Living with Bees

Well that was a long and unexpected hiatus.  You would not believe the ten days that I have had.  First of all, we moved!  We have wanted to get out of our old place and to a more affordable and locationally appropriate for quite some time and it finally came through.  On Monday we rented a truck, crammed everything we could into the back, and begged our families to help us move just this one last time.  Once again they have all vowed never to help us again and we have promised to hire movers for when we eventually leave this place.  Hopefully we can make it last for more than a year this time.

But before even that happened, things had gotten rather complicated.  Last Friday night I was packing up some stuff and went out on the back porch to clean off some baskets.  I found a bag out there with some of the boxes we use for moving and went back inside to ask Chris if he wanted to keep it.  He came out, looked inside it, and found some interesting items that made us want to investigate more.  I mean, how did that webcam end up out there anyway?  And what else could be in that bag.

So we investigated further.  He pulled out more stuff when something flew out and startled him, causing him to knock off his glasses.  I bent down to pick them up, laughing a little at the image of him jumping, dropping the bag, and swatting at his ear as it replayed in my head.  Then, like a scene out of a horror movie, I turned ever so slowly as I stood up and saw it -- dozens of yellow jackets rising out of the bag and heading towards me like a strike force.

I screamed.  Chris yelled.  We both dove through the door, slamming it shut as fast as possible.  We weren't fast enough. Chris had a sting on his leg and I had a gotten stung in the foot.  But then as we tore through the door some more got inside.  We ran to the bathroom, hurriedly closing both exit doors.  Standing still I realized that there were bees in my jeans, which I ripped off as fast as possible, getting stung on the leg for my trouble.

So there we sat.  Trapped in our own bathroom.  Him with one sting in the leg, me with one to match plus four or five in my foot.  Now, I'm not allergic to bees, but the one sting on my hand that I got at the beginning of the week was still having a topical reaction after five days.  It seemed that as we watched my foot swelled up in front of us, all shiny and painful.  And here we sat, afraid to leave our bathroom and face the bees beyond the door.

The rest is a blur of pain and tears.  We managed to get out of the bathroom, grab phones and my purse and left for the emergency room with a quick call to my sister to assure that it was the right course of action.  (Don't worry, I did not go pantsless, though that might have made me more popular with the drunks we met that night).  When we got to the car we realized we only had the keys to Chris' which was full of things we were packing.  Amidst more panic on my part and haste on his we finally realized we  had not idea where my keys were and had to unpack the car so that he could run the boxes back into the apartment and through them to the mercy of the bees.

We arrived safely at the hospital despite our many close calls and traffic violations.  We almost missed the turn into the hospital but I saw the sign at the last minute and Chris managed to cross three lanes of traffic at an intersection and then back into the turning lane so that we were not hit by oncoming traffic.  It was a stroke of genius, I tell you, the kind only given to those driving pregnant women to the hospital as they start labor.  Only later did he tell me that he had to wear his old glasses with the bad prescription because in the commotion we broke the good ones.

The lovely doctor at the ER examined my foot and determined that it would go back to normal (I didn't believe him) and gave me medicine for the pain which I took without question.  I would have taken rat poison if he told me it was the only way to stop the pain.  I was able to go to work the next day, on crutches, but I was not allowed to drive, which made packing and moving much more difficult.  On Monday when we moved I was next to useless.  I limped around putting things in boxes and tried to stay out of everyone's way.  (I did become everyone's hero when we arrived to find that our power and water had not been turned on as we'd asked.  I am quite good with a phone and a switchboard when I need to be. I think I was a telephone operator in a previous life)

So here we sit.  Mostly unpacked and enjoying our new home.  The swelling in my foot has finally gone down and so far there have been no more attacks by bees.  Though Chris tells me he found a wasp nest outside our door, so one really never knows.