Welcome home ... or maybe not.

After a long trip, I always look forward to getting home, loving on our four-legged babies, and sleeping in my own bed. But this year, after our first 24 hours at home, I'm ready to head back; we seem to have come home to a couple of unwelcome surprises!

Actually, we came home to just one unwelcome surprise. The other was something I brought back with me - a bad rash which we think may be due to an out-of-the-blue shellfish allergy. A bit of background: fresh seafood is one of my favorite foods. In fact, I think if I were ranking my favorites, it's probably #2, close behind anything Mediterranean. And it has to be fresh. As in, it was swimming around happily in the ocean the same morning it later appears on my dinner plate. When Bobby and I stopped eating meat nearly eight years ago, I couldn't quite give this up, so I've continued eating seafood. I chalk it up to a quality-of-life thing: the fish seem to live fairly happy lives until they're caught in the ocean, as opposed to the cruel farming, transport, and slaughterhouse procedures seen in the mainstream meat industry. At least in my mind they do. So eating good seafood is one of my favorite things about our annual beach trip.

My favorite things are shrimp and scallops, so just about every night of every beach trip, I order one or the other. Sometimes both. Fried, grilled, blackened, peel-and-eat ... it doesn't matter to me. This year was no different, except that about three nights into the trip, I noticed what looked like one small bug bite on each of my outer wrists. I chalked them up to some weird beach critter and didn't think much else about them. Until they started itching. And the itching turned into hot, painful prickling. And they spread to the backs of both hands and up my arms toward my elbows. The simple bug bites quickly became an uncomfortable rash - it itched, it swelled, and when I showered with barely warm water, the rash felt like a scalding burn. By the time we left the beach, the rash was in the aforementioned places plus small patches on the upper arms, the fronts of each shin, and a little bit around my mouth. The most bizarre thing is that the rash locations are almost mirror images of each other; where it is on the left side of my body, it will also be on the right.

I wracked my brain to think of what could be causing this. The redness and bumpiness could be characteristic of sun poisoning, but I hadn't been sunburned.

The prickliness felt just like an allergic reaction I'd had in 2001 to the joint drug Celebrex, so maybe an allergic reaction? But to what? No new medicines, cosmetics, lotions, or detergents. New sunscreen? Well, yes, but wouldn't that cause a rash everywhere I'd used it? Which for me is EVERYWHERE.

The mirror-image weirdness is sort of characteristic of lupus (when I began having joint pain in 2001, it took this pattern as well. If one thumb hurt, the other did too. If my right shoulder was achy, I knew the left would quickly follow). Ultraviolet exposure can trigger lupus flare-ups ... but I'm religious about sunscreen and wasn't showing any other symptoms.

It hit me on Thursday after dinner. (Dinner which had, of course, consisted of shrimp and scallops.) I'd been trying to think about what I'd eaten that might be allergenic. Shellfish? Oh, surely not. I've been eating it for years - my entire life really - and never had any problems with it. I discreetly googled it on my new iPhone and discovered that of all adult-onset food allergies, shellfish is the most common. I tried to sound casual as I said to Bobby and my mom, "You don't think this could be related to all the shellfish I've been eating, do you?" Much to my disappointment, neither of them dismissed this as utterly impossible. The more we all thought about it, the more it made sense. I reluctantly ordered salmon on our last night and itched all the way home.

I saw my doctor today, and when I told her the whole story, she seemed pretty sure it is a shellfish allergy. In fact, she said a similar thing happened to her older brother. They grew up along the gulf coast and were back down there vacationing when he started getting an itchy rash. She suggested he might want to lay off the shellfish (his favorite ... sound familiar?), but he ignored her; he loved this type of food and didn't want to have to stop eating it. (Sound familiar?) He ended up in the emergency room after the repeated exposure caused his throat to swell shut. (My mom has already suggested I get an epi pen.) So anyway, I see an allergist on Oct. 8 and won't know anything for sure until then; I'm going to request that they test me for each individual type of shellfish, in the hopes that there might be one or two favorites I can still eat.

And I'm still itching. On the bright side, I took a shower this evening - the first since Thursday, since showers were so painful (don't get grossed out ... I've been taking cool baths, but I wasn't able to wash my hair. OK, that is a little gross.) And it didn't hurt. I hope that means it's getting better.

Which brings me to the unwelcome surprise we came home to. I'm not sure what qualifies as an infestation, but we discovered what is surely at least a minor infestation of fleas in our master bedroom. Just in our bedroom, weirdly enough. But FLEAS?!?!? I suppose as a life-long cat owner, I was due for something like this, but we take such measures to control them - medicine for the cats and dog, and frequent sprayings inside the house even though I hate harsh chemicals. Ugh. And we didn't discover this until around 8:30 last night - this is what happens when you plop your luggage at the bottom of the stairs, thinking, "I'll take it up in a minute," and then fall onto the couch watching football for hours. Ugh. So instead of getting to sleep in my comfy king-sized bed last night, which is always so nice after sleeping in a smaller bed for a week, I got to cram into the guest bed with Bobby (to be later joined by a frightened Maggie) while our barricaded bedroom got fumigated. Twice.

Today we've washed EVERYTHING in the room, including all the clean clothes we'd just washed before leaving the beach, using the hottest water and bleach when possible, we cleaned all the junk out from under the bed, sprayed every inch of carpet directly with chemical flea killers (did I mention I hate using harsh chemicals?) - even moving all the furniture to get underneath it - and vacuumed the room about four times. A website we found on flea control recommends vacuuming every two days for a couple of weeks and emptying the bag outside, to get all the flea eggs and any remaining carnage, so that's what we'll do. Right now our mattresses are upright against the walls, our pillows and comforter are awaiting their turn in the wash, and the dressers are in the middle of the floor. Our efforts seem to have paid off though. We've gone almost all day without seeing a single flea. Still, this isn't how either of us wanted to spend our first day back at home after vacation.

But on the plus side, our bedroom will be cleaner than it's been in a long time.

Last night we were so freaked out by the fleas that we didn't stop to consider how this would affect Maggie, and she freaked as well. I've since decided that our terminology and behavior didn't help things. She's an extremely sensitive child, and though I keep this in mind 99% of the time, it didn't even cross my mind until much later, when she was asleep and I had a chance to really think about her reactions. When Bobby first discovered the fleas and screamed, "Look at this! They're going to eat me up!" she thought he was really going to be eaten up. (I'm sure if we'd been calmer, she probably wouldn't have taken his statement so literally. But he was upset, and that led to greater anxiety for her.) She started crying - really crying - and refused to walk on any of the carpets, worried the fleas would eat her too. When we talked of "bombing" the room (our word for setting off a fumigating bug bomb), she sobbed that she didn't want Daddy to be eaten or our house to be bombed. She was terrified to go to bed by herself, so we ended up letting her fall asleep on the couch downstairs while we all stayed as far away from the fumigation as possible. We made sure all the cats were out of the bedroom, then Bobby set off the bomb and we placed heavy towels along the seams of the door to keep it contained.

I briefly considered spending last night in a hotel, but I think I'm ready to head back to the beach to escape it all! On second thought, maybe I should swear off vacations for a while - first the broken toe in June, now this. I shudder to think what will happen when we're at Disney in February.