It must be a universal truth that every year that I am in China, I will get some sort of random health problem. The first year I was here, I got devil eyes. Last year, I got spots. Now I have mouth sores, inside and out! From whence did they come? I don’t know, but my mouth has been one big canker sore since last weekend. Or multiple tiny ones lining my oral cavity. And now I can feel the tingling of cold sores (yes, I know they’re herpes! I have herpes, OK?!?) on my lips.

Thankfully, I’ve been extremely fortunate that none of my health problems have been serious. I hope this current problem isn’t, either. Sometimes I just blame China for being a dirty, dirty country because it’s so hard to figure out the trigger for these sudden onsets of infections or whatever they are (except for the spots, which I eventually figured out were amoxicillin-related). But of course, it’s silly to attribute to China the things that happen to me here that never happened at home. So I won’t. Even though I want to.