I’ve had two memorable encounters with stinging insects, but I’m betting that you all have even better stingin’ yarns.
Here’s mine:
When I was in third grade, while coming into class after a recess on a windy day, the full skirt of my dress blew up. It was only after I got into the classroom and was sitting at my desk that I realized a problem: a wasp had been blown inside my dress, and was crawling on my back, repeatedly stinging me. I told the teacher, who didn’t believe me, so I was stung several more times before she let me leave my desk and tend to the problem.
Those stings were not as bad as my most memorable one, which was inside my mouth, near my upper lip. I had been washing my car, and had taken a sweetened can of iced tea outside with me. When I finished with the car, I took the can inside, without realizing that a wasp had crawled inside the can. I then drank from the can, intaking both tea and wasp, and was stung by the panicked bug. That one really hurt, and to add embarrassment to pain, my face swelled up tremendously for several days, and I walked around work with my head hanging down so nobody could see me. OUCH!
So where is the worst place you have ever been stung?
I got stung on the sole of the foot when I was fourteen or so. (I walked around barefoot a lot because I was convinced that shoes were Tools of the Conformist Suburbanite Oppressor. Don’t ask.) Anyway, the sting was right under the arch, and the whole area swelled up so that I was completely flat-footed for a week or so. It also itched like mad, and the only way to make it stop itching was to rub it until it hurt like mad, instead.
That’s how I found out that some aspects of Conformist Suburbanite Oppression might actually be based on common sense. I hate it when that happens.
I also got stung on the lip when a bee landed on mt soda can. My solution to the pain was to eat some really really hot buffalo wings. Once my whole mouth hurt, I couldn’t feel the sting!
Last week one of the guys on my hockey team got stung on the penis. The rink is outside, and has a ton of bees, and during warmups I one got up his shorts. He felt an inch, scratched, and the thing stung him.
The worst place I have ever gotten stung is on the neck, just under my chin. I was checking the hives at dusk, something I shouldn’t have been doing anyway. A bee crawled up under my veil and stung me. The sting wasn’t especially painful, but I later broke out in hives, itching all over. My only explaination is that I got stung in a lymph gland and the immune reaction spread over my body that way. I am unsure of whether that has caused me to become permanantly hypersensitive to bee venom, so I take Benadryl every time I am stung now as a precaution.
Sparteye: Thanks for a great thread. Everybody thinks their personal traumas are unique. Maybe it shouldn’t be but it’s somehow comforting to know shit happens to other people.
True story: I posted the tragi-comic circumstances of my father’s funeral ages ago. (It’s taken years but The Spreading Of The Ashes is now–weirdly, honestly–a good memory.) But at the time…
My sister and I were thoroughly exhausted, traumatized, beaten up–just entirely tapped out. We cadged a couple of soft drinks from Lurch, the soulless corporate ghoul of a funeral director, then dove outside for a break. Her drink was “leaded”, i.e. contained sugar. Hornet flew in it. She took a swig–and it stung the hell outta her throat. And kept stinging.
She gagged it out but the damage was done. Fortunately she wasn’t too sensitive: her face swelled, her voice wheezed but it wasn’t life threatening. (We were both wall-eyed batshit while Lurch sneered.) And umpteen people awaited us back in the Slumber Room…aaaarrrugh.
No lie–it morphed into the dreadful comedy routine from hell. She was swollen and weeping–and hurting and pissed–greeting people beside the bier, Lurch glaring back by the cheesy sound system pumping out ersatz organ music–and her throat hornet-stung to hell and gone.
Charles Addams couldn’t make up shit like that.
Veb
Who, with her sister, eyes soft drink cans with deep suspicion
Right underneath my left eyebrow. I am allergic to stinging insects (and arachnids for all you nitpickers). I was hanging out in a tree with a friend of mine, jumping on branches when we evidently disturbed a nest of bees and one came at me, I closed my eyes and pulled my shoulders up to my neck instinctively and it stung me just below my eyebrow.
My eyelids swelled up, and I immediately went on antibiotics to prevent the swelling from entering the inside of my head through my eye socket. It came very close to that, but luckily the swelling went down around 2 weeks later. My grandmother, always the cool eccentric one, made drapery for a living and had tons of cool leftover fabric in her sewing room. She made me countless eyepatches for each outfit, color coordinated and some wacky ones. Hehehe…
I grew up with an abnormal terror of stinging insects of all kinds, but to date have only been the target of yellow jackets.
I got my first sting at about age 7 or 8, on my right temple, an inch or so from my eye. My friends, whose terror was merely “healthy,” used to send me out ahead when we’d go walking through the woods as a sort of distant early warning system. Well, on one of these excursions, my alarms went off, and I turned and ran back through my friends the way we came. Evidently, I was the only one to get tagged, but it sure energized me. The youngest, shortest, and far and away fattest of the three of us, I sprinted fifty yards or so through scattered underbrush and very nearly cleared a gorge that was probably seven or eight feet across. Caught the upper lip of the far side of it with my solar plexus, which effectively ended my escape attempt.
A few years later, I got one on the inner wrist of my left arm (I think) from a yellow jacket that snuck inside on my grandmother’s coat and stung me as I played on my own bedroom floor.
Several years after that, and after adolescence had finally begun sprouting some muscles around my upper body, I got stung on the back side of my upper right arm while at a friend’s house. His sister, helping as best she could, pointed at my nascent tricep and asked “If it stung you up there, why is it swelling down here?” I swear to God, I cannot work on my triceps without thinking about that remark.
I was probably around the age of 9-10 at the time of this incident
I was swimming at my mother’s friend apartment pool. It was a great day to swim. You know, one of those 90 degree and humid as hell days.
Swimming was going great, but one problem. There were alot of these little black wasp looking bugs. No problem right? Water - wasps - dont mix right?
Wrong, IIRC mud wasps . .
One sure did land on my nose. I was scared, I did what came naturally. Jumped in.
I’m in the water now. Oh sh*t. It didnt fly off. I swat at it. No help. It seems to be glued to my nose. All of the sudden my tear ducts swell and out come a flood of tears and a bit of blood from my nose. PAIN. It was terrible. I dont think anyone in history has had a nose as big as mine after this happened. Thankfully after a few days the swelling went down.
Was at Busch Gardens Tampa, back around '75 or’76 - hadn’t been married long - waiting at the station for the train that goes around the park. Large open structure, lots of wood. I feel something under my shirt … stinging … yell … wife beats on back, apparently killing attacker (wasp or yellow jacket, don’t remember). A look under shirt reveals I’ve been stung multiple times. We get to nearest first aid station. Kindly, matronly nurse has me lie face down on the bed. Three-way conversation of nurse-wife-me, I hear her doing something in the sink. Suddenly, the coldest thing I’ve ever felt is on my back, I clear the bed by several inches, and I let go with language my wife didn’t know I knew. Seems the evil sadistic nurse had dumped a bunch of ice onto a towel in the sink, then run water over it, before applying it to my back.
The swelling went down. I apologized for my language (called nursey all sorts of things). We went back to the hotel.
I was riding my bike at high speed, about 20 miles from home, mouth agape, and a bee lodged in there and got me in the tongue.
Evidently, the poison entered directly into the bloodstream, because I ahd not previously been sensitive to bee stings, and I had to ride back to the hospital immediately (they say that hard exercise is the worst thing to do at that time, but what are you gonna do?), because I was blowing up like the Pillsbury Dough Boy. By the time I reached the hospital, I was wheezing.
Around 5 years ago I was riding down the motorway to the beach with a friend and somehow a wasp got into my helmet. I was doing around 70mph and all I could feel was the little bastard wiggling around stinging the side of my head at will. Every instinct in me screamed at me to rip the helmet off my head and kill the wasp - to this day I still don’t know how I managed to pull into the side safely.
Thankfully I’m not allergic to them, but my friend hasn’t been on the back of the bike since.
As I said in another thread, I’ve never been stung (mostly because I’m way too afraid of the things to let them get near). And this story is about a spider-bite that happened to my brother, not a bee/wasp sting anyway, so maybe it doesn’t fit. Here it is anyway.
It was a family vacation in Red River, New Mexico. It was Spring or Summer, and I was about 9, which would put my brother at about 7. One morning, he woke up and couldn’t open his eye. My parents took him to a doctor, who determined that it was a brown recluse bite. For those of you who don’t know, that’s bad. Brown recluse bites have a tendency to necrotize flesh. Really yucky. Fortunately, whatever treatment the doctor gave worked, and my brother’s eye was eventually fine. After the fist-sized swelling went away.
