What good is two inches? If you’re hitchhiking, that two-inch thumb might get you a ride. If you’re hangry, a snack sized Hershey’s bar cheers you up. If you like pickles, a gherkin makes your sandwich sparkle. If you don’t like pickles, it ruins your lunch.
Two inches of something indulgent is no cause for
alarm. Unless it’s a pickle. Two inches of something crawling up inside your denim
capris is a different story.
This is that story.
I’ve lived most of my life in the desert southwest. I
was born in Arizona, so even though I should have been born in Ireland, I’ve
adapted to sweltering heat and harsh terrains. I owe my resilience to the
invention of air conditioning and a good dermatologist. What I haven’t adjusted
to very well are two-inch invasive species. It’s a fair descriptor. Native or
not, some species shouldn’t invade my space.
When I was in the sixth grade, my family and I moved
to a small house in the desert where, one afternoon, I stepped outside and crushed
the life out of a scorpion with my bare foot. I didn’t mean to. I just didn’t
see him. But I felt him. It scared me to death to step on the creepy thing, but
the pain was no worse than a bee sting for me. I thought I’d learned my lesson—shoes
matter. It was the only time I’ve ever been on the wrong side of a scorpion.
Until last week.
In my own living room.
Wearing shoes.
And denim capris.
I’ve probably killed about two dozen of the crunchy
little demons in my lifetime, but only one of them with my bare foot. All the
rest I’ve pulverized wearing sturdy shoes. It’s easy to recognize Arizona’s
dangerous bark scorpion, even on my fake wood floors. Sure, they’re the same
color, but they still look like a scorpion.
Maybe overconfidence was my downfall.
When I’m sitting at my desk like I was last weekend, lost
in my writing and enjoying some iced tea, I’m not usually thinking about
scorpions. Not until I realize a two-inch version is crawling inside the leg of
my capris. Suddenly, intuition becomes better than vision, and I don’t need to
see the freaky beast to realize I’m in a lot of trouble.
No one was here to watch me boogie last week. Or stomp
my leg until the terrorist fell to his death on the fake wood floor, crushed by
my frenzied dance moves. He deserved it. Nor did anyone hear me sob like a baby
as the venom quickly spread across my shin and encircled my lower leg. Within
seconds, from knee to ankle, my leg throbbed with fiery pain, pulsating my
nerve endings like a TENs unit set to warp speed.
I kid you not.
My daughter, Katy, came over to administer first aid,
but as it turns out there is no pain relief for an attack like this. You just
put up with the effects of its powerful neurotoxin for the next seven hours,
making sure you can still breathe, and facing the fact that it’ll be close to a
week before residual numbness goes away.
Oh, goody.
I had my home sealed last year by professionals
against criminals like these. They missed a spot. Yesterday they came back to
re-seal my foundation and go after all the door jams that don’t jam and gaps in
the plumbing, as well as every air vent in my ceiling. Never underestimate predatory
arachnids. They are contortionists on steroids, able to squeeze inside the
house my contractor promised was impossible for them to penetrate.
im·pos·si·ble.
I do not think that word means what he thinks it
means.
There’s not a lot to do while sitting with your leg elevated
except shallow breathe and wait for the poison to work its way out of your
system. For the next two days, while every nerve in my lower leg pulsated to the
bizarre beat of some frantic jungle rhythm, my unnerved thoughts drifted to my
grandmother. Not because she was bohemian or a bad dancer, but because she was well
acquainted with scorpions.
For twenty-five years, she and my granddad lived on
fifty acres of desert land, raising their family in a home devoid of both air
conditioning and evaporative cooling. In the extreme heat of Phoenix summers, equipped
with only floor fans and cross ventilation to alleviate their suffering, she
developed frequent, massive migraines.
One afternoon while dealing with one of those awful
headaches, a scorpion, meaning to add insult to injury, crawled over and stung
her on the leg. Unfortunately, I don’t know how she would describe the
pain that followed. All she told me is that her migraine instantly disappeared.
Gone.
Kaput.
Vanished.
Vamoose.
Umm, bu bye. And instead of showing up every few weeks,
it didn’t return for six months. So, while she rubbed her throbbing leg instead
of her throbbing temples, she came up with a brilliant idea.
Now, this might have been a side effect of the neurotoxins
ravaging her body at the time. Possibly she was hallucinating from the pain. I’m
pretty sure that’s what I was doing last weekend. I actually wonder if Grandma
had an out of body experience, perhaps something akin to what Peter Parker
encountered when a radioactive spider bit him. (Well, they are distant cousins
of scorpions.)
Yes. I’m saying it right here. That savage beast
changed Grandma on the spot. She leaned into her new superpower Spidey Sense
and, every six months after that, whenever a new migraine tried to take over,
she invited another willing scorpion to sting her. On purpose.
I’m telling you the truth, they don’t call them the
Greatest Generation for nothing. That woman was tough. Sad to say, on the
advice of her doctor, who lacked spidey sense, she eventually gave up on her
homeopathic remedy and resorted to enduring regular migraines for the rest of
her life.
I often wonder how much better she’d have felt if that
horrified doctor hadn’t discouraged her from trusting her own instincts. It’s
not like the poison transformed her into some kind of mutant. She didn’t start
climbing up walls with her bare hands. She didn’t develop supersonic hearing.
And she didn’t become a crime fighter on the back streets of Phoenix. She just
wanted to get rid of a bad headache.
In other words, the neurotoxins from scorpion stings
seemed to counterattack whatever triggered her migraines. It’s like two
negatives making a positive. Isn’t that what science is all about? Or maybe
that’s math. I don’t know.
So, while I sat there ruminating on Grandma’s courage,
I wondered if I, too, would reap benefits from a severe scorpion sting. Maybe the
poison would clear up my chronic hives. Or my chocolate cravings. I don’t really
want to look through walls like Superman, but it would be nice if my eyesight became
an even 20/20 again. Is that asking too much for everything I went through?
Science and math will never know. Because I’m not as
brave as Grandma. I’m doing everything I can to keep two inches of pure terror
from ever tormenting me again. I’ve sealed up this house so tight I’ll probably
asphyxiate from lack of oxygen.
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