Not a superhero...

So, I used to live in Brazil, and it was really great.  I had lots of fun experiences, and some that were not so fun (Dengue Fever was a riot!).  There was one experience in particular that I thought was pretty interesting.  This one morning, I think it was in May of 2007, I woke up with a slight burning sensation on my right cheek and on the back, right side of my neck.  I didn't think much about it until my mission companion, Hebert Gomes, looked really startled and told me to run and look in the mirror.  On my cheek there was a spot about the size of a slice of pepperoni that appeared to have been burned!  There was generally a dark red color with little gray and yellow blisters.  Apparently on my neck there was a similar "burn" only it was about the size of the palm of my hand.  We couldn't figure out what had happened.  I thought maybe it was some sort of reaction to the Brazilian sun, which was strange because I never really get sunburned (I'm pretty brown naturally).  Some of our friends thought that maybe it was an allergic reaction to something.  Nobody really was sure what it was at the time.  By the next day, both sores had grown, and they had opened up.  There was pus and other gross stuff oozing out of them, they were painful to touch, and I had a slight fever.  It was a holiday (naturally) so all of the pharmacies were closed.  Being men of faith, we prayed about it, and I got a priesthood blessing, and I was able to continue working.  Of course I never wrote my mom about this at the time (sorry Mom), but here are some pictures that were taken about two weeks after the initial incident.



After a couple of weeks, the sores on both my face and neck dried up (the incessant oozing had stained the collars of most of my shirts), and eventually the dead skin and scabs peeled off.  I am happy to say that there is no residual scarring.  About a year later, I related this story and showed the pictures to a friend who just happened to be a spider expert.  He believed that I had been bitten by something like this:



He thought I had been bitten by a Brazilian variety of the brown recluse, a tiny spider that hides in dark places.  It injects its venom under the skin of its victim, causing necrosis to spread underneath.  That's why my face and neck had open sores that looked like hamburger or something.  He asked what treatment I received, and when I told him that I had pretty much just waited for it to heal, he was very surprised and told me that I was extremely lucky, as these bites can be deadly.  Wow.

Anyway, I don't really like spiders anymore.  That was a really scary experience, and I didn't even get any super powers!  That spider could have at least left me with a six-pack or something!  All joking aside, I guess I am super, because where I had some ugly sores and a slight fever, some people die.