Two: The Yellow Jacket
This year we got bees, and I believed myself to be allergic. This belief stemmed from an incident the previous summer wherein I’d gotten too close to a yellow jacket nest and one flew out and stung me on the ankle and then laughed maliciously. It was hard to hear the laughter, but it was unmistakable. The aftermath of that sting lasted four days and was highlighted by an inability to wear pants because my dumb ankles physically couldn’t fit through the dumb pant legs. Therefore, I thought, I must be allergic to bees.
And I might be allergic to bees, but I don’t know, because bees really don’t usually sting you. It’s a big thing for them; they have to die straight after they do it. So even if it’s pretty bad for you (sorry Rachel and Ian*), it’s much much worse for the bee. But anyway, you can know this not-stinging thing about bees with your whole brain and still not physically believe it, so I kept my distance from the bees this summer, although I greatly admire them and the work that they do. (I’ve written minor platitudes about this already.)
But if bees are like nuns in a convent who volunteer (and they kind of are), then yellow jackets are like badass smokers who drop out of Catholic School freshman year to be in a metal band. At the end of the summer, all the uncoupled female yellow jackets get together in a sort of commune and lez out and attack everyone they see without hesitation. I admire this too, but it is also deeply scary to me.
One day, about a week after my gigantic blister had finally fully healed (no “heel” pun intended, although actually, yeah, maybe there’s something there), and I was going to the gym again, I walked in my Saltwater sandals to the recycling bin through the back yard, and a chaotic-evil hard femme yellow jacket crawled up into my sandal and stung me between my toes AND LAUGHED MALICIOUSLY. I dropped to the ground screaming and crying and wishing that I was dead. Luke was there, but he seemed to believe I was overreacting, WHICH I WAS NOT. After this happened, he still expected me to make pancakes! This expectation made me cry actual literal tears.
It was not Luke’s fault, because yellow jackets are deceptively small, and I do overreact about things a fair amount. (Although I don’t know that “overreact” is ever a fair term; you just react. The reaction you have is your honest reaction. There is no baseline reaction that is universally acceptable. Some people have a lot of feelings, and this is a perfectly OK thing. It is not an “over” thing.) The band Dude York was visiting us and I’d wanted to impress them with these plantain pancakes I make that are really good,** but it was simply not going to happen. I took a bunch of Ibuprofen and reached for the Benadryl, but Luke was all, “Um, maybe you want to wait on that, because once you take that it is going to ruin your entire day.” At this point, there was golf ball under the skin of my toe and I was having a little trouble breathing.
IT WAS NOT LUKE’S FAULT, because he is not allergic to anything. In fact, he doesn’t even get mosquito bites. Oh, sure, they fly around him and they try their hardest to make his life hell, but no bumps ever materialize. When we had bed bugs (IT WAS YEARS AGO AND NOT IN OUR CURRENT HOUSE DON’T FREAK OUT), I suffered the painful, itchy fire of a thousand serpent suns (you heard me) every morning, while Luke made coffee. This is just how it is. We cannot blame Luke.
BUT ALSO, I felt that I was dying and that this was a less elegant version of “My Girl” and that nothing could ever be good again. You know, Bethany had just gotten a sting two days before. She’s a tough person, but she did NOT like the sting. Back then, two days before, it was awful for her. I remembered thinking, “Oh thank God I didn’t get a sting; poor Bethany; I am so glad I am not currently Bethany,” when she got stung. And now here I was, inching ever-closer to manifest amputation.
It is true that I am partially (mostly) writing about this because this experience was so terrible that I want to brag about it. I want to brag about the way that my foot filled up with pus and couldn’t even be crammed into a flip flop. Or about how I had miss a day of school because I physically could not walk without crutches, and I do not have crutches. Or about how the poison swelled all the way up to the bottom of my knee so that the pants problem happened again, but this time it was more ridiculous, because TOES ARE FAR FROM THE PANTS AREA. Or about how after this was all over, the skin on my foot had stretched out so far that it hung like a baggy sack around my exhausted foot muscle for about a week and that whole region of my body appeared to be very, very old. I want to brag about all of that stuff, because maybe I think there is no reason to go through a horrible thing if you don’t get to say, “I survived this horrible thing, and isn’t that amazing?”
Epi pens are expensive but I should get one. I guess allergies get worse as you get older; your body gets LESS immune the more it is exposed to the bad thing, which is a failure of evolution, but one we must accept. Another failure of evolution is that you never appreciate that you can do a cartwheel until you can’t do one anymore. Isn’t that how it goes.
For another three weeks, I could not go to the gym.
* Who were stung while beekeeping with us this summer.
** Bonus ho- to: A recipe for plantain pancakes. Put 2 green plantains, 4 eggs, a pinch of salt, and a teaspoon of baking powder in a blender. Heat up a cast iron skillet; go to town.