The Joy of Living in the Desert...

Thursday afternoon, I spied with my little eye a SCORPION. It was sitting high on the wall of my garage, just asking to be killed. Steve was home, so I told him to come do his husbandly duty. He pulled out the bug spray, drenched it, and called it good as dead.

And I believed him.

Friday hits, and no more scorpion. But I'm still leary, and make the kids avoid the garage and definitely wear shoes outside of the house.

Saturday rolls around, and no sign of him again. Later that night, I'm foolishly in the garage fishing for a box to pack some stuff in. For a split second, I consider dumping out the tissue paper that's sitting in this particular box into the garbage can next to it. But it's on overflow, so I opt not to.

Bad choice.

As soon as I stick my hand in to grab the tissue paper, bam. I have this incredible throbbing on the knuckle of my right pointer finger, and I just know that I've been stung by our very own scorpion.

I'm too freaked out to even check and make sure that it was, in fact, a scorpion, and instead run up to our bedroom and wake Steve up to help. Once back outside, however, we can't find anything. Steve does a little internet searching and discovers that all of my symptoms are indeed pointing to a scorpion bite (ie. horrible throbbing, numbness all the way up to my shoulder, thoughts of cutting my finger off). And the only way to treat it is to take Tylenol and ice the site of the sting.

So I take all the advice, and still feel horrendous. As Steve falls back asleep, I'm miserable watching him and wondering if the pain will ever subside. It gets to be unbearable and I decide to nix sleeping altogether. Instead, the dishes are getting washed, toys are being picked up, and I watch all 3 Matrix movies, which were terrible.

But all this distraction helped, and finally at 5 AM, I crashed to sleep.

48 hours later, all the pain and numbness has pretty much left the way it came, with a little still left at the site of the sting. Never in a million years would I wish this upon ANYBODY. Pain-wise, it was close to natural childbirth, minus the cute, loving baby! And I'm determined to rid our abode of every and all scorpions. The hunt is on, at least for Steve, that is. I'm too scared to hardly even step foot in the garage!