tell me if you think this is possible or if you have any more information?

[Guest guest]

I want to contribute a pretty wild theory to the hopper - there is so much we don't know, I will just tell you what happened and see what you think:

After years of combing (lice style) every night and morning after treating my hair with TweetMint, a protease. "Prote-" for "protein" and "-ase," which identifies the word as the name of an enzyme. Enzymes are solvents. That is, they dissolve things. So a "prote-ase" dissolves protein. Protein is meaty, fleshy. But while the Tweetmint would stop the action of the critters I have, they would NOT kill them.

The only things that I had found that would kill them up till then were submersion in water for 24 hours, preferably with some substance that would reduce the likelihood of their escape, followed by 4 hours of intense heat in my clothes dryer, a heat I am unable to apply for more than a moment to my skin.

I tried to think what the critters could be made of. Especially, what could the beveled feeding tube / snorkel / hypodermic needle be made of? Often the samples treated repeatedly with TweetMint would look like they had been burned to a crisp. But they would still bite me, and that stylus would be like new - unaffected by any chemical I threw at it, even the TweetMint. It occurred to me that the horny exterior, which produces that grainy feel when the critters emerge from my skin, was not unlike seashells. I looked up seashells at wikipedia to see what they were made of.

Chitin.

I started looking for something that would break down the exoskeleton of my critters - that is, a "chitinase." Willow corrected my punctuation of the word "chitin" and said she used a garden soil treatment that claimed to be a chitinase. She worked with the man who made and sold the product and he loaned her the smallest unit he had for making the product, which has to be used within 3 days of "cooking" it. If I remember right, Willow had some success with the results (am I remembering right, Willow?). He soon developed a prototype for a smaller, personal size unit. It is still very clunky and set each of us back about $200, I think. The raw materials are pricey too, and we each got the minimum, a 6-pack. The device was very difficult to set up and use but I did it, and the first time I did it, I poured the resulting mixture, which was dark brown and looked like it was full of dirt, through a filter and into a gallon jug. The unit will make a

gallon and a half at a time after "cooking" the materials for 24 hours.

Before I go any farther, have any of you ever noticed the diamond grid pattern of healthy skin? When I got my first microscope, in the late 90's, my skin was all skin color. By the time I got this prototype, I had developed a tiny red dot at every corner of every diamond. Odd, right? Hold that thought.

Meanwhile I had begun seeking other chitinases as well. I found two substances that would dissolve my fiber critters: Simple Green and Orange Plus. The Garden Tea made three!

I got in the shower and bathed as usual, then rinsed really well to remove the detergents from my skin as much as possible. I knew the Garden Tea would be vulnerable to contamination and might not work, because I had to use distilled water to "cook" it. I took about a pint of the "Tea" into the shower with me. I turned the water down to a drizzle, just enough to keep the shower stall warm, and I poured the mixture through a developer bottle (with a pointed dispenser cap) all over me and waited. Or, should I say, I leaned against the wall of the shower stall and fell asleep. I awoke 20 minutes later - exactly the time we had somehow determined we needed to leave it on our skin.

I looked down to see what, if anything had happened, not really expecting anything. But all over my skin were these thin gelatinous flakes. They were about 1/32" thick and about 1/8" long and wide. They were not exactly square. And they were sort of floppy flexible. They were not rigid at all. And they were inert. They were NOT biting me. I washed them off and got out of the shower. I cannot remember if I saved samples. I could see them, and had seen one of them before. I had removed it from my skin - I forget now where. I had photographed it. It was rectangular, more so than these things that came out of me in the shower. It was also a little larger/longer. It was about the same thickness, about like cardstock. It looked like it was doing stomach crunches on the lint roller sheet where I had it trapped. It too was that beigey translucent material that any of you with much scope time would recognize as organic and alive, whether animal or

vegetable, I don't know. Embedded in the gelatin were tiny black curly-cues. It also had two round bumps on one side, near one end. I have no idea what they were. I still have no idea what that was. I'm going to tell you the rest and let you think about it, then I will pose a theory for you to consider.

The rest is that the next time I happened to look at my skin through a scope, I can't remember why I did it, but I was startled to realize that there were a lot less of the red dots. My skin looked more normal than it had in a long time.

Here are some thoughts:

ceiling tiles.

the grid they sit in.

gelatinous organic material

live? or not? don't know

same size as the diamonds on my skin

red dots significantly fewer after this

bee hives

honeycombs

honey

Here is the next concept in this story:

The day after these things emerged from my skin in the shower, I started getting lesions. Some of them began as bites just under the skin, causing a purpura? (hematoma, sort of) which is what we call a lesion. Some of them were irregularly patterned troughs whose width was the same from start to winding finish. They looked like a cutworm had gone to work on me rather than a plant in my garden. And then the bleeding would be on the surface as well as under the skin.

I occasionally had fallout lesions, but I had never had lesions like this. This was new for me. And I still have them, which is why I am using the olive leaf, which helps the surface ones for me but so far not the ones under the skin.

What if...

What if the gelatinous squares came through my skin because they were RELEASED by the chitinase? Suppose the chitinase dissolved something that was holding them in place? What if the red dots were the points at which a grid attached to the underside of my skin, and what if the grid was there to hold the gelatinous shapes in place? What if they were food? Crops? Created by, planted by - whatever - somehow made by the critters as a food source? And when it was gone, they had to start getting their food the old fashioned way - hunting rather than farming.

What do people do when they first settle in a new land?

They plant food.

kajay