First, let me apologize for missing the newsletter last week. That’s my fault. You probably think, “she writes those up a couple of months in advance and has them all planned out and they just go out on a schedule” and you’d be right to expect that from someone else.
I’m not that person.
The newsletters are a frenzied free-form stream-of-conscience brain dump usually executed at 6 am on Thursday morning with insufficient caffeine.
It’s my “creative process.”
I had every intention of getting the newsletter written before Jeff and I headed to the farm in Oregon, but it turns out I pack for a trip a lot like I write a newsletter. It was chaos.
“I’ll write it when I get down there” I thought. I had visions of hanging out on the covered patio of the farm house, gazing out over endless fields as the deer came down to the creek to drink and hummingbirds flitted around me.
We arrived at the farm. A realtor was to be showing it so we headed down to the barn — a gorgeous gabled barn with a loft you could fit a mac truck in. It’s probably my favorite place on earth besides on a horse. And this is weird but I love to go up in that loft and just look at the bones of it — the beams and the plank floor and the wood harvested in the 1800s to build it.
Imagine that. My great-great-grandfather was stuffed into steerage on a boat to Canada, fleeing the Irish potato famine around the same time that big, grand barn was being built.
The blackberries called though, and so I went down to the edge of the hay field in front of the barn to pick berries and wait for the realtor and potential buyers to leave.
The only problem with fresh blackberries is that it’s hard to get them in your mouth fast enough. Or to get enough of them in general. Even if you pick them by the ton. The other problem is the general snagginess of blackberry bushes but getting tangled in a blackberry bush isn’t a bad thing if the berries are ripe.
The other problem with blackberry bushes is the apparent proximity of ground hives of what may have been bees but could as easily have been Satan’s spawn.
Initially, I felt a couple of stings and thought, “dangit!” (or some other less acceptable word). I quietly moved on, but not quickly enough. Soon, I had stings in my hands, legs, and face, and — this should tell you how dire it was — I dropped my wine glass and ran out of there toward the house.
Of course, one doesn’t get swarmed by bees without a.) swearing and b.) stripping. Both of which I managed to do while running down the driveway. And that’s how I met the potential buyers for our farm — screaming past them like a woman possessed. Technically, I was.
Jeff, still in the barn, had no idea anything had transpired.
The realtor and guests quickly piled into their vehicles, shouted something to Jeff along the lines of “your wife’s been stung” and tore out of there in a flurry of dust and gravel.
But this isn’t even where it got dramatic.
I was in my essentials in the chicken coop, shaking out the last of the bees from my clothes and getting myself put back together. We did a quick survey and counted at least 6 bites (which doesn’t sound like that many, unless you’re talking about venom-injecting demons only recently released from hell).
No problem. I mean, yes, annoying and uncomfortable and for sure my eyes would swell shut but we’d get some benadryl in the morning and just deal with it. It’s not like I’m allergic.
With no signs of anaphylaxis other than an elevated heart rate — easily attributed to the stress of the ordeal and which I quickly tried to remedy with white wine — we carried on with our evening and went to bed.
Then it got dramatic.
About midnight I woke up with abdominal pain and cramps like you might experience if you were spawning a really large, pointy alien. Intense. Then the nausea started. I couldn’t shake it — I tried showering because hot water always feels good. It just made me dizzy. Finally, laying in the bathtub and dizzy I called out to Jeff.
Marrying an EMT/mechanic was a good move.
We couldn’t imagine it was anaphylaxis because it had been a few hours and it was stomach pain. Almost on cue my chest felt like it just couldn’t quite accommodate much more than a shallow breath. Jeff piled me into the truck and off we went to the ER.
They did everything there like in the movies but without all the drama. When they said “Epinephrine” I had visions of Pulp Fiction:
Just. NO.
It was just a little poke in the thigh, not the rib-shattering scene I envisioned. Thank heavens because that one nurse was a big ol’ brute.
I spent the rest of our time down there on a steroid/benadryl coctail, starving and angry most of the time.
This was AFTER the drugs…
Jeff is a saint.
The buyers won’t be back.
And THAT is why I didn’t get the newsletter out last week.
