I return from the doctor!
I am fine. They mostly wanted me to come in because they, like all sane medical professionals, assume their patients may be idiots. (I do not begrudge them this. This is a very good assumption.) Once the doctor recognized me, and since he knows I can tell a centipede from, say, a floor lamp, he calmed down. Apparently they’d just had a patient suffer badly from an assassin bug bite (they can cause anaphylactic shock and cardiac arrest) and so they’re a little jumpy on the insect bite front at the moment.
“Now you’re sure it was a centipede?”
“Dude, it was hanging off my hand. I looked it up on-line. I think it was Scolopocryptops nigridius.”
“….”
“Here, I wrote it down.”
“Oooookay, then. Take two of these every four hours, call me if your hand swells, call 911 if your tongue swells, and see how you feel tomorrow. I’m gonna go look this thing up now…”
I love my doctor.
To clarify, while it’s referred to as a centipede “sting,” it’s not a true sting–they don’t have the apparatus. It’s actually a poisoned bite. Those huge-ass pointy sticky things sticking off them are gigantic modified hollow fangs, which they sink into you and envenomate you with. So technically, it’s more akin to being bitten by a rattlesnake than being stung by a bee, but they still call it a centipede sting for some reason.
It hurts. As pain goes, it’s a bizarre jabbing tingly thing, like a fine gauge wire drifting through my hand. It still hurts, too, and apparently it’s not going away for at least a day. Ice helps, but once I remove it, it starts right back up. It is a weird and disracting pain.
I have a prescription for some kind of anti-allergic mega-benadryl thing that’s supposed to help, but it’s also gonna knock me flat on my ass, so the day’s pretty much a loss for work. Oh, well, coulda been worse…
WARNING: Picture of centipedes in comment section! Not too gut-wrenching, but still shudder inducing!
