My own personal outbreak

Now I’m sitting in a health clinic in Montebello as a walk-in patient to see whether I have staph. So far the majority of people I have asked think it ISN’T, but staph isn’t a democracy. And apparently it’s running rampant around here; as a matter of fact, when I was at R1 yesterday someone showed up to warn everyone about the outbreak. And there I was with some symptoms on my leg.

It just looks like scrapes that are scabbing over, but there are lots of them, maybe 4 or 5. and then there are also about 5-6 lumps that look like spider bites or something—my internet research indicates that people sometimes confuse staph with spider bits because they look the same at first. But if it’s staph, I should also be feeling ill, like I have the flu or something, which I don’t. and there should be pus, which there hasn’t been.

The two main things that would suck about having staph, over and above the minor nuisance of it being fatal sometimes, are 1) I really hope I didn’t give it to anyone else and 2) to make sure I DON’T give it to anyone else, I’d be off the mat till it’s better. This would mean no competition on Sun, not to mention no training for probably a week. Crap. I guess there’s nothing for it but to wait and see what the doctor says. The TV here in the waiting room just advertised the LA County Fair: maybe I’ll be going there a lot. Plus, Johnny and Eben were talking about Nickel Nickel, an arcade with old school video games like Frogger and Galaga. That’d be like old times in Michigan when my friends Mark, Michael and I would be the only people in Pinball Pete’s who weren’t 12-year-old boys.

As exciting as that sounds, I REALLY hope it’s not staph.

On Sunday I trained at an open mat at Rigan Machado’s and got to spar some more with Melissa from a couple weeks ago, as well as Daynin, a blue belt from Hawaii. She looks great; she’s into her 40s but I would have pegged her at 32 or so. She attributes it to BJJ. I got a picture with her and Cindy because it was the first time I had actually seen Cindy wearing her black belt (every other time we had been training no-gi).

Later Jimmy, Kenny and I went for lunch and then met up with Melissa (different Melissa from the one I trained with—the one from Friday night) for an MMA fundraiser. And later it was time for some retail therapy at the Citadel (shopping mall) with Jimmy, Melissa, Johnny, and Sean. I needed some more training clothes: board shorts, spandex, etc.

We were SOOO LA; among the 5 of us we were in 4 cars. Pretty hilarious.

Monday I was exhausted; Johnny’s vampire schedule gets to me after a while, so I slept all afternoon before training at night.