Halloween Finger

While in Lake Arrowhead over the weekend we enjoyed looking at a heap of large pumpkins entered in a contest sponsored by Jensen's market. The largest on display was Newton's at 169 pounds

and the smallest was Ava's at 8 pounds. 

The contest entrants didn't come close to the heaviest pumpkin on record, this giant 2009 pound monstrosity grown by Ron Wallace last year:

You can't help but notice how the outer skin of the giant fruits gets pulled and tight as the pumpkin increases in size. It loses it's lovely shape and gets distorted and asymmetrical, lumpy and grotesque.

The same thing happened to my finger on Sunday! In the garden something stung me three times: ping, ping, ping. The stings were sharp and clean; strong enough to notice but not seriously. A few hours later, I suddenly became aware of pressure against my rings.  I looked at my stung finger and realized it had swollen significantly. Quickly I applied soap and worked my rings off, breathing a sigh of relief as they slid onto the counter, but I was puzzled at the degree of swelling. During the evening the finger was a bit itchy and that night I slept fitfully, waking myself up scratching. In the morning several maroon colored lesions had appeared on the side on my finger - it was a digit grotesque, just in time for Halloween.

Here's musical accompaniment to accompany further reading.

King Singers: Flight of the Bumblebee (short)



Following Richard's advise, I took a Benadryl and kept an eye on it. By afternoon my wrist was swelling too. It was time to see a doctor. Off we went to Dr. Miller who said "Wowza" and declared it a severe allergic reaction to the bee or yellow jacket stings. She gave me a prescription for the steroid, prednisone,  orders to take Zyrtec and Zantac ( ZZZ's for the bees) and to go to the emergency room if it didn't improve by today. Even though I've had many stings in my life with no problems, all of a sudden I'm allergic. It's not uncommon to develop an allergy out of the blue and I know several people who've had the same experience. My name became McAcute for speeding filling of the prescription.

The Halloween finger looks much better today; the swelling's reduced considerably and the finger is rapidly returning to normal.   Hip hip hooray for drugs.