May 17, 2006
Flat on my back on a hard, cold sidewalk looking up at storefronts far from my house. It was not a place where I expected to suddenly wake up from a dead sleep. I rolled to the side and got up on one elbow. “Lie down! Lie down!” an unfamiliar voice said. What was going on? I could hear my wife's voice. I could see people in uniform and the open door of my car. It started coming back to me.
About fifteen minutes earlier, I had gotten stung a couple of times. Usually, the worst that would happen would be a grotesquely swelling limb, but this time had felt different. There was a metallic taste in my mouth, I felt light-headed, and my underarms and crotch were starting to itch, symptoms of a full body allergic reaction. I knew there was at least a slight chance it was developing into something serious. I'd had this experience a couple of times when allergy shots had gone bad, and it was scary when my throat began swelling shut, threatening to suffocate me like a python necktie.
I didn't want to panic my wife, but I didn't want to die either. The symptoms were still just a whisper. I figured it made sense to begin heading toward the hospital, only a few miles away, with the option of going in . . . or turning back if there were no problems.
“Erin, can you drive me to the hospital?”
I went upstairs, got my wallet, chewed a Benadryl tablet to speed up its absorption (it tasted terrible), and headed out to the car.
I had been returning some empty combs to my biggest hive without my bee suit (which has not been too unusual for small incursions into the hive) and had gotten stung very thoroughly by two conscientious guard bees. They stung deep and hard like professionals, not half-heartedly like some bees that were only putting in their time waiting for a shot at nectar collecting.
My fault, really. For reasons of ill-preparation, I had opened the colony twice already that afternoon, and apparently I had very much worn out my welcome. My hands being full of equipment, I couldn't immediately scrape off the disembodied bee stingers, so, fascinated, I had watched the now-beeless pieces of abdomen posthumously pumping toxins into my skin for a long twenty seconds. Feeling both otherworldly and agitated, I had made short work of what I was doing and retreated to the house, looking for both an antihistamine and my wife.
“I'll call 911,” she had said.
“No.” I was between insurance plans and did a quick calculation of an ambulance's cost per mile to the local hospital. A hundred dollars a mile? Maybe more?
“Can you drive? It's not really an emergency, just a precaution, and we'd be there before an ambulance got here.” My voice sounded a little high and weird but not raspy, maybe just from nerves. No sign yet of a swelling, suffocating throat. I figured we'd make it. She reluctantly agreed to try.
As Erin rolled through the stop signs in our neighborhood, I had called 911 to ask them to let the local hospital know we were on our way, and why. They strongly suggested we pull off the road and let them send an ambulance, but we were already partway there, making good time, and the symptoms weren't appreciably worse so far.
That changed nearly as soon as I hung up. That's also when we hit the school traffic. Neither of us had anticipated that we'd be passing a high school at the end of the school day. Cars were jammed up and double-parked, and insolently sauntering students in small groups took their turn at making sure the crosswalks stayed blocked for minutes at a time.
I felt increasingly light-headed but still had no trouble breathing, so I passed the time morbidly reviewing with my wife the things to tell my daughter, baby grandson, and stepkids in case I didn't make it. I began having a weird sensation of the world around me getting weirdly brighter (guessing that, for some reason, my eyes were dilating). The brightness increased to the point where my field of vision slowly bleached to white. I remember noting to my wife with some detachment that it was exactly like the fade-to-white camera effect Six Feet Under used whenever someone died. I was both scared and fascinated (my wife, much more the former and much less the latter). I managed to report “that's weird, I can't see anything anymore” before whiting out completely.
I regained consciousness and eyesight long enough to realize that we'd made it about six blocks in what felt like a split second. I stayed awake long enough to compliment her on finessing through another jam-up before I peacefully detached from this world again.
Well, it was peaceful for me, anyway. For Erin, it was undoubtedly hell. As I slouched, blissfully unconscious, I was unaware as she screamed into the phone and 911 kept cutting off. Didn't hear her shouting and shaking me as I slumped forward in slack-jawed unconsciousness. Didn't feel her park the car or hear her plead with struck-dumb bystanders to help get me onto the sidewalk as the 911 operator had instructed.
Nor did I see Jesus, Buddha, my dad, my '65 Chevy convertible, or any other dead loved ones lolling around at the end of a tunnel.
When I did recover consciousness, I was aware that she was trying to drag me single-handedly out the passenger door. I tried to tell her that I could probably get myself out, but my efforts at communicating were not apparently as effective as I thought they'd be. Finally, she got two guys to stop watching and help lower me onto my back on the pavement.
Even before I had terra firmly under me, we could hear the sirens of the rescue workers. I was groggily conscious, and my eyesight was back again. A miracle! (Unfortunately, one of the things that kicks in last is good judgment of when humor is appropriate. As the rescue folks got me into the ambulance, a fire truck also pulled up with siren screaming. “A fire truck? Am I in danger of going up in flames?” I quipped. They didn't get the joke, and responded with “No, you're going to be all right,” as if speaking to a delirious and somewhat slow child. Tough crowd.)
They hooked me up to machines, gave me oxygen, and perhaps some pseudoephedrine, stuck needles into me, and shouted out blood pressure numbers. By now I felt as conscious and as coherent as I ever was but glad to be lying down. I waved to Erin to assure her that she was still stuck with me and was pleased to see our neighbor Linda and her son Nicholas suddenly appear to embrace her (coincidentally they'd been driving by and saw the commotion). My breathing became fine, and my blood pressure quickly rose from weirdly low to more or less normal.
Eventually, we headed to the hospital, where I was forced to spend a few hours loafing around while they observed me and ran up my bill. My daughter Elana, who lived four blocks from the hospital, literally ran over with seven-month-old Acton, who spent the time inspecting oxygen tubes on my otherwise familiar face.
The drama had ended and changed to the tedium of waiting to be discharged. I went home with a Benadryl high, a prescription for EpiPens, and lots of things to mull over. The next time, I convinced a very reluctant Erin to do the bee interaction, but her resistance was matched by my eagerness to get back in the saddle.
Since then, I have upgraded my gloves to make it harder to sting me through them, but I still get three to six stings a year. I still keep my EpiPens nearby and review the instructions often but have never had to use them. I sometimes wonder if, upon feeling the beginning of a mild allergic reaction, I just panicked and fainted. I don't quite know how to feel about that.
Regardless, it's sobering to have a hobby that could conceivably kill me someday, but frankly also a little exciting. Sure, it's not skydiving or car racing, but every time I get ready to work the hives, I feel a tinge of danger to remind me that I'm not just a beekeeper, I'm an extreme beekeeper. I laugh at death, and “Danger” is my middle name.