When Nature's Remorseless Biting Mofos Attack
VANCOUVER ISLAND - Well, greetings again, seekers. I received a mild taunt from one of my valued readers (when you only have six and are related to two of them, you value your readers greatly) about not having posted any outrages in, well, let's call it a few weeks.
Sorry. I have been busy/sick/hurt/tired/traveling/at music festivals/all of the above for the past month or so, and the Batcave is turning more and more into a semi-urban replica of an Appalachian shanty, so much so that I've actually having to do things to keep it from turning me into a flesh-covered pancake in my sleep. I'm currently out at Stately Wayne Manor on Vancouver Island, living the life of Riley and looking out the patio doors at the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Coastal Mountains, which is a hell of a sight better than the view out the window of the Batcave in upstate New York, from which the delightful sight line often is my neighbor's ass crack as he fiddles with his petunias, and since he really has petunias that is not supposed to be a metaphor.
By the way, I should point out that the title of this short screed is not a reflection on the correspondent who tweaked me for not writing in a while. It's actually something that happened to me a couple weeks ago while I was camping at folk festival.
I love going to these festivals, where I play fiddle with friends I only see at such events. A co-worker calls them "fiddling and diddling festivals" in the mistaken belief that what occurs at these things is that we all play music till the wee hours in the campground, drink beer and whiskey and, when the music is over, all have sex with each other multiple times. He is right about two of those things, and I will leave it to your imagination which two. However, I do nothing to discourage his firm belief that the third part of this actually happens, mainly because he can scarcely contain his envy.
So while camping at this festival, some goddamned awful living thing either lunched on my calf or decided to get even with the human race with one quick blow of the pedipalps, or whatever they call those things. Within 24 hours my entire lower leg looked as if I'd been having beet juice injections, so I wound up writhing in the emergency room and then flat on my back with an IV sticking out of my fiddling arm. I would have rather been at the imaginary orgy, believe me. Since then I have been back at the hospital once and at the doctor's office twice.
The best part of all that is that when a nurse asked to see the bite, she clasped her hands over her mouth and said "Oh, my God!" Great. What you do not want to hear in a medical setting is someone acting as if you have the worst thing they've ever seen.
But what amazes me is that after a couple sets of bloodwork, "they" still have no clue what bit me. The best they can come up with is that it "probably" was a spider, "possibly" a black widow, and that there's also a chance that it was a simple mosquito bite that became infected. It's hard to imagine how one could get such an infection while rolling around in a campground littered with all manner of filth, isn't it? The person tented next to me was drinking almost as much beer as I was, so I immediately suspected that he'd snuck over and peed (or worse) on my turf rather than walking the 50 yards to the portable shitter in the middle of the night. After all, he was from some other state, Connecticut or something, and who the hell knows what kind of people come from a place like that?
So here it is some two weeks from the bite, and it's still huge but healing. It kind of freaks me out to look at black widow bites on the Web and see how similar it is. That's one of the great things about the Internet...no matter how much of a hypochondriac you are, you can always find something to stoke your worst fears and make them far worse. I also looked at photos of brown recluse spider and hobo spider bites and for a short time convinced myself one of them would be the culprit, but nature seems to have placed them out West and not in the East, so even though it was neither of these that gave me the existing wound I will have ample opportunity for one of those little assholes to have at me while I'm here on the Left Coast.
So forgive my absence recently. Hopefully, it makes the heart grow fonder, or whatever that greeting-card-type bullshit saying is.
Sorry. I have been busy/sick/hurt/tired/traveling/at music festivals/all of the above for the past month or so, and the Batcave is turning more and more into a semi-urban replica of an Appalachian shanty, so much so that I've actually having to do things to keep it from turning me into a flesh-covered pancake in my sleep. I'm currently out at Stately Wayne Manor on Vancouver Island, living the life of Riley and looking out the patio doors at the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Coastal Mountains, which is a hell of a sight better than the view out the window of the Batcave in upstate New York, from which the delightful sight line often is my neighbor's ass crack as he fiddles with his petunias, and since he really has petunias that is not supposed to be a metaphor.
By the way, I should point out that the title of this short screed is not a reflection on the correspondent who tweaked me for not writing in a while. It's actually something that happened to me a couple weeks ago while I was camping at folk festival.
I love going to these festivals, where I play fiddle with friends I only see at such events. A co-worker calls them "fiddling and diddling festivals" in the mistaken belief that what occurs at these things is that we all play music till the wee hours in the campground, drink beer and whiskey and, when the music is over, all have sex with each other multiple times. He is right about two of those things, and I will leave it to your imagination which two. However, I do nothing to discourage his firm belief that the third part of this actually happens, mainly because he can scarcely contain his envy.
So while camping at this festival, some goddamned awful living thing either lunched on my calf or decided to get even with the human race with one quick blow of the pedipalps, or whatever they call those things. Within 24 hours my entire lower leg looked as if I'd been having beet juice injections, so I wound up writhing in the emergency room and then flat on my back with an IV sticking out of my fiddling arm. I would have rather been at the imaginary orgy, believe me. Since then I have been back at the hospital once and at the doctor's office twice.
The best part of all that is that when a nurse asked to see the bite, she clasped her hands over her mouth and said "Oh, my God!" Great. What you do not want to hear in a medical setting is someone acting as if you have the worst thing they've ever seen.
But what amazes me is that after a couple sets of bloodwork, "they" still have no clue what bit me. The best they can come up with is that it "probably" was a spider, "possibly" a black widow, and that there's also a chance that it was a simple mosquito bite that became infected. It's hard to imagine how one could get such an infection while rolling around in a campground littered with all manner of filth, isn't it? The person tented next to me was drinking almost as much beer as I was, so I immediately suspected that he'd snuck over and peed (or worse) on my turf rather than walking the 50 yards to the portable shitter in the middle of the night. After all, he was from some other state, Connecticut or something, and who the hell knows what kind of people come from a place like that?
So here it is some two weeks from the bite, and it's still huge but healing. It kind of freaks me out to look at black widow bites on the Web and see how similar it is. That's one of the great things about the Internet...no matter how much of a hypochondriac you are, you can always find something to stoke your worst fears and make them far worse. I also looked at photos of brown recluse spider and hobo spider bites and for a short time convinced myself one of them would be the culprit, but nature seems to have placed them out West and not in the East, so even though it was neither of these that gave me the existing wound I will have ample opportunity for one of those little assholes to have at me while I'm here on the Left Coast.
So forgive my absence recently. Hopefully, it makes the heart grow fonder, or whatever that greeting-card-type bullshit saying is.
posted by Fiddler at 3:15 PM
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