Wasp Bites

Damn, I mean seriously, I was outside last evening minding my own business while mowing the lawn when, kaboom, out of the blue I get stung by a flying insect, most likely a wasp (they tend to hand out in the sloped and untended area of my lawn.

Wasp bite right smack on the third phalange of my right ring finger.

So I stop the mower and go into the house and ice the sting down. Not so bad, I think.

Back outside, I resume mowing and, pow, a second wasp plants another string on me, right on the shinbone of my right leg.

This one hurts like the dickens.

Immediate, intense stab of pain like a dentist angrily pushing his drill deep into a molar root that hadn’t been numbed.

I mean I’m cussing up a storm and yelling like a manic, willing at the moment to spout off — if I only knew them — any magic words that would disappear every wasp, hornet, bee, or other flying insect from my little piece of this wonderous world.

So I stop the mower again and for a second time run into the house to ice down this latest assault on my poor old aging boomer’s body.

Well, I finish the mowing job, leaving undone the area that obviously has a nest of some sort in the vicinity, and then go in and shower and sit around while watching the bites swell up and redden.

All this wouldn’t be quite so annoying if I hadn’t had the same thing happen two weeks ago when I mowed the lawn. And that sting from a bee (this one left the stinger in me so I knew it was a bee) was no darn fun for almost a week before the swelling went down and the pain disappeared.

So now it’s Saturday and I’m sitting here bitching about the two latest stings because they hurt like a visit to a sadistic dentist whose instruments include pliers and bailing wire and have me all distracted from doing the writing I had planned on doing today.

The point of all this, which I apologize for getting to so late, is that today I have an increased appreciation for anyone who lives in chronic pain.

Seriously, I don’t know how folks in continual pain do it when the small but constant and annoying pains from my two stings have reduced my overall capacity today to do anything but yell at the dogs and my wife by at least 30%.

Cranky?

Man, I’m so cranky I could yell nasty things at the twelve disciples of Christ… I could laugh right now at the Pope’s and Hillary’s broken wrists… I could pee on Michelle Obama’s  organic garden… it’s bad… it’s really bad when my usually good-natured, good-humored self scales this height of crabbiness!

Well, enough of all this.

Time to stop whining and go ice down the wasp bites again for a few minutes.

Ice so far is the only thing that helps much.

I was up four times between midnight and eight a.m. icing down these stupid wasp bites because every time I’d roll over little jolts of increased pain would wake me up.

Poor, poor, poor me!