Ebola-licious!

Ohhhh, it's so pretty and totally deadly!

I'm reading a book called The Hot Zone. It is a "terrifying true story" written like true crime and it describes the origins and spread of filo-viruses ("thread viruses" because the virus itself is long and thready and makes crazy loops and designs before it develops crystallized bricks in your blood cells and causes them to explode) from Africa. Holy shit this is a scary book. These viruses spread like fire and Ebola has a 10% survival rate. All it takes is the teensiest bit of exposure and you can expect to crash and bleed out while your body basically liquefies within 3 weeks. Right now I'm at the part where a bunch of infected monkeys are dying off in droves in a quarantine house right outside of Washington DC.

GROSS. I haven't been getting enough sleep because I can't stop reading about this disgusting and weird (and totally fascinating) virus.

Last night my poor broken toe really freaked me out. WARNING: THIS IS GROSSER THAN EBOLA!!! The left half of my toenail on the broken toe was basically floating on top of a huge pocket of, uh, drainage, and when I cut my toenail back (to decrease the pressure of my toe against my shoe) it all came gushing out and it was SO NASTY I don't even want to think about it except that oh right it is attached to my body. So now I have an oozing toenail bed with half a nail attached to it. I drenched it in hydrogen peroxide, slathered the sucker in neosporin, covered it in a band-aid, taped that up, and then put one of those gauze tubes over it (left over from when I smashed a bookshelf into my other big toe and tore half that nail off), and a clean sock over that. I haven't even looked at it yet today because I need to go to the drugstore at lunch and get more first aid stuff so I can wrap it back up. Depending on how it looks (right now my main concern is infection- or a fungus- or EBOLA!- under the nail) I will call the podiatrist the ER referred me to. Either way, I'm going to lose a huge part of my toenail, if not the whole thing.

Oddly enough, after all that happened my toe looked a lot better. But it still hurts like hell. So in addition to the reading that is keeping me awake, any pressure against my toe is waking me up too. Maybe I should have accepted the ER doc's offer of vicodin. This will be hard to get to when I seal my house in plastic and have food delivered through a level 3 decontamination chamber. I'm never going out again- you just don't know when Ebola is lurking outside your front door.