Alexander's

The other day, after a restful night, I noticed a quite painful, big scarlet—red mark on my leg. My first thought was that this had to be a some kind of strange bruise.

Even though I could not remember hurting myself or hitting something, it was not that improbable. After all my girlfriend likes to torture me in my sleep.

At noon I still had no good explanation.

I could only be sure of one thing: this was not a normal bruise!

So I did what every good physicist would do, marked the outline to see if it was getting bigger, noted the time of the measurement and continued with my day.

By nightfall the blotch had turned into a deep shade of Harvard crimson. It was hot and quite painful. Slightly worried I turned to my parents for help:

This has to be a spider sting! I can even see the two bite marks!
What bite marks?
The two round shapes — what else.
Those are the two zeros from 13:00!

Next time I’ll make sure he wears his glasses when inspecting my lesions!

But the fact remained that unless there was a giant spider^[1] in my room something was really wrong with my leg.

The next morning I went straight to the hospital.

This is a “necrotic soft tissue infection”^[2] But it’s very rare — especially amongst young people like yourself.

So basically I contracted a very rare disease, only a few days after being tortured?

I’m not sure how coincidental these things really are. After all I still didn’t tell her my password.