This post is more for Andee over in Chacala but I think it is interesting enough to share with all of you. She has written about scorpions lately and her fear of them. That reminded me of my first experience with a scorpion here on the island.
In 2000, we were still visiting as tourists and stayed at a little house by the beach. This place had a palapa roof. The ones made out of interlocking palm fronds. I woke up one morning and complained, er, mentioned, to B that my chest hurt. More accurately, my right pectoral muscle. I thought maybe I had slept on it funny or had overdone it the day before. You know, turned over too many times while lying in the sun all day!
As the day wore on, it got progressively worse. It felt like some champion boxer had punched me exactly in the pec. Then that same intense pain migrated to my underarm and my lymph nodes began to swell. B wanted me to go the doctor. Who? Me? No way. There was no blood, no damage, nothing. By early evening we could see 14 tiny pin prick like marks on my chest which had formed tiny scabs. Mmmmm. It looked like something may have bitten me. We were sitting at a restaurant which happened to be directly across from the doctors' office when the next symptom occurred. My entire right arm went numb and I could not feel it or move it. That scared me enough that I pranced myself across the street to the doctor.
He listened to my symptoms and examined the little scabby things. He then pronounced that I had been stung by a scorpion no less than 14 times! I probably rolled over onto it in my sleep and it just kept banging away until I moved off of it. Thankfully, he diagnosed that it was one of the lesser scorpions that cause a lot of pain but are not deadly! I had to get a very painful shot of antihistamine in my right butt cheek, take antihistamine pills and rub cortisone cream onto the scabs for two weeks.
When the scabs finally fell off they left 14 very visible little white scars. They show up really well when I am not tanned. To commemorate this event, I went back to Minnesota and promptly had a scorpion tattooed over the spot!
So Andee, chances are that even if you get stung, you won't die. But you will be miserable for awhile!
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5 comments:
yikes-i've been fortunate in that in all of my visits to mexico i have not seen any scorpions. i guess i've been lucky but i'm sure there will come a time when i too will see one. God willing, just like andee, i won't get bitten. so what hurt more, the bites or the tattoo?
enjoy your weather in paradise. our ellensburg winds have recently picked up again, but today is absolutely beautiful!
Most definately the scorpion. Getting a tattoo is a "good" pain!
What are Ellensburg winds???
hi wayne,
i just call it the ellensburg wind because it is a very windy town. we never realized how windy until we moved here last fall. it had been pretty calm for over a month, but last night it started howling again. we had about an hour of it this morning and now it's just breezy. we are about a half hour from the columbia gorge amphitheater. it's even worse over there. one morning we woke up to find our tent facing the wrong direction. we hadn't noticed when we got back from the concert the night before. as we stood around wondering how the tent had ended up in that position, some guys came over and told us it had blown away and they had set it up for us. another time we were camping in a 6 person tent and the little tent right next to us was about to blow away. we took it while it was still up and put it in our tent for safekeeping until its owners returned. still, i prefer the wind here to the rain in western wa. any day.
take care,
teresa
Hey, thanks for sharing. I have gotten four emails from people today who are coming to Chacala this winter and are now nervous about coming becaue of my post about my lovely pet scorpions.
I was just kidding. About being afraid of scorpions. I even have pet names for the ones I find. I call them "Dead", "Deader" and "crushed flat".
So I wrote another post today, trying to be straightforward and informative.
Which will probably scare more people. Oh well, we get too many scare-d-cat tourists here anyway.
Whatever.
Last time we were in Isla, I sideswiped something with my foot on my way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. On my way back I turned on the light to see what it was, it was a big black scorpion...it was much better looking once my husband stomped it with his sandal.
The time before when we were there, my husband saw something shiny moving on the rocks near our pool, it was dark out....he decided to pick it up to see what it was(hello dum dum!) and got stung on the tip of his thumb. I had some benadryl cream handy from a sun rash I had and some fresh aloevera as well. I put that on his thumb and wrapped it in ice. He said it felt like his thumb was being immersed in boiling oil. The extreme pain lasted for twenty minutes (good thing he had a few beer into him) and then it hurt for a few days. When he came in the house it lookied like someone put a smoke out on his thumb, after the twenty minutes it turned black like a blood blister and stayed on his thumb for two months. We thought it would be a pretty cool scar, but eventually it fell off. And that's my scorpion story...Sandra
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