Cat Scratch Fever
What doesn't kill you makes you crazy
There are various ailments from which I imagine you could easily lose your mind. A bad case of tinnitus that has your ears buzzing like a mosquito in your inner canals at all times. Vertigo that has you holding onto railings and feeling nauseous when you move through the world. Or, what I got for Christmas, which might be somewhere around the 7th ring of hell: an unreachable and unrelenting itch.
For a few days in the doldrums between the Eves I was basically only occupied with rubbing up against any angle in my house, constantly begging my kids to lend their poor ailing mother a sharp fingernailed hand. Luckily, the unbearable itchiness does stop when I’m sleeping so I can get some peace. Lacking a proper back scratch device (stocking stuffer 2025?), I’ve taken to using whatever utensils and products I have around: hairbrushes, running water, cool cream. As I write this, which of course has made this worse with the hyper-focus on the matter, I have shoved a large pasta server down my shirt in between slides against the wooden back of my chair.
Sure enough, as I’ve learned with every topic I ever needed to investigate for this platform, there’s a Reddit forum for that. Yes, it’s winter and dry skin/low humidity season, but the intensity of one remote area of the body that isn’t otherwise climate-affected doesn’t make much sense. Rather than the death-by-itch group I was expecting to find, looks like this search landed me in the community chat room of the peri-to-menopausal itchy witchy ladies of a certain age who are raging with low estrogen and insane incessant tingling. Oh woeful welcome, they say, just pull up this spiked chair and try to not to rub your dermis off while we compare sob stories. Of course, we get to get indefinable skin conditions along with the other cruel ailments of our aging.
Here there’s the mom using a long fork so much her kids have designated this certain one the Skin Fork. Other women are gouging themselves with their fingernails until they bleed. Dousing themselves in creams (not lotions, they advise), popping Benadryl, shivering in cold (never hot!) showers. Drink more water, the wise crones advise, the remedy for everything. Start hormone replacement therapy pronto, grab this and that gilded anti-itch remedies of the gods.
Welcome to the wilds of “Women Over 40” and “Menopause,” where the ladies of a certain age fume, and offer some collective wisdom and tales such as:
“OK… So this might sound super weird, but my back itches all the time these days! Especially as the evening approaches before I go to bed. What’s this about? I remember as a kid one of my aunts would always ask me to scratch her back, and I always thought it was so weird! Now I realize it’s probably because she couldn’t, reach around and get to that spot, as I’m having flexibility issues reaching those particular spots. Am 44 and will be 45 in another couple months. What’s this about? Is anyone else experiencing this? Am I deficient in some kind of nutrients? Also, I should note there are no bumps or blemishes on my skin from the area that needs to be itched… it’s just odd how strong the need to scratch it is!!”
“For my 45th birthday, some friends and I went on a cruise. As a gift, one of them bought different colored extendable back scratchers for each of us! I thought it was such an odd gift, fast forward to months later: it’s the best thing anyone’s given me!!”
“I call it the ‘itchy, bitchy, scritchies.’”
“Yes! Like... scratch til I bleed itchy.”
And oh my, just try to stop scratching, an impossible feat because you become further obsessed the more you resist. And then you dare itch again—nirvana—but there’s no end. WebMD explains how this happens—how scratching is the horrible hamster wheel that only leads to more itching. Only our skin can both feel pain and itch (other organs just know pain). An itch (induced outside or in, exogenous or endogenous) triggers in the brain the impulse to scratch. Which then:
Though it feels good, scratching actually triggers mild pain in your skin. Nerve cells tell your brain something hurts, and that distracts it from the itch. It can make you feel better in that moment, but 1 in 5 people say scratching makes them itch somewhere else on their body.
Sometimes the pain from scratching makes your body release the pain-fighting chemical serotonin. It can make the itch feel even itchier.
That’s why the more you scratch, the more you itch. The more you itch, the more you scratch. This cycle can be tough to break, especially if your itch is really bad.
Though they can’t explain why the itch always has to be in a spot you alone can’t reach, like the bottom of your soles when you are wearing shoes. Scratch my back, asks the heroine of this movie of 1920, “the startling story of the man who always did as he pleased” because perhaps he isn’t suffering this debilitating itchiness.
There are medical terms I learned on this research journey that sound more exciting than they are.
There’s Nostalgic Paresthetica, which I guess is nostalgic in both that it might remind us of our primate roots and results from scratching a certain spot into a damned spot that always requires scratching. From a scholarly article on the subject in the National Library of Medicine:
For centuries people have complained about an itch, just between the shoulder blades, that is out of reach to scratch. For some, the itch can become so persistent, so maddening that finding a way to scratch is all consuming. The back-scratcher is such a primitive tool that even apes have been observed making them from tree branches. Elaborate back-scratchers have been fashioned from everything from whale-bone to tortoiseshell and have been designed by diverse cultures throughout time. We postulate that notalgia paresthetica (NP) was the stimulus leading to the invention of the backscratcher, perhaps by our primate ancestors. Another possible explanation could be that the backscratcher or similar instrument is not the treatment of NP but its cause. Itch can lead to scratching and rubbing either with an instrument or against a wall, which leads to post-inflammatory hyper-pigmentation and the findings that we call NP.
A chicken and egg problem of never knowing which comes first. Or maybe, it’s not the chickens but the mammal meat…
Alpha-gal syndrome, has nothing to do with a strong female version of the sort of alpha I unpacked a while back. Rather, alpha-gal (galatose) is a sugar found in the tissue of mammalian meats (except for humans and other primates we aren’t supposed to eat?) that may induce an allergy which has been known to cause itchiness, among other problems. AGS can also be tick-induced, and may or may not kill you.
Which is actually a question of mine—can this kill you? Probably not but these pruritogenic (a fine adjective meaning itchy) obsessions could make you want to murder. This poor writer in The Atlantic has literally torn herself to shreds in epic ways only matched in my fiction.
No, the techniques that work are the techniques that work. During the day, I pace. Overnight, when the itching intensifies, I balance frozen bags of corn on my legs or dunk myself in a cold bath. I apply menthol, whose cold-tingle overrides the hot-tingle for a while. I jerk my hair or pinch myself with the edges of my nails or dig a diabetic lancet into my stomach. And I scratch.
My body bears the evidence. Right now I am not itchy—well, I am mildly itchy, because writing about being itchy makes me itchy—yet my feet and legs are covered in patches of thick, lichenified skin. This spring, I dug a bloody hole into the inside of my cheek with my teeth. I’ve taken out patches of my scalp, shredded the edge of my belly button, and more than once, desperate to get to an itch inside of me, abraded the walls of my vagina.
During my first pregnancy, when the itching began, it was so unrelenting and extreme that I begged for a surgeon to amputate my limbs; during the second, my doctor induced labor early to stop it. Still, I ended up hallucinating because I was so sleep-deprived. Now I have long spells when I feel normal. Until something happens; I wish I knew what. I get brain-fogged, blowing deadlines, struggling to remember to-dos, failing to understand how anyone eats dinner at 8 p.m., sleeping only to wake up tired. And I get itchy. Maybe it will last forever, I think. It stops. And then it starts again.
Her case is as extreme as it sounds—among the worst of the one in five who experience chronic itch. “The itching is the corporeal equivalent of a car alarm, a constant, obnoxious, and shrill reminder that you are in a body: I’m here, I’m here, I’m here.” This condition, as you might imagine, can cause elevated stress, anxiety, depression, sleep deprivation, and taken far enough: suicidal ideation, or there’s the person quoted in one study who scratched through to their skull. And yet, with all that, the medical industry has always focused on pain far more than this red-headed stepchild of mere itchiness. The science surrounding this remains vaguely undeveloped, until, aha, some breaking news that emerged from Harvard in late 2023, just in time for Thanksgiving and that year’s scaly skin season, that a common bacterium, Staphylococcus aureus, might be the culprit by activating nerve cells when our microbial balance is thrown off. And if researchers now know what might be triggering this itch, then they might be better equipped to target it someday with actual medicine.
In the meantime, we resourceful housewives, we weremothers, sharpen our kitchen tools for a fleeting moment of sweet relief.
Hey neat! I was thinking of writing about itching (what it is, why it's a thing, and precisely how and why it's different from pain. I think you just did most of the heavy lifting.
I'm definitely trying not to feel itchy right now.
Mine helped w hormones and thank god bc it was keeping me up and waking me up!