It was a fairly uneventful Christmas, by most standards. I’ll be honest, my love of Christmas has dwindled down to a mere wicked flame, where once it was a roaring fire. Just imagine the log, when it gets down to embers, before someone adds a new log…that’s me at Christmas.
(For those not in Canada, “the log” is a T.V. station solely dedicated to a 24/7 view of a fireplace with a fire in it. You can put it in your T.V. and viola…instant fireplace charm. My kids like to watch it and yell…”Look! A poker! Or someone is adding a log!” like it’s a big deal. Anyway. For me that’s…Christmas. For my kids? They’re like a herd of drunk elephants. There is only two of them in the room, and somehow the noise is deafening…but perhaps I have been drinking to get through the Holidays, and it just seems louder than it is. But I digress. Back to the “fairly” part).
We went to visit my Mom who is escaping the winter deep freeze in a nice little place outside of Tuscon, AZ. The kids had a blast, saw a gajillion different varieties of cacti and animals, and we spent some quality time at a preserve/zoo, where most of the interest lay in the “creepy crawlies” section: you know, snakes, spiders, scorpions. One of the displays was dark, with just a single red button underneath. When you pressed it, little scorpions lit up under the black light, glowing neon green. It truly was amazing.
“Did you see this yet?” I asked a surly looking teenager, forgetting that I am not really anywhere near his age or anywhere near cool enough to even talk to him. But hey, dude, its scorpions, and aren’t they rad? Aren’t we friends because we are both loving the creepy section?
“No.” he said in my general direction, before pressing the button. I could see his eyes light up, before he doused them with teenage “everything sucks” vision. (I recognize this…I refused to have too much fun at Disneyland as a teenager because I was stuck in this exact version of EverythingSucks)
No matter. I was impressed!
Totally impressed until Christmas Eve day, when we were unpacking all of our clothes.
My son let out a yell from the bedroom.
“Mom! Mom!”
I was at that exact moment, carrying too much luggage down the stairs, even though I knew it was too much luggage and doing it anyway.
“Not…right…now!” I yelled…”I’m a little busy!”
Then my daughter was at the top of the stairs, eyes like saucers.
“He got bit by a spider! And he said it was big!” She was freaking out now, near tears. I think she was imagining the tarantulas we just saw in the desert biosphere. I was imagining the house spiders I have blogged about previously, which aren’t much smaller. Shocking that one would actually take a chunk out of him, I thought, while grabbing a giant wad of tissues.
“WHERE is IT!?!” I yell at him, thinking this was going to be one giant splat. He yelled that it was under his shirt…on the floor… Both kids are outside the room, waiting for an update.
I charge in and lift up his shirt to find…
Huh.
Yeah.
One of those little scorpions that I thought were so cool.
Sitting there, tail up. Almost invisible against the orange carpet, like a little fucking camouflaged ninja.There was almost no thought process other than THATSGOTTODIE as I brought the almighty wrath of Mother Chuck Norris into my body, squishing it in the pile of Kleenex. I came out of the room.
“It was a scorpion,” I said, as Evan went whiter than his normal shade of white, which is saying something.
“What’s going to happen to me?” he said, as his sister started bawling.
“Nothing, you’re going to be fine. The hospital will know what to do,” I say, thinking,
the hospital in North Vancouver will have no idea what to do.
We called 911. We had firemen come and stand around until the ambulance came. And since he was showing no signs of breathing problems or allergic reaction, we knew almost right away it would be ok. At least, I had decided that he would be ok, and That Was What Was Going To Happen. He would be ok. (Something to repeat internally for five hours straight)
My husband? He hadn’t gone for a run in about six months, but decided to right before this happened. He showed up to an ambulance in the driveway and the house door open.
“Uh….”
“So…we brought home a scorpion, apparently, and it stung Evan.”
“That’s exciting…” he said… as we all stood around in various stages of incredulity.
After many hours at the hospital under observation, he was fine, except for the pain up one arm. We decided that he might gain super-powers, like Spiderman, and maybe they would be stealth and camouflage. We also thought that maybe, if put under a black light, one arm would have a decidedly green glow. He also thought there would be possible street cred at school, which I wholeheartedly agreed with, and one of the reasons I held off telling this story, as it was really his tale to tell first. Now Christmas will always have a good story to go with it. I will have to find a way to bake scorpion cookies and find a scorpion ornament. But I will say that it did remind me of what to be grateful for… a healthy family, and the absence of scorpions.