There is a First Time for Everything (Although I hope in this case it is an only time)

So this weekend has been a weekend of firsts…here’s the list:

• First time having April 6th off of work because of a holiday (I had originally planned on doing laundry & cleaning my kitchen/bathroom).
• First time getting stung by a scorpion.
• First time having to call Dr. Rit (the Peace Corps doctor here in Thailand).
• First time having to spend the entire day on my stomach with a bottle of cold water pressed to the back of my thigh because I don’t have any ice (I finally smartened up and put a water bottle in the freezer so I had bottles of ice).
• First time I spent the rest of the weekend tearing apart my kitchen trying to find the scorpion so that I could kill it (no luck on that end but as soon as I find the bastard he is dead!)
• First time I can honestly say that I would rather have spent the day doing laundry and/or cleaning the kitchen/bathroom.

Here’s what happened:

I was going to spend the day doing laundry and then try to get to cleaning my kitchen & bathroom, but I wasn’t sure if I would have time as I had a few weeks worth of laundry and it takes about two hours to hand wash one load. Anyway, I went to the bathroom and I figure that is when the scorpion crawled up my pant leg (I was wearing a pair of gauchos which have very baggy legs). I was walking through the kitchen when I felt a very sharp stinging (think 100 times worse than a bee sting). I looked down but didn’t see anything so I shook out my pant leg and out falls a scorpion.

I started to freak out (I think that you would too). I watched the scorpion run away, but I wasn’t even thinking about killing it because my leg hurt so badly and the panic had started to set in…I mean aren’t they poisonous?!? Am I going to have to get rushed to the hospital for antivenin shots during my second week at site?!? I grabbed the book “Where There Is No Doctor” that the Peace Corps had given us and looked up scorpion stings and it said that they are “rarely dangerous to adults.” Well, that didn’t really make me feel any better because what if this was one of the ones that was dangerous to adults?!? So I called Dr. Rit (which I felt bad about because it was a holiday) and he said to ice it & keep it cool and we would keep an eye on things to make sure I didn’t have an allergic reaction (Dr. Rit was wonderful and called a couple of hours later to see how I was doing).

Well, I don’t have any ice…I have one of those mini-fridges and it does not have any of those small little ice trays. So I got to spend the entire day in my bed, on my stomach, with a bottle of water resting on the back of my thigh (and if I took the bottle off for more than a couple of minutes, my leg would start hurting).

All in all, getting stung by a scorpion is a bit like getting stung by 20 bees in the same exact spot…not fun at all!!! You know that tingling you get when you leg falls asleep? Well it feels a bit like that but multiply by 20 and add in some sharp pain. But at least I can cross-off “get stung by a scorpion” to my list of “Things I never knew existed or wanted to do but ended up doing anyway” which seems to be getting longer and longer…