Hey peeps! Isn't that great news in the headline? You're telling me!
Do me a favor and take a very wide berth around the paper wasp nest and I'll fill you in...
Ok. Now that we are safely away from those evil bastards, let me take a deep breath (because thankfully I CAN take a deep breath) and explain what's going on here.
This past Monday I took half the day off work so I could do some stuff with my kids. Austin ISD uses Columbus Day as a teacher conference day, so they were off and it was about haircuts and new shoes and sleeping late, all the good stuff, right? So we eat breakfast and we're getting ready to head out. I take the garbage out barefoot...
... and I step on this unfortunate creature.
I'm sure many of you have been stung by wasps, probably on the sole of your foot, too, and I'm sure many of you have been stung many many times in your lives.
This is the second time I've been stung by any bee in my life. The first time it almost killed me.
Now, surely peregrine kate would say something like "Leave it to you, Bastrop, to finagle escape from dramatic injury" but I'm here to tell you as I write this diary on my eyephone, I haven't been that scared in I do not know how long. Because the last time I got stung I was four years old and went into anaphylactic shock. I almost didn't make it.
I might have written about this here before, I know I've mentioned it in comments , but I can't do that kind of search and formatting from this junker phone. The short version is I was on the old tractor, "driving" it around, and refused to give a turn to my friend. The bald faced hornets on the bottom of that old seat didn't appreciate the commotion and so they told me, repeatedly, in the only way possible. My mom was on the phone inside and when I tried to tell her I'd been stung, she shooed me away like parents sometimes do. I went back out to play.
I have very clear memories of this incident and can still see in my mind the events unfold, right up until losing consciousness in the car in the way to the ER. I can see me going back inside unable to breathe but not understanding why my mother's face grew pale as she put down the phone. Or why I couldnt talk. I have no memory of how I looked as I never saw myself in a mirror or reflection, but I know my face and neck were swollen with hives and that my skin was turning the early shades of hypoxic steely blue.
My mother set me on the back seat of whatever 60's or early 70's sedan she drove at the time and set out fast along the back roads of rural Massachusetts for the nearest emergency department several towns away. I know she was driving fast not just by my body pressing into the seat against the curves, or the speed of the dappled sunlight filtering through the maple canopy overhead, but because she was pulled over by a townie cop for recklessly owning the road.
The cop, once aware of what was happening, told her to follow since he wasnt allowed to transport medical emergency and there was no time to call an ambulance. And I can still hear his siren in my mind as we drove faster still through the twist and grades of that rockwall landscape, the shadows and stippled light of the canopy my only anchor in reality. I always watched the lightplay as we drove, the way it rose and pushed across vinyl seats and rise into the window and back out into the air. Shadows were my friends when we travelled and on this day they kept my attention. When they started to fade and change color I struvgked harder to keep focus. They were making me sleepy. I was closing my eyes to them.
And then WOOOSH! I was awake in a sterile place with men and women in white coats and hats and the Doctor was telling me I'm a lucky boy! I can have all the sherbet I wanted as long as I took my benedryl. That probably wasn't the first time I'd heard the word benedryl but it was the first time I rember hearing it, a word I would come to knw very, very well.
Benedryl was part of my action plan for surviving another bee sting, an likely and frightening scenario living on an old farm where hornets and wasps, the culprits in my allergy, flourished in every eave and under every split of firewood that wintered on the ground. So was Medic Alert bracelet and Allergist. It was that last one that became the most familiar and resigned word of my vocabulary.
At first I visited the allergist weekly then bi-weekly for years. Two shots, one I each arm, then a 30 min wait for reaction. The reactions varied from big welts to less big welts and each time I watched my arm inflate I became a little more frustrated and eventually resigned. Walking the stone wall picking up cigarette packs for their designs as I waited, I'd daydream about the eventual immunity the doctor was confident Id develop. And he was right. 11 years later (you do the math on the shots) I was declared free of allergy wasp/vespid. I hadnt been stung in the interim years and until Monday, despite the odds, nor was I stung thereafter.
So when Monday happened I was very surprised. The sting itself burned and was uncomfortable but no where near how I expected a sting would feel. The fear, however, was somethig else. It's been a while since I had that level of fight/flight response, yet all my years of prep paid off.
I had no idea what would happen. Would in go severe full on reaction? Would it be nothing at all as I'm blessed with immunity? As I sat quietly with my Epi pens, ready as they always have been for just such an emergency, I watched the venom migrate across the arch of my foot and over into my leg near the ankle. In time I felt my body responding, my scalp became itchy and I was close to sending home that needle I to my thigh and calling 911. Somethig told me though that it wouldn't be that bad, and perhaps foolishly I waited. Two hour benchmark came and went with only a bad headache, an itchy scalp and a general feeling of malaise set in. The itching and the headache went away. Malaise lasted over a day. Yet another escape from the jaws of fate.
Not to bee all dramatic and stuff.
Hope y'all had a great week.
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