It’s 5 AM, and I’m peacefully snoring in bed, hell-bent for sleeping until hell, at least 9 or 10. Luxury. Suddenly, I’m jolted out of slumber by a searing pain in my right middle toe. I mean like white-hot sewing needle through the phalange pain.
“Gah!,” I scream profoundly. I’m suddenly standing beside my bed without any memory of going from a horizontal to a vertical orientation. I’m simply lying down one instant and hopping up and down, throwing back the covers the next.
As the covers fly back, I see a smallish black object soar directly toward my face. I react with all the well-considered aplomb you’d expect from a naked guy jolted out of bed at 5 AM by someone stabbing him in the foot with a hot icepick.
That is to say, I squealed like a 5-year-old and made lots of largely ineffectual flailing motions with my hands and feet. By sheer luck, I ended up stomping the little demon into oblivion.
Centipede. ICK. Only about an inch and a half long, but god, what a wallop. The pain had by this time spread through three toes, and the original injured one had a small, angry red bump on it. For the next two hours, I sat with my offended foot in cold water to keep down the throbbing pain.
Easy for you to say - you don’t live within 50 miles of the OP like I do. And nobody ever warned me about venomous centipedes! Makes me wonder what other dangerous animals I need to know about here…
There have been two or three threads about centipedes lately, none of them positive. I think we should make them the official hated invertabrate of the SDMB.
Well, I’ve lived in this general (very general) vicinity for most of my life, and this is the first time it’s ever happened to me, so I wouldn’t worry all that much about it.
Also, my cats are cute and fuzzy, and they like to chase and eat bugs…but I’m not sure they’re just right for the ecological niche.
Not all of those nasty suckas live down south… they also reside right here in good ol’ West Central Indiana.
I’m not normally squeamish about such critters, but you give me something with more than 8 legs (and that’s being generous! I generally like 'em to have 6 legs or less, tyvm…), and the squick factor increases exponentially. I encountered a rather large specimen of the long-legged, banded type as I was getting ready for work one morning, and I sounded like a bull in a china shop! I was knocking stuff over left and right, and making this god-awful sound in the back of my throat. I killed that sucka with much ado. Thinking all was once again right in my world, I resumed getting ready for work.
Evidently, the first one was just a warm-up, because what should come along but one TWICE THE bleeping SIZE of the first one! Inches people, the thing was INCHES long! I immobilzed the thing with some hairspray and then killed it, too.
Bleargh. I still shudder and cringe when I think of that morning.
I once stumbled on a nest of 'em while I was breaking up a section of roof that had been left in my back yard. I got three bites, including on nice red welt just above the elbow. The one that gave it to me was at least as long as my arm*. I assume the critters took care of the rest that evening, because I didn’t see centipedes with any more frequency than anyone else.
Disclaimer: some descriptions may be exaggerated due to unmitigated horror. Your centipedes may vary.
My three year old found a centipede in the yard and named him Sherman. She told me “Sherman is my friend” and kissed him. Soon I heard “oh no Sherman broke”. Luckily she was able to find Sherman II (and III, IV…)
