u/Aggressive_Big3236

*Contains suicidal ideation

Imagine having a white hot needle shoved into your skin just below the surface. The desire to rip it out would be irresistible, right? Now multiply that to random spots at random moments over your whole body. It’s like spontaneous volcanic injections right beneath the epidermis, aching to tear you apart.

This is what it feels like to have my skin condition. It doesn’t really have a proper medical name, considering it’s just very sensitive skin. I call it “my condition”. It’s like hell opens its gates randomly to give me a peak at what’s inside. It inevitably leads to fits of itching, even to the point of drawing blood. Anything can set off an attack: someone touching me, dust in the air, bumping a table, a change in temperature or humidity, a slight breeze, or doing nothing at all.

It’s sudden, it’s vicious, and it has made me reconsider living more than once.

Medicine had failed me by the time I was in high school. I had tried every therapy, ointment, and treatment under the sun. My parents relocated to a more temperate climate, where the cold didn’t bite and the sun didn’t burn, but the outside world of the Pacific Northwest was still hostile. Soothing rain made a mockery of the desert that was my skin. I lived inside when I could, getting lost in virtual worlds with characters who didn’t feel pain like I did.

My parents had been so busy with my condition growing up that they only got around to having my sister nine years after me. They were relieved that she came out normally after the inconvenience that I was.

My younger sister was the only person who liked the move. Somehow, she decided she could be happy even after leaving her school and friends for a city where she knew no one. My parents transitioned to homeschooling us at this point. She liked it. I watched her draw at the kitchen table as I languished in pain between math and science. She drew rain clouds with smiley faces and a sun in every picture casting a rainbow across the sky. I didn’t get it. There was no hope in the sun or the rain. There was only hell on the surface of my skin.

I started traveling more as my parents searched for better specialists and treatments. Every trip weakened my resolve. The terrible cold of Minneapolis, the unbearable heat of Phoenix, the biting wind of Chicago. I hated it. But I hated the thought that death was better.

It was my seventeenth birthday when I had a rather terrible and aggressive attack in the middle of the night that left me howling in pain and tearing at my own skin til I bled. In my hatred of life, I locked the door to my room. My parents attempted to coax me out, promising cake and food and money and video games. I didn’t open the door all day.

Around three in the afternoon, as I laid in my bloodied sheets, I heard a small slit and watched a piece of paper slide under the door. On a piece of white paper, in the hand of an eight year old girl, was a picture of some creature hanging from a branch by its tongue, arms and legs outstretched. Above it were the words “Hang in there!”

I discarded it in my wire trash can and went back to laying on my bed. I tried to go to sleep and decided to skip my birthday this year. But that stupid looking animal hanging by its tongue wouldn’t get out of my head. The proportions were so wrong; it looked so dumb. Why did it have those beady little eyes? Why did it have those stupid fat arms? What even was it?

I sprang from my bed and fished the paper out of the trash can, half crumpling it in a fist. I threw open the door to my room and stomped down the hallway. My mom and dad looked up with delighted surprise. “Happy birthday!” my mom said, then saw my face and fell silent. I marched past her to the dining room table where my sister sat, coloring.

I slammed the paper down on the table, edges now crinkled and torn, and yelled, “What is this shit?”

Her surprised face turned to look, and her lip started to quiver. She didn’t answer. I picked up the paper, holding it in both hands, and with the most biting tone I could muster, I continued. “I mean, what is this shit? Its stupid looking face and its fat arms and its-”

I stopped. By chance holding it up to the light of the dining room, I saw there was ink on the other side. I flipped it around to see in bold rainbow letters “Happy Birthday.” The tears welled in my sister's eyes, and her voice tried to break a whisper as she croaked a reply. 

“An anteater.”

She began to sob. The beady little eyes of that anteater looked at me and I realized I needed to get help.

That day was a turning point for my family. I realized how much I was hurting them. Going to therapy revealed to me the consequences of my actions. I was able to forgive my parents and sister for not always helping the best with the pain, and they were able to forgive me for being so insufferable all the time.

Better than that, though, I started to spend time with my sister. She became my number one confidant. I managed to go to college online, with my sister helping me get through itching attacks in the middle of tests. It took me a while to graduate, but by that time I had a remote job and my own place. My sister was just learning how to drive, and so she helped me get out and go places. She even set up an online dating profile for me and helped me go on some dates. They didn’t go anywhere, but I was pretty content with my life as it was.

My parents had been in their mid-forties by the time they had my sister, so they were retiring when she went off to college. With that came a huge challenge of managing all of my own healthcare. I was still going to weekly doctor’s visits and therapy and pain management and had prescriptions for everything. Even as my sister went to college, she still helped. She called me weekly to see how I was doing, sharing about her adventures studying art and traveling. It barely seemed like she did school.

I wasn’t jealous. I liked being home and working at my desk and ordering delivery without having to leave a climate controlled apartment. 

One day, I was just sitting at my desk working when I got a message from my sister.

“Hey I’m in Japan right now. I just went to these hot springs up in the mountains that were so amazing. I talked to one of the locals, and she said that people travel from all over the island to bathe here. People with some skin diseases actually get cured, they say, by the river spirits, but I’m sure it’s something with the water. We should talk more about this tonight! I think it could be something that could help you. 

She included a photo of some beautiful pools surrounded by zen gardens and volcanic black rock. As my skin crawled thinking about the sensation of hot water flowing over my body, I felt what I think was zen. Something welled up inside me I don’t think I had felt before: hope.

Before I knew it, I was scheduling a flight to Japan, trying not to scream when a TSA agent patted me down, and holding my breath as an uncomfortable seat rubbed my back raw. Then I was hiking a mountain in horrid humidity, my feet bleeding as they blistered and swelled. Several of my toenails fell off. But finally, I was there. 

I bathed in the pool for a week. Under the water, my skin felt like new. I emerged from the springs full of life. I felt like I could climb the next mountain over. 

That feeling didn’t last long. The itching returned eight hours into the twenty two hour plane ride back. I was bleeding from my scalp a week later, as if the demon on my skin was tormenting me more now that I found a cure.

My sister didn’t give up. She had seen me alive and well in Japan and was committed to dragging me along with her. I bathed in hot springs in Iceland. I went to saunas in Denmark. I swam in the healing pools of Jerusalem. I tried eucalyptus balms in Australia and exotic teas in China.

Each one offered relief, but it faded after a few weeks or months. I was worn out from the travel, from the treks up mountains and the wind biting and the cold battering me. I went through thousands of rolls of gauze. But we were close. My sister didn’t give up. I could never thank her enough for that. For all the sacrifices she made.

It was for our eighth trip that she recommended we go on a safari. Now a hot day in Africa sounded like the premium version of hell to me, but she told me about a conservation group she had heard about from an environmentalist friend that was doing experimental research into animal cures. They sounded like legitimate leaders in stem cell treatment, specializing in treatments from natural sources on the African continent. Apparently several celebrities had gone there, and the company shipped a few treatments to Asia and Europe. 

We flew into Kenya and after terrible sweaty hours kicking up dust in an open top Jeep, we arrived at a private preserve out in the savanna. There was a compound with many air conditioned buildings, a welcome relief to the red hot needles erupting under my skin.

The sun was setting over the great flat plains in a scene more brilliant than any painting. I watched two giraffes feed from an Acacia tree, and a herd of zebras trotted by. It was like something out of a nature documentary. 

I spent the next few days being analyzed, poked and prodded by doctors and scientists. They took scrapings of my skin, leaving me scabbed and raw. I signed forms with words I didn’t know anything about, but the treatment was being provided free of charge, given that it was experimental.

One afternoon, a doctor invited me on a walk to explain the treatment. When I asked where we were going, she said “to meet your donor.”

We passed huge enclosures of rhinos, a pond with hippos and alligators, and a reptile house with snakes. 

“We are leading research into animal to human stem cell transplants. We take the cells of the animals from parts of their bodies like skin and modify it to match your genome specifically. There is a slight chance that your body rejects the transplant, but it results only in sickness for a few weeks until your body is rid of the cells. But otherwise, our treatments have great success,” she said.

“So I’ve heard,” I said. “So am I getting Hippo cells or something?”

“You’ll see. Here we are. Time to meet your donor.” 

The enclosure we walked up to house a few termite mounds and little else. There didn’t appear to be any animals even in it. She opened the gate with a key card and beckoned me to follow. 

We walked to the back of the enclosure in the shade. There was a small burrow and at its mouth sat a strange round lump that looked like a spiky rock. 

“Say hello!” said the doctor, bending down to poke the rock.

“What is it?” I asked.

“This is a pangolin. They are like anteaters with scales. When they are threatened, they curl into a ball and predators leave them alone. Do you want to pet it?”

“Um, sure.”

She stroked the scales lightly until the little creature unfurled itself. It was about the size of my arm. The deep brown scales ran down from its head to its tail. It looked at me with its beady little eyes, uncertain but calm. It shambled about on short stubby legs. It was funny. This little guy held the secret to curing my condition.

My procedure date was set. All my tests had come back clean, and it took them three days to collect, sequence, and analyze the stem cells. Before I knew it, I was dressed in a hospital gown, being wheeled to an operating room and laid on a cool steel table. 

The doctors unveiled a table full of prefilled syringes. Each one held a dose of stem cells that would save my skin. Those needles looked big. Hopefully, they would be the last painful needles I would ever feel.

They had to strap me down. I screamed as the injection sites all over my body stung with disinfectant before I bit down. The first needle hit my skin like a dagger. Heat coursed over my body. Each new injection was a new tidal wave of pain across my skin. I tore at the leather restraints in an attempt to grab, itch, claw away the skin. I felt like my skin was a flesh sack swelling up around my bones, like I would burst at the next needle. After a few injections, I must have passed out from the pain.

I awoke in a hospital room looking out over the gorgeous savannah. As I blinked away the sleep from my eyes, I saw my sister drawing. She looked up and saw I was awake. She took my hand.

“Good morning,” she said with a smile. “How are you?”

Tears streamed down my face. Despite the sting of the injection sites and the soreness of my muscles, her hand didn’t sting my skin. It didn’t itch. For the first time, it didn’t hurt.

They kept me for a few days and monitored for side effects. They didn’t find any. By the time we left, I felt like a new person.

I couldn’t stop running my fingers over my skin. It was soft and smooth like a baby’s.

The only things that hurt was my finger where they had clamped the EKG monitor for my vitals. Honestly, it was a relief that the pain was predictable. Every sensation after that was a blast. I wanted to shake everyone’s hand. I wanted to hug the TSA guy. I put my hands out the window into the cold Seattle air and felt the rain on my skin. I went outside and just sat on a bench in shorts, feeling the wind caress my legs, arms, and face. The world was beautiful for the first time ever.

It was strange then that only the pain of my finger persisted. After a few weeks, it was worse. My fingernail was bruised, turning black and blue.

One day, I was idly sitting at my desk working when the nail came off. Grossly enticed by the shed fingernail, I looked at the nail bed and saw there was another nail underneath it. It still hurt a little bit and bled a few drops. I threw the broken nail in the trash and went on with my day.

When I woke up the next morning, my arm was hurting. It felt like my muscle was tight and ridged under the skin, and as I moved it tightened more. When I rubbed it, some of the hair shed off my arm. I assumed I must have slept on it so it was sore, and the hair had just been growing in. The pain bugged me throughout the workday, but I had made it through worse before my treatment. I eventually got to sleep despite the pressure.

I opened my eyes and the first thing I felt was tightness in my entire back, like the layer of muscle below my skin was pulled across my skeleton. A lot of the hair on my legs was shedding, and I felt strange. I figured I must have a weird case of the flu that was making me really achy.  I let my sister know I was sick and went to bed.

My fingernails were all bleeding when I woke up. Sharp pain was coursing through them so that I could barely bend my fingers. It took me a while to text my sister. She was out of town for the weekend, and I felt fine enough internally, but I decided it would be good to see a doctor. 

In a lot of pain, I got up and put on a jacket. A sharp pain bit into my elbow. I recoiled and took it off, then found blood dripping from my elbow. I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. Patting it with gauze, I tried to find the cause of the pain.

There was something lodged in my arm. I felt around its circular edge and smeared away the blood. Finding its edge, I tried to pull on it, only for pain to shoot up my arm. I recoiled then grabbed the gauze and tried to clean the wound.

It was a fingernail. In the middle of my skin. 

I didn’t understand. I ran my finger around the edges again and again, smearing the blood. Eventually it dripped onto the floor. I bent down to wipe it up. A sharp poke stabbed my lower back. I stood up and saw my white T-shirt streaking with red. I took off the shirt and felt behind my back. Through the blood and skin, I could feel another fingernail. Or was there two?

As I twisted and turned to get a better view, more cuts opened and seeped blood. I grabbed a towel and tried to dry it.

My head spun. I reached up to rub my temple. A clump of hair peeled away as I ran my hand over my scalp. There was a nail under it.

I went back to the nail on my arm. My finger absent-mindedly traced its outline as I stared at the trails of blood down my body in the mirror. A flap of skin formed around it, and I picked at it to reveal another nail overlapping the first. I peeled the skin back more. More nails overlapping. Rows and rows in a crimson mire poking through my flesh, like red shields in a phalanx.

I stepped into the shower and started to peel. Layer after layer, my arms, my back, my scalp, my legs. Scales. All over my body.

I felt so weak by the time I had pulled the last shreds of skin from the top of my feet that I just collapsed onto the shower floor, bloody remnants of my old skin around me.

I awoke to knocking on the bathroom door. How long had I been asleep? I wasn’t bleeding or in pain anymore.

“Are you in there? Are you ok?” called my sister.

“Uh, yeah, just showering,” I said as I stared in the mirror at the new facade of my skin - or scales. I showered quickly, admiring how nickels the scales deflected the water, and how they shone when clean. 

I put on some pants and looked in the mirror again. My fingers traced the outline of each scale on my arms, feeling their beautifully uniform outlines. There was no pain when I tapped on them. It was truly remarkable. 

I opened the door to my bathroom and considered putting on a shirt, but decided against it. I wanted my sister to see.

She was sitting at the kitchen table, sketching something with pencil while absentmindedly commenting “Did you fall asleep in the tub?” Then she looked up.

Her scream died into worried cursing under her breath. She prayed and whimpered and asked what the hell had happened. Eventually she fell silent.

“It doesn’t hurt,” I said. “Don’t worry. I like it.”

“What do you mean?”

“It doesn’t hurt.”

“We need to get you to a hospital.”

“No you’re not listening!” I said, stepping closer to her. “It doesn’t hurt.”

She inched back. “No, you need help.”

“I like this new skin. I can’t feel pain anywhere.”

“That’s not good!”

“How would you know? You didn’t have to suffer through it for twenty-nine years!”

“What do you mean? All these trips, all the birthdays you ruined, all the opportunities I’ve given up because I wanted a big brother! That’s not pain too?”

“You don’t get it! You didn’t have a volcano erupt on your skin every day!”

“I had to live with it, though!”

“You don’t get it. You never could.”

“I - I…” The light in her eyes faded.

“I’m finally free of the pain and all you can think about is yourself.”

“That’s not true,” she said, tears running down her cheeks.

“Get out,” I said.

“What?” She looked surprised.

“Get out. If you don’t like it, then I don’t ever want to see you again.”

“What?”

“LEAVE!”

She burst into sobs as she grabbed her bag and bolted out the door.

I looked at what she was drawing. It was a picture of a pangolin with some balloons. On the back it said “Happy Birthday” in nice bold letters.

That’s right, I thought. I forgot it was my birthday.

“Well happy birthday to me,” I said with a smile. I give myself such nice gifts.

Imagine having a white hot needle shoved into your skin just below the surface. The desire to rip it out would be irresistible, right? Now multiply that to random spots at random moments over your whole body. It’s like spontaneous volcanic injections right beneath the epidermis, aching to tear you apart.

This is what it feels like to have my skin condition. It doesn’t really have a proper medical name, considering it’s just very sensitive skin. I call it “my condition”. It’s like hell opens its gates randomly to give me a peak at what’s inside. It inevitably leads to fits of itching, even to the point of drawing blood. Anything can set off an attack: someone touching me, dust in the air, bumping a table, a change in temperature or humidity, a slight breeze, or doing nothing at all.

It’s sudden, it’s vicious, and it has made me reconsider living more than once.

Medicine had failed me by the time I was in high school. I had tried every therapy, ointment, and treatment under the sun. My parents relocated to a more temperate climate, where the cold didn’t bite and the sun didn’t burn, but the outside world of the Pacific Northwest was still hostile. Soothing rain made a mockery of the desert that was my skin. I lived inside when I could, getting lost in virtual worlds with characters who didn’t feel pain like I did.

My parents had been so busy with my condition growing up that they only got around to having my sister nine years after me. They were relieved that she came out normally after the inconvenience that I was.

My younger sister was the only person who liked the move. Somehow, she decided she could be happy even after leaving her school and friends for a city where she knew no one. My parents transitioned to homeschooling us at this point. She liked it. I watched her draw at the kitchen table as I languished in pain between math and science. She drew rain clouds with smiley faces and a sun in every picture casting a rainbow across the sky. I didn’t get it. There was no hope in the sun or the rain. There was only hell on the surface of my skin.

I started traveling more as my parents searched for better specialists and treatments. Every trip weakened my resolve. The terrible cold of Minneapolis, the unbearable heat of Phoenix, the biting wind of Chicago. I hated it. But I hated the thought that death was better.

It was my seventeenth birthday when I had a rather terrible and aggressive attack in the middle of the night that left me howling in pain and tearing at my own skin til I bled. In my hatred of life, I locked the door to my room. My parents attempted to coax me out, promising cake and food and money and video games. I didn’t open the door all day.

Around three in the afternoon, as I laid in my bloodied sheets, I heard a small slit and watched a piece of paper slide under the door. On a piece of white paper, in the hand of an eight year old girl, was a picture of some creature hanging from a branch by its tongue, arms and legs outstretched. Above it were the words “Hang in there!”

I discarded it in my wire trash can and went back to laying on my bed. I tried to go to sleep and decided to skip my birthday this year. But that stupid looking animal hanging by its tongue wouldn’t get out of my head. The proportions were so wrong; it looked so dumb. Why did it have those beady little eyes? Why did it have those stupid fat arms? What even was it?

I sprang from my bed and fished the paper out of the trash can, half crumpling it in a fist. I threw open the door to my room and stomped down the hallway. My mom and dad looked up with delighted surprise. “Happy birthday!” my mom said, then saw my face and fell silent. I marched past her to the dining room table where my sister sat, coloring.

I slammed the paper down on the table, edges now crinkled and torn, and yelled, “What is this shit?”

Her surprised face turned to look, and her lip started to quiver. She didn’t answer. I picked up the paper, holding it in both hands, and with the most biting tone I could muster, I continued. “I mean, what is this shit? Its stupid looking face and its fat arms and its-”

I stopped. By chance holding it up to the light of the dining room, I saw there was ink on the other side. I flipped it around to see in bold rainbow letters “Happy Birthday.” The tears welled in my sister's eyes, and her voice tried to break a whisper as she croaked a reply. 

“An anteater.”

She began to sob. The beady little eyes of that anteater looked at me and I realized I needed to get help.

That day was a turning point for my family. I realized how much I was hurting them. Going to therapy revealed to me the consequences of my actions. I was able to forgive my parents and sister for not always helping the best with the pain, and they were able to forgive me for being so insufferable all the time.

Better than that, though, I started to spend time with my sister. She became my number one confidant. I managed to go to college online, with my sister helping me get through itching attacks in the middle of tests. It took me a while to graduate, but by that time I had a remote job and my own place. My sister was just learning how to drive, and so she helped me get out and go places. She even set up an online dating profile for me and helped me go on some dates. They didn’t go anywhere, but I was pretty content with my life as it was.

My parents had been in their mid-forties by the time they had my sister, so they were retiring when she went off to college. With that came a huge challenge of managing all of my own healthcare. I was still going to weekly doctor’s visits and therapy and pain management and had prescriptions for everything. Even as my sister went to college, she still helped. She called me weekly to see how I was doing, sharing about her adventures studying art and traveling. It barely seemed like she did school.

I wasn’t jealous. I liked being home and working at my desk and ordering delivery without having to leave a climate controlled apartment. 

One day, I was just sitting at my desk working when I got a message from my sister.

“Hey I’m in Japan right now. I just went to these hot springs up in the mountains that were so amazing. I talked to one of the locals, and she said that people travel from all over the island to bathe here. People with some skin diseases actually get cured, they say, by the river spirits, but I’m sure it’s something with the water. We should talk more about this tonight! I think it could be something that could help you. 

She included a photo of some beautiful pools surrounded by zen gardens and volcanic black rock. As my skin crawled thinking about the sensation of hot water flowing over my body, I felt what I think was zen. Something welled up inside me I don’t think I had felt before: hope.

Before I knew it, I was scheduling a flight to Japan, trying not to scream when a TSA agent patted me down, and holding my breath as an uncomfortable seat rubbed my back raw. Then I was hiking a mountain in horrid humidity, my feet bleeding as they blistered and swelled. Several of my toenails fell off. But finally, I was there. 

I bathed in the pool for a week. Under the water, my skin felt like new. I emerged from the springs full of life. I felt like I could climb the next mountain over. 

That feeling didn’t last long. The itching returned eight hours into the twenty two hour plane ride back. I was bleeding from my scalp a week later, as if the demon on my skin was tormenting me more now that I found a cure.

My sister didn’t give up. She had seen me alive and well in Japan and was committed to dragging me along with her. I bathed in hot springs in Iceland. I went to saunas in Denmark. I swam in the healing pools of Jerusalem. I tried eucalyptus balms in Australia and exotic teas in China.

Each one offered relief, but it faded after a few weeks or months. I was worn out from the travel, from the treks up mountains and the wind biting and the cold battering me. I went through thousands of rolls of gauze. But we were close. My sister didn’t give up. I could never thank her enough for that. For all the sacrifices she made.

It was for our eighth trip that she recommended we go on a safari. Now a hot day in Africa sounded like the premium version of hell to me, but she told me about a conservation group she had heard about from an environmentalist friend that was doing experimental research into animal cures. They sounded like legitimate leaders in stem cell treatment, specializing in treatments from natural sources on the African continent. Apparently several celebrities had gone there, and the company shipped a few treatments to Asia and Europe. 

We flew into Kenya and after terrible sweaty hours kicking up dust in an open top Jeep, we arrived at a private preserve out in the savanna. There was a compound with many air conditioned buildings, a welcome relief to the red hot needles erupting under my skin.

The sun was setting over the great flat plains in a scene more brilliant than any painting. I watched two giraffes feed from an Acacia tree, and a herd of zebras trotted by. It was like something out of a nature documentary. 

I spent the next few days being analyzed, poked and prodded by doctors and scientists. They took scrapings of my skin, leaving me scabbed and raw. I signed forms with words I didn’t know anything about, but the treatment was being provided free of charge, given that it was experimental.

One afternoon, a doctor invited me on a walk to explain the treatment. When I asked where we were going, she said “to meet your donor.”

We passed huge enclosures of rhinos, a pond with hippos and alligators, and a reptile house with snakes. 

“We are leading research into animal to human stem cell transplants. We take the cells of the animals from parts of their bodies like skin and modify it to match your genome specifically. There is a slight chance that your body rejects the transplant, but it results only in sickness for a few weeks until your body is rid of the cells. But otherwise, our treatments have great success,” she said.

“So I’ve heard,” I said. “So am I getting Hippo cells or something?”

“You’ll see. Here we are. Time to meet your donor.” 

The enclosure we walked up to house a few termite mounds and little else. There didn’t appear to be any animals even in it. She opened the gate with a key card and beckoned me to follow. 

We walked to the back of the enclosure in the shade. There was a small burrow and at its mouth sat a strange round lump that looked like a spiky rock. 

“Say hello!” said the doctor, bending down to poke the rock.

“What is it?” I asked.

“This is a pangolin. They are like anteaters with scales. When they are threatened, they curl into a ball and predators leave them alone. Do you want to pet it?”

“Um, sure.”

She stroked the scales lightly until the little creature unfurled itself. It was about the size of my arm. The deep brown scales ran down from its head to its tail. It looked at me with its beady little eyes, uncertain but calm. It shambled about on short stubby legs. It was funny. This little guy held the secret to curing my condition.

My procedure date was set. All my tests had come back clean, and it took them three days to collect, sequence, and analyze the stem cells. Before I knew it, I was dressed in a hospital gown, being wheeled to an operating room and laid on a cool steel table. 

The doctors unveiled a table full of prefilled syringes. Each one held a dose of stem cells that would save my skin. Those needles looked big. Hopefully, they would be the last painful needles I would ever feel.

They had to strap me down. I screamed as the injection sites all over my body stung with disinfectant before I bit down. The first needle hit my skin like a dagger. Heat coursed over my body. Each new injection was a new tidal wave of pain across my skin. I tore at the leather restraints in an attempt to grab, itch, claw away the skin. I felt like my skin was a flesh sack swelling up around my bones, like I would burst at the next needle. After a few injections, I must have passed out from the pain.

I awoke in a hospital room looking out over the gorgeous savannah. As I blinked away the sleep from my eyes, I saw my sister drawing. She looked up and saw I was awake. She took my hand.

“Good morning,” she said with a smile. “How are you?”

Tears streamed down my face. Despite the sting of the injection sites and the soreness of my muscles, her hand didn’t sting my skin. It didn’t itch. For the first time, it didn’t hurt.

They kept me for a few days and monitored for side effects. They didn’t find any. By the time we left, I felt like a new person.

I couldn’t stop running my fingers over my skin. It was soft and smooth like a baby’s.

The only things that hurt was my finger where they had clamped the EKG monitor for my vitals. Honestly, it was a relief that the pain was predictable. Every sensation after that was a blast. I wanted to shake everyone’s hand. I wanted to hug the TSA guy. I put my hands out the window into the cold Seattle air and felt the rain on my skin. I went outside and just sat on a bench in shorts, feeling the wind caress my legs, arms, and face. The world was beautiful for the first time ever.

It was strange then that only the pain of my finger persisted. After a few weeks, it was worse. My fingernail was bruised, turning black and blue.

One day, I was idly sitting at my desk working when the nail came off. Grossly enticed by the shed fingernail, I looked at the nail bed and saw there was another nail underneath it. It still hurt a little bit and bled a few drops. I threw the broken nail in the trash and went on with my day.

When I woke up the next morning, my arm was hurting. It felt like my muscle was tight and ridged under the skin, and as I moved it tightened more. When I rubbed it, some of the hair shed off my arm. I assumed I must have slept on it so it was sore, and the hair had just been growing in. The pain bugged me throughout the workday, but I had made it through worse before my treatment. I eventually got to sleep despite the pressure.

I opened my eyes and the first thing I felt was tightness in my entire back, like the layer of muscle below my skin was pulled across my skeleton. A lot of the hair on my legs was shedding, and I felt strange. I figured I must have a weird case of the flu that was making me really achy.  I let my sister know I was sick and went to bed.

My fingernails were all bleeding when I woke up. Sharp pain was coursing through them so that I could barely bend my fingers. It took me a while to text my sister. She was out of town for the weekend, and I felt fine enough internally, but I decided it would be good to see a doctor. 

In a lot of pain, I got up and put on a jacket. A sharp pain bit into my elbow. I recoiled and took it off, then found blood dripping from my elbow. I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. Patting it with gauze, I tried to find the cause of the pain.

There was something lodged in my arm. I felt around its circular edge and smeared away the blood. Finding its edge, I tried to pull on it, only for pain to shoot up my arm. I recoiled then grabbed the gauze and tried to clean the wound.

It was a fingernail. In the middle of my skin. 

I didn’t understand. I ran my finger around the edges again and again, smearing the blood. Eventually it dripped onto the floor. I bent down to wipe it up. A sharp poke stabbed my lower back. I stood up and saw my white T-shirt streaking with red. I took off the shirt and felt behind my back. Through the blood and skin, I could feel another fingernail. Or was there two?

As I twisted and turned to get a better view, more cuts opened and seeped blood. I grabbed a towel and tried to dry it.

My head spun. I reached up to rub my temple. A clump of hair peeled away as I ran my hand over my scalp. There was a nail under it.

I went back to the nail on my arm. My finger absent-mindedly traced its outline as I stared at the trails of blood down my body in the mirror. A flap of skin formed around it, and I picked at it to reveal another nail overlapping the first. I peeled the skin back more. More nails overlapping. Rows and rows in a crimson mire poking through my flesh, like red shields in a phalanx.

I stepped into the shower and started to peel. Layer after layer, my arms, my back, my scalp, my legs. Scales. All over my body.

I felt so weak by the time I had pulled the last shreds of skin from the top of my feet that I just collapsed onto the shower floor, bloody remnants of my old skin around me.

I awoke to knocking on the bathroom door. How long had I been asleep? I wasn’t bleeding or in pain anymore.

“Are you in there? Are you ok?” called my sister.

“Uh, yeah, just showering,” I said as I stared in the mirror at the new facade of my skin - or scales. I showered quickly, admiring how nickels the scales deflected the water, and how they shone when clean. 

I put on some pants and looked in the mirror again. My fingers traced the outline of each scale on my arms, feeling their beautifully uniform outlines. There was no pain when I tapped on them. It was truly remarkable. 

I opened the door to my bathroom and considered putting on a shirt, but decided against it. I wanted my sister to see.

She was sitting at the kitchen table, sketching something with pencil while absentmindedly commenting “Did you fall asleep in the tub?” Then she looked up.

Her scream died into worried cursing under her breath. She prayed and whimpered and asked what the hell had happened. Eventually she fell silent.

“It doesn’t hurt,” I said. “Don’t worry. I like it.”

“What do you mean?”

“It doesn’t hurt.”

“We need to get you to a hospital.”

“No you’re not listening!” I said, stepping closer to her. “It doesn’t hurt.”

She inched back. “No, you need help.”

“I like this new skin. I can’t feel pain anywhere.”

“That’s not good!”

“How would you know? You didn’t have to suffer through it for twenty-nine years!”

“What do you mean? All these trips, all the birthdays you ruined, all the opportunities I’ve given up because I wanted a big brother! That’s not pain too?”

“You don’t get it! You didn’t have a volcano erupt on your skin every day!”

“I had to live with it, though!”

“You don’t get it. You never could.”

“I - I…” The light in her eyes faded.

“I’m finally free of the pain and all you can think about is yourself.”

“That’s not true,” she said, tears running down her cheeks.

“Get out,” I said.

“What?” She looked surprised.

“Get out. If you don’t like it, then I don’t ever want to see you again.”

“What?”

“LEAVE!”

She burst into sobs as she grabbed her bag and bolted out the door.

I looked at what she was drawing. It was a picture of a pangolin with some balloons. On the back it said “Happy Birthday” in nice bold letters.

That’s right, I thought. I forgot it was my birthday.

“Well happy birthday to me,” I said with a smile. I give myself such nice gifts.

Imagine having a white hot needle shoved into your skin just below the surface. The desire to rip it out would be irresistible, right? Now multiply that to random spots at random moments over your whole body. It’s like spontaneous volcanic injections right beneath the epidermis, aching to tear you apart.

This is what it feels like to have my skin condition. It doesn’t really have a proper medical name, considering it’s just very sensitive skin. I call it “my condition”. It’s like hell opens its gates randomly to give me a peak at what’s inside. It inevitably leads to fits of itching, even to the point of drawing blood. Anything can set off an attack: someone touching me, dust in the air, bumping a table, a change in temperature or humidity, a slight breeze, or doing nothing at all.

It’s sudden, it’s vicious, and it has made me reconsider living more than once.

Medicine had failed me by the time I was in high school. I had tried every therapy, ointment, and treatment under the sun. My parents relocated to a more temperate climate, where the cold didn’t bite and the sun didn’t burn, but the outside world of the Pacific Northwest was still hostile. Soothing rain made a mockery of the desert that was my skin. I lived inside when I could, getting lost in virtual worlds with characters who didn’t feel pain like I did.

My parents had been so busy with my condition growing up that they only got around to having my sister nine years after me. They were relieved that she came out normally after the inconvenience that I was.

My younger sister was the only person who liked the move. Somehow, she decided she could be happy even after leaving her school and friends for a city where she knew no one. My parents transitioned to homeschooling us at this point. She liked it. I watched her draw at the kitchen table as I languished in pain between math and science. She drew rain clouds with smiley faces and a sun in every picture casting a rainbow across the sky. I didn’t get it. There was no hope in the sun or the rain. There was only hell on the surface of my skin.

I started traveling more as my parents searched for better specialists and treatments. Every trip weakened my resolve. The terrible cold of Minneapolis, the unbearable heat of Phoenix, the biting wind of Chicago. I hated it. But I hated the thought that death was better.

It was my seventeenth birthday when I had a rather terrible and aggressive attack in the middle of the night that left me howling in pain and tearing at my own skin til I bled. In my hatred of life, I locked the door to my room. My parents attempted to coax me out, promising cake and food and money and video games. I didn’t open the door all day.

Around three in the afternoon, as I laid in my bloodied sheets, I heard a small slit and watched a piece of paper slide under the door. On a piece of white paper, in the hand of an eight year old girl, was a picture of some creature hanging from a branch by its tongue, arms and legs outstretched. Above it were the words “Hang in there!”

I discarded it in my wire trash can and went back to laying on my bed. I tried to go to sleep and decided to skip my birthday this year. But that stupid looking animal hanging by its tongue wouldn’t get out of my head. The proportions were so wrong; it looked so dumb. Why did it have those beady little eyes? Why did it have those stupid fat arms? What even was it?

I sprang from my bed and fished the paper out of the trash can, half crumpling it in a fist. I threw open the door to my room and stomped down the hallway. My mom and dad looked up with delighted surprise. “Happy birthday!” my mom said, then saw my face and fell silent. I marched past her to the dining room table where my sister sat, coloring.

I slammed the paper down on the table, edges now crinkled and torn, and yelled, “What is this shit?”

Her surprised face turned to look, and her lip started to quiver. She didn’t answer. I picked up the paper, holding it in both hands, and with the most biting tone I could muster, I continued. “I mean, what is this shit? Its stupid looking face and its fat arms and its-”

I stopped. By chance holding it up to the light of the dining room, I saw there was ink on the other side. I flipped it around to see in bold rainbow letters “Happy Birthday.” The tears welled in my sister's eyes, and her voice tried to break a whisper as she croaked a reply. 

“An anteater.”

She began to sob. The beady little eyes of that anteater looked at me and I realized I needed to get help.

That day was a turning point for my family. I realized how much I was hurting them. Going to therapy revealed to me the consequences of my actions. I was able to forgive my parents and sister for not always helping the best with the pain, and they were able to forgive me for being so insufferable all the time.

Better than that, though, I started to spend time with my sister. She became my number one confidant. I managed to go to college online, with my sister helping me get through itching attacks in the middle of tests. It took me a while to graduate, but by that time I had a remote job and my own place. My sister was just learning how to drive, and so she helped me get out and go places. She even set up an online dating profile for me and helped me go on some dates. They didn’t go anywhere, but I was pretty content with my life as it was.

My parents had been in their mid-forties by the time they had my sister, so they were retiring when she went off to college. With that came a huge challenge of managing all of my own healthcare. I was still going to weekly doctor’s visits and therapy and pain management and had prescriptions for everything. Even as my sister went to college, she still helped. She called me weekly to see how I was doing, sharing about her adventures studying art and traveling. It barely seemed like she did school.

I wasn’t jealous. I liked being home and working at my desk and ordering delivery without having to leave a climate controlled apartment. 

One day, I was just sitting at my desk working when I got a message from my sister.

“Hey I’m in Japan right now. I just went to these hot springs up in the mountains that were so amazing. I talked to one of the locals, and she said that people travel from all over the island to bathe here. People with some skin diseases actually get cured, they say, by the river spirits, but I’m sure it’s something with the water. We should talk more about this tonight! I think it could be something that could help you. 

She included a photo of some beautiful pools surrounded by zen gardens and volcanic black rock. As my skin crawled thinking about the sensation of hot water flowing over my body, I felt what I think was zen. Something welled up inside me I don’t think I had felt before: hope.

Before I knew it, I was scheduling a flight to Japan, trying not to scream when a TSA agent patted me down, and holding my breath as an uncomfortable seat rubbed my back raw. Then I was hiking a mountain in horrid humidity, my feet bleeding as they blistered and swelled. Several of my toenails fell off. But finally, I was there. 

I bathed in the pool for a week. Under the water, my skin felt like new. I emerged from the springs full of life. I felt like I could climb the next mountain over. 

That feeling didn’t last long. The itching returned eight hours into the twenty two hour plane ride back. I was bleeding from my scalp a week later, as if the demon on my skin was tormenting me more now that I found a cure.

My sister didn’t give up. She had seen me alive and well in Japan and was committed to dragging me along with her. I bathed in hot springs in Iceland. I went to saunas in Denmark. I swam in the healing pools of Jerusalem. I tried eucalyptus balms in Australia and exotic teas in China.

Each one offered relief, but it faded after a few weeks or months. I was worn out from the travel, from the treks up mountains and the wind biting and the cold battering me. I went through thousands of rolls of gauze. But we were close. My sister didn’t give up. I could never thank her enough for that. For all the sacrifices she made.

It was for our eighth trip that she recommended we go on a safari. Now a hot day in Africa sounded like the premium version of hell to me, but she told me about a conservation group she had heard about from an environmentalist friend that was doing experimental research into animal cures. They sounded like legitimate leaders in stem cell treatment, specializing in treatments from natural sources on the African continent. Apparently several celebrities had gone there, and the company shipped a few treatments to Asia and Europe. 

We flew into Kenya and after terrible sweaty hours kicking up dust in an open top Jeep, we arrived at a private preserve out in the savanna. There was a compound with many air conditioned buildings, a welcome relief to the red hot needles erupting under my skin.

The sun was setting over the great flat plains in a scene more brilliant than any painting. I watched two giraffes feed from an Acacia tree, and a herd of zebras trotted by. It was like something out of a nature documentary. 

I spent the next few days being analyzed, poked and prodded by doctors and scientists. They took scrapings of my skin, leaving me scabbed and raw. I signed forms with words I didn’t know anything about, but the treatment was being provided free of charge, given that it was experimental.

One afternoon, a doctor invited me on a walk to explain the treatment. When I asked where we were going, she said “to meet your donor.”

We passed huge enclosures of rhinos, a pond with hippos and alligators, and a reptile house with snakes. 

“We are leading research into animal to human stem cell transplants. We take the cells of the animals from parts of their bodies like skin and modify it to match your genome specifically. There is a slight chance that your body rejects the transplant, but it results only in sickness for a few weeks until your body is rid of the cells. But otherwise, our treatments have great success,” she said.

“So I’ve heard,” I said. “So am I getting Hippo cells or something?”

“You’ll see. Here we are. Time to meet your donor.” 

The enclosure we walked up to house a few termite mounds and little else. There didn’t appear to be any animals even in it. She opened the gate with a key card and beckoned me to follow. 

We walked to the back of the enclosure in the shade. There was a small burrow and at its mouth sat a strange round lump that looked like a spiky rock. 

“Say hello!” said the doctor, bending down to poke the rock.

“What is it?” I asked.

“This is a pangolin. They are like anteaters with scales. When they are threatened, they curl into a ball and predators leave them alone. Do you want to pet it?”

“Um, sure.”

She stroked the scales lightly until the little creature unfurled itself. It was about the size of my arm. The deep brown scales ran down from its head to its tail. It looked at me with its beady little eyes, uncertain but calm. It shambled about on short stubby legs. It was funny. This little guy held the secret to curing my condition.

My procedure date was set. All my tests had come back clean, and it took them three days to collect, sequence, and analyze the stem cells. Before I knew it, I was dressed in a hospital gown, being wheeled to an operating room and laid on a cool steel table. 

The doctors unveiled a table full of prefilled syringes. Each one held a dose of stem cells that would save my skin. Those needles looked big. Hopefully, they would be the last painful needles I would ever feel.

They had to strap me down. I screamed as the injection sites all over my body stung with disinfectant before I bit down. The first needle hit my skin like a dagger. Heat coursed over my body. Each new injection was a new tidal wave of pain across my skin. I tore at the leather restraints in an attempt to grab, itch, claw away the skin. I felt like my skin was a flesh sack swelling up around my bones, like I would burst at the next needle. After a few injections, I must have passed out from the pain.

I awoke in a hospital room looking out over the gorgeous savannah. As I blinked away the sleep from my eyes, I saw my sister drawing. She looked up and saw I was awake. She took my hand.

“Good morning,” she said with a smile. “How are you?”

Tears streamed down my face. Despite the sting of the injection sites and the soreness of my muscles, her hand didn’t sting my skin. It didn’t itch. For the first time, it didn’t hurt.

They kept me for a few days and monitored for side effects. They didn’t find any. By the time we left, I felt like a new person.

I couldn’t stop running my fingers over my skin. It was soft and smooth like a baby’s.

The only things that hurt was my finger where they had clamped the EKG monitor for my vitals. Honestly, it was a relief that the pain was predictable. Every sensation after that was a blast. I wanted to shake everyone’s hand. I wanted to hug the TSA guy. I put my hands out the window into the cold Seattle air and felt the rain on my skin. I went outside and just sat on a bench in shorts, feeling the wind caress my legs, arms, and face. The world was beautiful for the first time ever.

It was strange then that only the pain of my finger persisted. After a few weeks, it was worse. My fingernail was bruised, turning black and blue.

One day, I was idly sitting at my desk working when the nail came off. Grossly enticed by the shed fingernail, I looked at the nail bed and saw there was another nail underneath it. It still hurt a little bit and bled a few drops. I threw the broken nail in the trash and went on with my day.

When I woke up the next morning, my arm was hurting. It felt like my muscle was tight and ridged under the skin, and as I moved it tightened more. When I rubbed it, some of the hair shed off my arm. I assumed I must have slept on it so it was sore, and the hair had just been growing in. The pain bugged me throughout the workday, but I had made it through worse before my treatment. I eventually got to sleep despite the pressure.

I opened my eyes and the first thing I felt was tightness in my entire back, like the layer of muscle below my skin was pulled across my skeleton. A lot of the hair on my legs was shedding, and I felt strange. I figured I must have a weird case of the flu that was making me really achy.  I let my sister know I was sick and went to bed.

My fingernails were all bleeding when I woke up. Sharp pain was coursing through them so that I could barely bend my fingers. It took me a while to text my sister. She was out of town for the weekend, and I felt fine enough internally, but I decided it would be good to see a doctor. 

In a lot of pain, I got up and put on a jacket. A sharp pain bit into my elbow. I recoiled and took it off, then found blood dripping from my elbow. I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. Patting it with gauze, I tried to find the cause of the pain.

There was something lodged in my arm. I felt around its circular edge and smeared away the blood. Finding its edge, I tried to pull on it, only for pain to shoot up my arm. I recoiled then grabbed the gauze and tried to clean the wound.

It was a fingernail. In the middle of my skin. 

I didn’t understand. I ran my finger around the edges again and again, smearing the blood. Eventually it dripped onto the floor. I bent down to wipe it up. A sharp poke stabbed my lower back. I stood up and saw my white T-shirt streaking with red. I took off the shirt and felt behind my back. Through the blood and skin, I could feel another fingernail. Or was there two?

As I twisted and turned to get a better view, more cuts opened and seeped blood. I grabbed a towel and tried to dry it.

My head spun. I reached up to rub my temple. A clump of hair peeled away as I ran my hand over my scalp. There was a nail under it.

I went back to the nail on my arm. My finger absent-mindedly traced its outline as I stared at the trails of blood down my body in the mirror. A flap of skin formed around it, and I picked at it to reveal another nail overlapping the first. I peeled the skin back more. More nails overlapping. Rows and rows in a crimson mire poking through my flesh, like red shields in a phalanx.

I stepped into the shower and started to peel. Layer after layer, my arms, my back, my scalp, my legs. Scales. All over my body.

I felt so weak by the time I had pulled the last shreds of skin from the top of my feet that I just collapsed onto the shower floor, bloody remnants of my old skin around me.

I awoke to knocking on the bathroom door. How long had I been asleep? I wasn’t bleeding or in pain anymore.

“Are you in there? Are you ok?” called my sister.

“Uh, yeah, just showering,” I said as I stared in the mirror at the new facade of my skin - or scales. I showered quickly, admiring how nickels the scales deflected the water, and how they shone when clean. 

I put on some pants and looked in the mirror again. My fingers traced the outline of each scale on my arms, feeling their beautifully uniform outlines. There was no pain when I tapped on them. It was truly remarkable. 

I opened the door to my bathroom and considered putting on a shirt, but decided against it. I wanted my sister to see.

She was sitting at the kitchen table, sketching something with pencil while absentmindedly commenting “Did you fall asleep in the tub?” Then she looked up.

Her scream died into worried cursing under her breath. She prayed and whimpered and asked what the hell had happened. Eventually she fell silent.

“It doesn’t hurt,” I said. “Don’t worry. I like it.”

“What do you mean?”

“It doesn’t hurt.”

“We need to get you to a hospital.”

“No you’re not listening!” I said, stepping closer to her. “It doesn’t hurt.”

She inched back. “No, you need help.”

“I like this new skin. I can’t feel pain anywhere.”

“That’s not good!”

“How would you know? You didn’t have to suffer through it for twenty-nine years!”

“What do you mean? All these trips, all the birthdays you ruined, all the opportunities I’ve given up because I wanted a big brother! That’s not pain too?”

“You don’t get it! You didn’t have a volcano erupt on your skin every day!”

“I had to live with it, though!”

“You don’t get it. You never could.”

“I - I…” The light in her eyes faded.

“I’m finally free of the pain and all you can think about is yourself.”

“That’s not true,” she said, tears running down her cheeks.

“Get out,” I said.

“What?” She looked surprised.

“Get out. If you don’t like it, then I don’t ever want to see you again.”

“What?”

“LEAVE!”

She burst into sobs as she grabbed her bag and bolted out the door.

I looked at what she was drawing. It was a picture of a pangolin with some balloons. On the back it said “Happy Birthday” in nice bold letters.

That’s right, I thought. I forgot it was my birthday.

“Well happy birthday to me,” I said with a smile. I give myself such nice gifts.

Imagine having a white hot needle shoved into your skin just below the surface. The desire to rip it out would be irresistible, right? Now multiply that to random spots at random moments over your whole body. It’s like spontaneous volcanic injections right beneath the epidermis, aching to tear you apart.

This is what it feels like to have my skin condition. It doesn’t really have a proper medical name, considering it’s just very sensitive skin. I call it “my condition”. It’s like hell opens its gates randomly to give me a peak at what’s inside. It inevitably leads to fits of itching, even to the point of drawing blood. Anything can set off an attack: someone touching me, dust in the air, bumping a table, a change in temperature or humidity, a slight breeze, or doing nothing at all.

It’s sudden, it’s vicious, and it has made me reconsider living more than once.

Medicine had failed me by the time I was in high school. I had tried every therapy, ointment, and treatment under the sun. My parents relocated to a more temperate climate, where the cold didn’t bite and the sun didn’t burn, but the outside world of the Pacific Northwest was still hostile. Soothing rain made a mockery of the desert that was my skin. I lived inside when I could, getting lost in virtual worlds with characters who didn’t feel pain like I did.

My parents had been so busy with my condition growing up that they only got around to having my sister nine years after me. They were relieved that she came out normally after the inconvenience that I was.

My younger sister was the only person who liked the move. Somehow, she decided she could be happy even after leaving her school and friends for a city where she knew no one. My parents transitioned to homeschooling us at this point. She liked it. I watched her draw at the kitchen table as I languished in pain between math and science. She drew rain clouds with smiley faces and a sun in every picture casting a rainbow across the sky. I didn’t get it. There was no hope in the sun or the rain. There was only hell on the surface of my skin.

I started traveling more as my parents searched for better specialists and treatments. Every trip weakened my resolve. The terrible cold of Minneapolis, the unbearable heat of Phoenix, the biting wind of Chicago. I hated it. But I hated the thought that death was better.

It was my seventeenth birthday when I had a rather terrible and aggressive attack in the middle of the night that left me howling in pain and tearing at my own skin til I bled. In my hatred of life, I locked the door to my room. My parents attempted to coax me out, promising cake and food and money and video games. I didn’t open the door all day.

Around three in the afternoon, as I laid in my bloodied sheets, I heard a small slit and watched a piece of paper slide under the door. On a piece of white paper, in the hand of an eight year old girl, was a picture of some creature hanging from a branch by its tongue, arms and legs outstretched. Above it were the words “Hang in there!”

I discarded it in my wire trash can and went back to laying on my bed. I tried to go to sleep and decided to skip my birthday this year. But that stupid looking animal hanging by its tongue wouldn’t get out of my head. The proportions were so wrong; it looked so dumb. Why did it have those beady little eyes? Why did it have those stupid fat arms? What even was it?

I sprang from my bed and fished the paper out of the trash can, half crumpling it in a fist. I threw open the door to my room and stomped down the hallway. My mom and dad looked up with delighted surprise. “Happy birthday!” my mom said, then saw my face and fell silent. I marched past her to the dining room table where my sister sat, coloring.

I slammed the paper down on the table, edges now crinkled and torn, and yelled, “What is this shit?”

Her surprised face turned to look, and her lip started to quiver. She didn’t answer. I picked up the paper, holding it in both hands, and with the most biting tone I could muster, I continued. “I mean, what is this shit? Its stupid looking face and its fat arms and its-”

I stopped. By chance holding it up to the light of the dining room, I saw there was ink on the other side. I flipped it around to see in bold rainbow letters “Happy Birthday.” The tears welled in my sister's eyes, and her voice tried to break a whisper as she croaked a reply. 

“An anteater.”

She began to sob. The beady little eyes of that anteater looked at me and I realized I needed to get help.

That day was a turning point for my family. I realized how much I was hurting them. Going to therapy revealed to me the consequences of my actions. I was able to forgive my parents and sister for not always helping the best with the pain, and they were able to forgive me for being so insufferable all the time.

Better than that, though, I started to spend time with my sister. She became my number one confidant. I managed to go to college online, with my sister helping me get through itching attacks in the middle of tests. It took me a while to graduate, but by that time I had a remote job and my own place. My sister was just learning how to drive, and so she helped me get out and go places. She even set up an online dating profile for me and helped me go on some dates. They didn’t go anywhere, but I was pretty content with my life as it was.

My parents had been in their mid-forties by the time they had my sister, so they were retiring when she went off to college. With that came a huge challenge of managing all of my own healthcare. I was still going to weekly doctor’s visits and therapy and pain management and had prescriptions for everything. Even as my sister went to college, she still helped. She called me weekly to see how I was doing, sharing about her adventures studying art and traveling. It barely seemed like she did school.

I wasn’t jealous. I liked being home and working at my desk and ordering delivery without having to leave a climate controlled apartment. 

One day, I was just sitting at my desk working when I got a message from my sister.

“Hey I’m in Japan right now. I just went to these hot springs up in the mountains that were so amazing. I talked to one of the locals, and she said that people travel from all over the island to bathe here. People with some skin diseases actually get cured, they say, by the river spirits, but I’m sure it’s something with the water. We should talk more about this tonight! I think it could be something that could help you. 

She included a photo of some beautiful pools surrounded by zen gardens and volcanic black rock. As my skin crawled thinking about the sensation of hot water flowing over my body, I felt what I think was zen. Something welled up inside me I don’t think I had felt before: hope.

Before I knew it, I was scheduling a flight to Japan, trying not to scream when a TSA agent patted me down, and holding my breath as an uncomfortable seat rubbed my back raw. Then I was hiking a mountain in horrid humidity, my feet bleeding as they blistered and swelled. Several of my toenails fell off. But finally, I was there. 

I bathed in the pool for a week. Under the water, my skin felt like new. I emerged from the springs full of life. I felt like I could climb the next mountain over. 

That feeling didn’t last long. The itching returned eight hours into the twenty two hour plane ride back. I was bleeding from my scalp a week later, as if the demon on my skin was tormenting me more now that I found a cure.

My sister didn’t give up. She had seen me alive and well in Japan and was committed to dragging me along with her. I bathed in hot springs in Iceland. I went to saunas in Denmark. I swam in the healing pools of Jerusalem. I tried eucalyptus balms in Australia and exotic teas in China.

Each one offered relief, but it faded after a few weeks or months. I was worn out from the travel, from the treks up mountains and the wind biting and the cold battering me. I went through thousands of rolls of gauze. But we were close. My sister didn’t give up. I could never thank her enough for that. For all the sacrifices she made.

It was for our eighth trip that she recommended we go on a safari. Now a hot day in Africa sounded like the premium version of hell to me, but she told me about a conservation group she had heard about from an environmentalist friend that was doing experimental research into animal cures. They sounded like legitimate leaders in stem cell treatment, specializing in treatments from natural sources on the African continent. Apparently several celebrities had gone there, and the company shipped a few treatments to Asia and Europe. 

We flew into Kenya and after terrible sweaty hours kicking up dust in an open top Jeep, we arrived at a private preserve out in the savanna. There was a compound with many air conditioned buildings, a welcome relief to the red hot needles erupting under my skin.

The sun was setting over the great flat plains in a scene more brilliant than any painting. I watched two giraffes feed from an Acacia tree, and a herd of zebras trotted by. It was like something out of a nature documentary. 

I spent the next few days being analyzed, poked and prodded by doctors and scientists. They took scrapings of my skin, leaving me scabbed and raw. I signed forms with words I didn’t know anything about, but the treatment was being provided free of charge, given that it was experimental.

One afternoon, a doctor invited me on a walk to explain the treatment. When I asked where we were going, she said “to meet your donor.”

We passed huge enclosures of rhinos, a pond with hippos and alligators, and a reptile house with snakes. 

“We are leading research into animal to human stem cell transplants. We take the cells of the animals from parts of their bodies like skin and modify it to match your genome specifically. There is a slight chance that your body rejects the transplant, but it results only in sickness for a few weeks until your body is rid of the cells. But otherwise, our treatments have great success,” she said.

“So I’ve heard,” I said. “So am I getting Hippo cells or something?”

“You’ll see. Here we are. Time to meet your donor.” 

The enclosure we walked up to house a few termite mounds and little else. There didn’t appear to be any animals even in it. She opened the gate with a key card and beckoned me to follow. 

We walked to the back of the enclosure in the shade. There was a small burrow and at its mouth sat a strange round lump that looked like a spiky rock. 

“Say hello!” said the doctor, bending down to poke the rock.

“What is it?” I asked.

“This is a pangolin. They are like anteaters with scales. When they are threatened, they curl into a ball and predators leave them alone. Do you want to pet it?”

“Um, sure.”

She stroked the scales lightly until the little creature unfurled itself. It was about the size of my arm. The deep brown scales ran down from its head to its tail. It looked at me with its beady little eyes, uncertain but calm. It shambled about on short stubby legs. It was funny. This little guy held the secret to curing my condition.

My procedure date was set. All my tests had come back clean, and it took them three days to collect, sequence, and analyze the stem cells. Before I knew it, I was dressed in a hospital gown, being wheeled to an operating room and laid on a cool steel table. 

The doctors unveiled a table full of prefilled syringes. Each one held a dose of stem cells that would save my skin. Those needles looked big. Hopefully, they would be the last painful needles I would ever feel.

They had to strap me down. I screamed as the injection sites all over my body stung with disinfectant before I bit down. The first needle hit my skin like a dagger. Heat coursed over my body. Each new injection was a new tidal wave of pain across my skin. I tore at the leather restraints in an attempt to grab, itch, claw away the skin. I felt like my skin was a flesh sack swelling up around my bones, like I would burst at the next needle. After a few injections, I must have passed out from the pain.

I awoke in a hospital room looking out over the gorgeous savannah. As I blinked away the sleep from my eyes, I saw my sister drawing. She looked up and saw I was awake. She took my hand.

“Good morning,” she said with a smile. “How are you?”

Tears streamed down my face. Despite the sting of the injection sites and the soreness of my muscles, her hand didn’t sting my skin. It didn’t itch. For the first time, it didn’t hurt.

They kept me for a few days and monitored for side effects. They didn’t find any. By the time we left, I felt like a new person.

I couldn’t stop running my fingers over my skin. It was soft and smooth like a baby’s.

The only things that hurt was my finger where they had clamped the EKG monitor for my vitals. Honestly, it was a relief that the pain was predictable. Every sensation after that was a blast. I wanted to shake everyone’s hand. I wanted to hug the TSA guy. I put my hands out the window into the cold Seattle air and felt the rain on my skin. I went outside and just sat on a bench in shorts, feeling the wind caress my legs, arms, and face. The world was beautiful for the first time ever.

It was strange then that only the pain of my finger persisted. After a few weeks, it was worse. My fingernail was bruised, turning black and blue.

One day, I was idly sitting at my desk working when the nail came off. Grossly enticed by the shed fingernail, I looked at the nail bed and saw there was another nail underneath it. It still hurt a little bit and bled a few drops. I threw the broken nail in the trash and went on with my day.

When I woke up the next morning, my arm was hurting. It felt like my muscle was tight and ridged under the skin, and as I moved it tightened more. When I rubbed it, some of the hair shed off my arm. I assumed I must have slept on it so it was sore, and the hair had just been growing in. The pain bugged me throughout the workday, but I had made it through worse before my treatment. I eventually got to sleep despite the pressure.

I opened my eyes and the first thing I felt was tightness in my entire back, like the layer of muscle below my skin was pulled across my skeleton. A lot of the hair on my legs was shedding, and I felt strange. I figured I must have a weird case of the flu that was making me really achy.  I let my sister know I was sick and went to bed.

My fingernails were all bleeding when I woke up. Sharp pain was coursing through them so that I could barely bend my fingers. It took me a while to text my sister. She was out of town for the weekend, and I felt fine enough internally, but I decided it would be good to see a doctor. 

In a lot of pain, I got up and put on a jacket. A sharp pain bit into my elbow. I recoiled and took it off, then found blood dripping from my elbow. I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. Patting it with gauze, I tried to find the cause of the pain.

There was something lodged in my arm. I felt around its circular edge and smeared away the blood. Finding its edge, I tried to pull on it, only for pain to shoot up my arm. I recoiled then grabbed the gauze and tried to clean the wound.

It was a fingernail. In the middle of my skin. 

I didn’t understand. I ran my finger around the edges again and again, smearing the blood. Eventually it dripped onto the floor. I bent down to wipe it up. A sharp poke stabbed my lower back. I stood up and saw my white T-shirt streaking with red. I took off the shirt and felt behind my back. Through the blood and skin, I could feel another fingernail. Or was there two?

As I twisted and turned to get a better view, more cuts opened and seeped blood. I grabbed a towel and tried to dry it.

My head spun. I reached up to rub my temple. A clump of hair peeled away as I ran my hand over my scalp. There was a nail under it.

I went back to the nail on my arm. My finger absent-mindedly traced its outline as I stared at the trails of blood down my body in the mirror. A flap of skin formed around it, and I picked at it to reveal another nail overlapping the first. I peeled the skin back more. More nails overlapping. Rows and rows in a crimson mire poking through my flesh, like red shields in a phalanx.

I stepped into the shower and started to peel. Layer after layer, my arms, my back, my scalp, my legs. Scales. All over my body.

I felt so weak by the time I had pulled the last shreds of skin from the top of my feet that I just collapsed onto the shower floor, bloody remnants of my old skin around me.

I awoke to knocking on the bathroom door. How long had I been asleep? I wasn’t bleeding or in pain anymore.

“Are you in there? Are you ok?” called my sister.

“Uh, yeah, just showering,” I said as I stared in the mirror at the new facade of my skin - or scales. I showered quickly, admiring how nickels the scales deflected the water, and how they shone when clean. 

I put on some pants and looked in the mirror again. My fingers traced the outline of each scale on my arms, feeling their beautifully uniform outlines. There was no pain when I tapped on them. It was truly remarkable. 

I opened the door to my bathroom and considered putting on a shirt, but decided against it. I wanted my sister to see.

She was sitting at the kitchen table, sketching something with pencil while absentmindedly commenting “Did you fall asleep in the tub?” Then she looked up.

Her scream died into worried cursing under her breath. She prayed and whimpered and asked what the hell had happened. Eventually she fell silent.

“It doesn’t hurt,” I said. “Don’t worry. I like it.”

“What do you mean?”

“It doesn’t hurt.”

“We need to get you to a hospital.”

“No you’re not listening!” I said, stepping closer to her. “It doesn’t hurt.”

She inched back. “No, you need help.”

“I like this new skin. I can’t feel pain anywhere.”

“That’s not good!”

“How would you know? You didn’t have to suffer through it for twenty-nine years!”

“What do you mean? All these trips, all the birthdays you ruined, all the opportunities I’ve given up because I wanted a big brother! That’s not pain too?”

“You don’t get it! You didn’t have a volcano erupt on your skin every day!”

“I had to live with it, though!”

“You don’t get it. You never could.”

“I - I…” The light in her eyes faded.

“I’m finally free of the pain and all you can think about is yourself.”

“That’s not true,” she said, tears running down her cheeks.

“Get out,” I said.

“What?” She looked surprised.

“Get out. If you don’t like it, then I don’t ever want to see you again.”

“What?”

“LEAVE!”

She burst into sobs as she grabbed her bag and bolted out the door.

I looked at what she was drawing. It was a picture of a pangolin with some balloons. On the back it said “Happy Birthday” in nice bold letters.

That’s right, I thought. I forgot it was my birthday.

“Well happy birthday to me,” I said with a smile. I give myself such nice gifts.