My niece, Ashlyn, came over this morning to play with our kitten (Remember the dentist's niece in Finding Nemo? Yeah, like that, but my niece is way cute.).
To give the kitten a break, I got Ashlyn to help me wash my dog Gracie. When we were done, Ashlyn offered to dry Gracie for me. I grabbed a beach towel that was draped over a patio chair, and, since I was half-soaked from the bathing, I decided to wipe myself down first. Swiping the towel across my face, I heard and felt a mad fluttering of insect wings and glimpsed a brownish-red blur dart off into the sky in the same instant that a stabbing pain jolted my forehead at my hairline. This all happened quicker than it took my reflexes to bring my hand up to shoo away the already-departed pest, and it took another split-second for me to put it all together and realize that I'd just been stung by a wasp that had been hiding in the beach towel.
A fucking wasp!
Fucking OW, goddammit! Shit! Fuck! Ow! Dammit! Fuck! I kept shouting as I hopped around madly, rushed to open the patio door, and ran through the kitchen to the sink as the firey pain radiated across my forehead.
I knew next to nothing about insect stings. I'd been stung only one other time, on my leg, by a little sweat bee at summer camp when I was about twelve years old. I remembered the godawful burning, but I couldn't remember what the camp nurse did to treat it.
In my mad dash to the kitchen sink, I tried to think what I could most immediately do both to alleviate the pain and to minimize whatever reaction I might have to the sting, though I didn't think I was allergic. I didn't know if wasps leave their stingers behind. It occurred to me to use a baking soda paste to try to draw out any poison and the stinger, if there was one. I grabbed a small bowl and the box of baking soda out of the cabinets, dumped some soda and a little water in the bowl, mushed it up with my fingers, and began smearing the stuff on my forehead. Once I got a good layer pasted over the area of the sting, I finally took a breath and calmed down a fraction of a degree.
Then I noticed little Ashlyn standing just inside the patio door, staring at me silently in wide-eyed semi-frightened wonderment. No more than two minutes had passed, but my frantic jumping and string of expletives had continued nonstop since I'd first dropped the towel, and she had no idea what was wrong with me. I grunted that a wasp stung me, goddammit. I'm afraid I wasn't able to withhold the expletives quite yet, the pain was still so acute, plus I was just plain pissed about being stung. Ashlyn's face showed immediate relief, however, to know that Aunt Kristin's crazy-hopping-and-cursing-show had nothing to do with her. Since she wasn't in trouble, she left me to my misery and went back outside to dry off Gracie, carefully shaking the towel out first. Smart girl.
With the searing pain so intense I could barely see straight, I managed to text my brother, asking him to come pick up his kid. I then went to my laptop and looked online for advice on treating wasp stings. Scrape the stinger out with a butter knife. Ice it for ten to fifteen minutes. Apply topical antihistamine and pain reliever. Take oral antihistamines and pain relievers. And - aha! - there, at the bottom of the list, almost as a side note, the author added that some people suggest applying a baking soda paste, but there was no scientific evidence that it worked. I didn't care! At least it was on the list.
After the paste dried, I washed it off and began trying the other suggested remedies. My doctor-brother took a look at the sting when he arrived, but by then my forehead was too swollen to tell if the stinger was in there. I didn't think it was. Over the next half-hour, the sharp burning pain subsided to hot pulsating agony.
Though my brother said it was unnecessary if I wasn't allergic, I had already taken Benadryl and knew it would make me a little drowsy. I decided to spend the next couple of hours on the couch, watching t.v. shows on Netflix and feeling sorry for myself.
After about an hour, I wasn't drowsy enough to doze off, but I did want a snack. I went to the pantry, took out an almost-empty bag of mini pretzel twists, and headed back to the couch. I almost never eat pretzels, but we didn't have much else to snack on.
Only half-paying attention to the television screen, I examined the little pretzel I was eating and, in my pain-and-drug-induced daze, remembered a trick I'd done with pretzels as a kid. I wondered if I still had that special talent. Though I had only a few extra pretzels for do-overs if I messed up, after about five minutes of careful nibbling, I managed to accomplish my goal, with one full pretzel to spare:
