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The Sting

This afternoon, I was sitting in my office, strumming my guitar, and I felt like my shorts were riding up strangely. I couldn’t figure out what the problem was, so, like anybody, I grabbed at them to pull them back down. There was a slight, strange bulge. What I was feeling was not my shorts.

Then, I felt a prick.

I was touching a bee.

It stung me.

I immediately shrieked like a woman and ran across the house, shouting incoherently about a bee stinging me. It took me a few seconds to realize that pain was blasting through the middle finger of my right hand. A surprising amount of pain, all things considered. I’ve never had a bee sting before, and I had been given the impression that, yeah, they suck, but they don’t hurt all that much.

This impression was inaccurate.

I tried several bizarre home-remedy tricks to solving the bee sting crisis: baking soda mixed with water applied to the afflicted area, followed by allowing liquefied aspirin to absorb into the skin around the sting. Neither worked, so I iced it up for a good three hours or so. It still hurts, though not as badly. It’s mostly just annoying the piss out of me, and I have to type with one hand.

One good thing has come of this: I’ve always been afraid that I’m allergic to bee stings. I don’t really know, since I’ve never been stung, and one could argue that if I did get stung and was allergic, I would probably not be around to tell this story at the moment. So, I guess that’s good to know. I will add this to the very short list of things in nature that won’t make me die.

Posted by Stan on September 5, 2003 9:16 PM  | Permalink | Stories of Pain and Humiliation | Digg It