefore knew a lot about lepers, and I had drawn some sort of loose connection between bandages and awful flesh-eating diseases and being cast out from society to live in the shadows of the city gate, etc etc.

This friend didn’t have leprosy (pretty sure I checked this out with an adult to be sure, I’ve always been risk-averse) and so I noted the bandages and forgot about them, in that way only children can do, and I also accepted the sporadic tantrums, albeit with a bit of an internal eye roll. Anyway, I didn’t know how serious and horrible her skin itchiness and soreness must have been for it to have required bandaging, but now that I have my own first proper serious flare-up of eczema (lower shins, thanks for asking), all I can think is

OH MY GOD HOW DID THE POOR GIRL EVEN SURVIVE?

I would have been a misery guts one hundred percent of the time, not just occasionally. Now that I have shins that feel as though they have been set on fire, that I am having to wrap in bits of cotton so that I don’t touch them, that I am having to slather in creams every hour and sometimes put cold compresses on, I think about the bandages around her elbows and wonder how she ever made it into school. It must have felt torturous. My patches are smallish and on a part of the body that does not need to crease, or stretch, or contract: I cannot imagine how it must feel to have it on more moveable parts that would feel constantly irritated.

Anyway, it’s all the fault of the Subtropical Swimming Paradise at Center Parcs. I mentioned this waterpark briefly in my last post, the one detailing all of the things I did over the Christmas break instead of scrolling Instagram, but it has had such a catastrophic impact on the start of my year that I need to bring it up again. Because I’m almost certain that the highly-chlorinated shallows of this glass-domed kids’ swimming complex have been the cause of three different ailments and counting: the serious shin eczema flare-up, a skin problem around my lady parts and (indirectly, probably as a result of my home treatments for the lady parts) a huge bubonic-esque boil that sits somewhere very awkward and unspeakable.

Obviously these things could have happened at any swimming pool, but the problem with the Center Parcs Subtropical Swimming Paradise is that the kids love it so much you end up spending half your days there, emerging so shrivelled and dry and crispy that you could be sealed into a little foil bag and sold as a bar snack.

Photo by Valentin Lacoste on Unsplash

There’s a full Center Parcs review coming, but to give you a spoiler, both kids (they are 8 and 10) voted this Subtropical Ailment Incubator as the singular best thing they’d ever been to. River Rapids that wound around the outside of the huge glass dome, the frothy water steaming dramatically in the frosty air, different water slides and chutes with varying levels of thrill and speed. A loud jungle drum/Tarzan-yell alarm that went off every half an hour to signal the turning on of the wave machine and that immediately pulled all of the crowds into the water as though they were hypnotised, or answering a call from a higher power.

It was so good that I wasn’t ever allowed to get out and I knew - I knew it! - that I would get some form of inconvenient bodily malaise from staying in the water, despite regular trips to the heated “lagoon” to try and keep my kidneys warm. My money was on a bout of cystitis, but amazingly I escaped that particular joy (probably because I kept my kidneys warm), and neither did I get the thrush that I had so pessimistically forecasted after the very first half hour. No verrucas, none of the predicted athlete’s foot (I’m an absolute delight to spend leisure time with, honestly), just shins that feel as though they have been cheese-gratered and then sprinkled with battery acid, and some extra little dermatological issues of the gusset area.

But wow are the shins itchy. I’ve actually had these sore, itchy patches since my teens and have always managed them with casual applications of various unprescribed creams, and by trying not to have the temperature of my bath water above boiling point and, in extreme circumstances, simply scratching off all of the scaly problem skin vigorously with my nails. But this is different. This feels serious. I have welts. And I don’t think I’ve ever been woken from my slumber due to unbearable itchiness before. Maybe when I was pregnant, but really, pregnancy is just a whole period of weird stuff happening to you all the time anyway, like you’re being experimented on by an alien life-force, so that doesn’t count.

Photo by Natalia Marcelewicz on Unsplash

In normal life, I do not wake from my slumber for anything. (I don’t wake for no man!) And now I do, apparently, and for the past two nights I have been lying there with my knees in the air, the edge of a hot water bottle resting inside my buttock crease as a makeshift hot compress (don’t ask) and my shins draped in cool flannels, Googling pictures of Sylvanian owls at 3.27 in the morning.

Photo by Chris Abney on Unsplash

What I will say about the Subtropical Paradise, because I can’t seem to get the place off my mind, is that the air temperature in there was far from Subtropical. It was positively chilly. Maybe that big glass dome hots up nicely in the summer months, but BOY is it nippy when you’re running back up to the top of the rapids. It’s the perfect recipe for gynaecological disaster, really: damp swimming costume next to your crotch, holding water that has the same pH as, I don’t know, venom, and then repeatedly going from warm environments to freezing ones with a load of tepid, fungal-growth temperatures in between. I’m amazed I’m still standing.

I’m also amazed that I was persuaded onto a water ride called The Cyclone. I’m not a thrill-seeker at heart. I know that will shock you all to the core. Considering my hatred of enclosed spaces, fear of drowning horribly in a submarine and general wariness of running water, it seems incredible that Rich convinced me to join him on a rubber raft that would be shot down a dark tube at high force into a plunge pool where I would then have to disembark the raft in front of an audience in the most undignified manner. In all honesty I would have backed out of the ride altogether but I didn’t want to lose face in front of our fellow rafters, and so put on my sturdiest expression as we climbed aboard at the top of the dome.

‘Don’t worry,’ said my friend Simon, as we all arranged our legs in a criss-cross at the centre of the raft, ‘it’s not that bad. You go around and around in this giant room and then basically drop through the middle of it down a hole. Like going down a plughole.’

He couldn’t have come up with a more terrifying expression. Going down a plughole is in my list of top five irrational fears. I will even rescue a spider from said fate, despite not really liking to touch spiders that much, because I can’t bear the thought of its hellish journey. That dark, endless pipe. Imagine getting stuck! This is why I can’t watch those videos of extreme caving, or pot-holing. Why would anyone do that voluntarily?

Photo by Nik on Unsplash

Yet there I was, voluntarily boarding the Heart Attack raft and waiting for the big push. I did come close to having a coronary, I think, as the raft span around and edged closer to the plughole. My Oura ring detected a worrying spike in stress levels, at any rate. I couldn’t even scream, such was my fear. Rich ended up being the person who faced backwards for the entire thing, which is the worst position to be in. Ha, I thought. That’ll learn ya.

Though I’d rather have done the plughole backwards than deal with these shins…

My bandaged shins, behold. Professional job using odds and ends from the first aid kit that haven’t been commandeered for “vet surgery” games over the years…