I’ve been getting a lot of emails from people lately. These emails generally fall into one of three categories. The first two have to do with jumping to conclusions. The third has to do with handling an ugly situation. I’ll cover each kind of email with its own blog post, starting with this one on bed bug bites.
I Might Have Bed Bug Bites
One type of email I get frequently is where somebody describes breaking down emotionally just at the thought that they might have bed bugs because they found some kind of bug bite on their body.
It’s easy to get a few marks on your body that might look like bed bug bites, do a web search on bed bugs, come to a site like this and end up convinced you have bed bugs. Even though you’re not a doctor and you’ve never personally seen a bed bug bite before.
In some ways this reminds me of a girl I used to know. Every time she got a sore throat or some other ache or pain she would race to the internet and convince herself she had some kind of horrific illness.
“See?! This is what I have!!” she would say, in a panic, after taking a few of her symptoms and matching them up with the worst possible disease in some medical database.
Despite the repeated episodes of panic, the worse she ever had was the flu.
We all do stuff like this from time to time. My point is that it’s easy to jump to a conclusion without having much information.
The thing to do then is to remember just how easy it is to jump to conclusions and instead hold off judgment until you have more information.
It’s good to read up on these things. It helps give you a direction for inquiry. It prepares you to ask good questions. That is how you use the information on a site like this. That is only the first step though. When you have a physical problem, you need to talk to your doctor instead of jumping to a firm conclusion and having a breakdown based on something you read on a website.