As is so often the case, our summer hasn’t exactly been all good. We’ve had a few hiccups along the way.

First, Tracy had what seemed like a really bad case of the stomach flu at the beginning of July. After missing a week of work, she finally started to feel better. A few days after the symptoms had subsided, we read about how boxes of peaches and nectarines had been recalled from Trader Joe’s for carrying listeria. We’d had the exact nectarines a few days before Tracy got sick (and the peaches while she was already sick), and her symptoms matched up exactly. Even though the listeriosis is supposed to be most common among people with compromised immune symptoms, she’d fallen victim.

Speaking of bizarre medical problems, I started getting a weird rash on my legs and feet toward the end of June. After it didn’t go away for several weeks, I went to the dermatologist and she was sort of stymied. They took a biopsy and lots of blood work to see what was going on. When the biopsy came back, it showed vasculitis, so they guessed I had Rocky Mountain Spotted fever even though I’d never gotten a visible tick bite.

They took more blood and sent me to see my primary care doctor who told me it definitely wasn’t RMSF based on my second set of blood results. Instead, she was pretty sure this was a case of Henoch-Schönlein Purpura. Never heard of it? Me neither. In fact, I was the first person my doctor had ever seen with this bizarre illness. It affects kids 90% of the time and is very rare in adults, but it’s luckily usually harmless except for the rash and a bit of discomfort. After a course of steroids and plenty of elevating my legs, the rash is finally almost gone.

So there you have it. Two of us with weird health issues that totally confused the medical profession. I’m hoping that we are done with doctors for a while (*knock on wood*).