Week 13: Now with more bees!

12 weeks.

So I woke up this morning in a really bizarre way – my hand stung like Hell, and I wondered if I’d smacked it against something. Nope, stung when I moved my thumb around too. I have to admit that my main reason for hoping I’d smacked it was that I could immediately go back to sleep as opposed to having to get up and check it out.

It was 5:15 in the morning, and I was tired.

I felt around on my hand to see if there was the telltale lump of a spider bite, but unfortunately, I have a big scar on my right hand right where the stinging was, and that was bumpy, so I had to get up. You know, and turn on the bathroom light. At 5:15 am, light sucks.

Sure enough, there was a white bump with red swelling coming around it. I was sort of confused, though… spider bites tend to have two entry punctures, and I could only see one on this. Weird things went through my head, since it was, you know, 5 in the morning – for example, the bubonic plague is present in Denver right now. Maybe it was an evil giant plague-transmitting flea!! (I’m really allergic to flea bites…) Or, hrm… no, I was still pretty stuck on the spider idea. My hand didn’t hurt much anymore, but I started to worry – I’m allergic to an array of bites and stings, and while I’ll usually take Benadryl if I get bitten, I didn’t really want to impose unnecessary drugs on the Small Monster.

So I went back into the bedroom to see if whatever bit/stung me was still around. It was too dark in the bedroom to see, but there was something twitching about 4 inches below my pillow. So I *ahem* bravely got a paper towel, squished the thing for good measure (I admit it – I’ve been seriously afraid of insects ever since I lived in New Orleans), and took it into the bathroom for a better look. It looked like a spider in the dark, but when I could see it in the light, it was…

A bee. A freaking bee stung me inside my house while I was sleeping. I mean, who gets stung by a bee in their sleep??

Now, it had been maybe 20 minutes by then, and while I desperately wanted to go back to sleep, I didn’t, because of something that happened, oh, 15 years ago…

Back then, my trusty roomie and bestest buddy Bridget and I would often take road trips from our evil New Orleans dorm up to our homelands in the upper Midwest. We would hop in to the Sheepmobile (my barely-running`77 Honda Civic which was so named because it was small, white and noisy, and had scary faux-sheepskin seat covers installed by my grandfather) – also known as the Meepmobile for its silly horn – and scoot along up the Mississippi toward Illinois singing Simon and Garfunkel songs with my ancient boombox (which was taped to the dashboard with packing tape – very classy). We were insane for driving that car across town, let alone across the country. The 19-hour drive home for me was bad enough in a regular car, but I’m amazed Bridget and I aren’t still living out our lives at a truck stop in Marston, Missouri, trying to pay our way back home after some car-related catastrophe.

Anyway, enough reminiscing about the Sheepmobile. On one trip home, it was late afternoon, and we were driving across southern Illinois. Now, keep in mind, this car was so advanced that it had 4 speeds and no air conditioning. Since it was hot out, we had the windows open, and me, stupid me, had my arm on the door frame where the window was rolled down. When something smacked my arm hard, I think at first I thought it was a rock. Anything that hits you while you’re going 75 pretty much feels like a rock (don’t ask how we did 75 in a ancient 4-speed… all I’ll say was that it was noisy). I’m not sure if I’d figured out it was a wasp before or after we pulled over – all I know is that by the time I did pull over, not only did I have a big red welt on my arm, but several on my stomach where the wasp had stung me several times. I flung the evil wasp off my shirt onto the floor and stepped on it. It still squirmed. The bastard did not want to die.

Sometime not long thereafter, I started having a little trouble breathing, so we drove on looking for a hospital, finding one in Mount Vernon. I really don’t remember what happened, but I did drive us home, and I remember taking a lot of Benadryl once I got up to Milwaukee.

So anyway, I’ve had a bad reaction to wasps before (and actually, now that I think about it, I had had another reaction, though not so bad, to a bee or wasp that stung me when we were driving through Denver when I was a kid – stupid open car windows), and usually once you’ve had one, they give you an Epi-pen so that you can treat yourself immediately if you get stung so that you don’t, for example, die of anaphylactic shock. I’m not sure if I never asked my doctor about it because I wasn’t really insured, or because I was stupid, or what, but anyhow, I haven’t thought about it in a long time.

I did, however, think about it when I saw that bee this morning. Crap, I thought. Do I call the doctor now? Am I supposed to go to the hospital just in case? Maybe I’ll just wait and call 911 if it gets bad. After about 20 minutes of debating this, I called the after-hours nurse hotline. Her first reaction was “You got stung in your sleep??“, which was pretty much my reaction when I saw the bee, and after we’d established that I’d probably have swollen up like the Michelin Man earlier if I was truly going to have a bad reaction, she told me to take 50 mg of Benadryl (which is, apparently, ok for me to take now – yay! Not that I’m going to dose myself with it regularly, but when my allergies go totally haywire, it’s an option) , and watch things for the next 2 hours, making sure someone was around to watch me. I was just happy to know that there was something I could do that wasn’t pregnancy-unfriendly to try to mitigate evil reactions.

I know this is stupid, but I didn’t want to wake my husband to watch me. It was 5:45 am, and he was so cute, lying there, deep in his dreams. So I stayed awake. For 2 hours. Which about killed me, because I was tired.

Anyhow, you can barely see the sting now, so all is fine, but it was one freaky morning. And I don’t have to worry about some horrid systemic reaction that might have affected the baby. That was what I was most worried about (well, after death, that is…).

But damnit, bees… stay out of my bed!