Following my initial Contractor from Hell column a few weeks back, a buddy emailed to say, “Holy smokes Dave. If it wasn’t for bad luck, you’d have no luck at all,” and helpfully suggested that I take up writing country and western songs. Well, he might be on to something, since my not-good-luck streak continued last week. Writing quickly after what happened, I managed to get these lyrics down in an inspired frenzy of creativity—almost as if I’d heard them before:
It was the 20th of July, another sleepy, dusty Niagara day
I was out choppin' cotton, and my brother was balin' hay
And at dinner time we stopped and walked back to the house to eat
And mama hollered out the back door, y'all, remember to wipe your feet
And then she said, I got some news this mornin' from Choctaw Ridge
Today, Ol’ Baldy got hisself bit five times by yellowjackets
I know, the last line needs some work (apologies to Bobbie Gentry), but it does concisely capture the incident.
Yes, after decades of successfully avoiding pretty much anything worse than mosquito bites—although in tropical Indonesia those could be pretty unpleasant, and malarial—a single nudge of a ceramic planter pot on our back deck last Thursday unleashed a furious swarm of the barbed waspy bastards, who did not take kindly to their nest being disturbed.
Nest? Exactly. What nest. It wasn’t until two days later that we finally figured out that they had managed to construct a papery, pancake-thin nest under the planter, which we had elevated this season with spacers to allow better water drainage.
Some advice that I learned later: When being attacked by wasps, don’t flail around and try to swat them away. (Don’t pretend you wouldn’t!) This merely makes them even more peevishly intent on drilling venom into your flesh. And this they did. In the ten seconds or so from realization that it’s bees, angry bees, to dashing back inside the house with at least one of them still attached, they managed to bite me in five different spots.
Unlike other bees, yellowjackets—predatory social wasps of the genera Vespula and Dolichovespula—don’t lose their stingers after biting, and can apparently keep at it indefinitely. Either I was bitten by five unique wasps each defending their motherland, or it was just one exceptionally fast little f****r.
In fact, one stinger was left embedded in my arm, which my spouse—who was standing next to me when it happened and remained calm and therefore unbitten—removed with tweezers. I can only hope that the stinger-less creature spiralled to its death, but I suspect he was treated to a hero’s homecoming by the queen and given an early retirement and full military pension, possibly a dacha in Sherkston Shores.
As the exceptionally sharp pain kicked in, I consulted my phone, as one does now, asking Google for treatment advice. Wash with soapy water and elevate was the gist of it. Expect the pain to last for a couple of hours, the cheerful AI voice said. Swelling may last for up to 48 hours. (Underestimate of the year, that one.)
We tallied the bites: base of the right pinkie, top of the right forearm, back of the right upper arm, first joint of the left index finger, and in the left armpit. Oh, what fun.
Somewhere along the mayhem I remembered that my mother has always claimed to be deathly allergic to bees, as in literally. This was the most I’d ever been stung at once, so were genetics about to take me down, no EpiPen in sight, having already survived Covid, emergency intestinal surgery, and the Gang of Four? My wife and I looked at each other and shrugged. Probably would have already puffed up and dropped dead by now, we reasoned.
So that was Thursday afternoon, Thursday evening, and Thursday night. I popped a couple of generic Benadryl that were past their use-by date, rubbed in some anti-itch cream, and tried to ignore the sensation—continuing with the country and western theme—that tiny cowpokes were taking branding irons to my tender, writerly flesh in five different spots (did I mention the armpit?).
The next morning was worse. While the pain had ebbed to something more like being jabbed by medium-hot soldering irons, the swelling and redness had gone way up. More disconcerting, each lump was hard, and hot. I swallowed two more out-of-date fake Benadryl and headed over to consult my favourite pharmacist.
“You’re still upright?” was his response upon hearing of my Benadryl intake (overly diligent readers may recall that this spring I lost a few pounds after a week or so in the hospital and am now Dave Lite ™).
“They were your house brand, and expired,” I countered, adding that I was there to stock up on the real thing, and get some advice.
“Bees like to poke into a lot of bad stuff,” he said, “like dog poop. I hope you washed those.”
By now the swelling was approaching sunny-side-up egg proportions, if the yokes were crimson. I wasn't sure how thorough my washing had been.
“The standard treatment is a couple of days on a steroid and a scrip for Auro-Cephalexin,” he said. “It’s an antibiotic that’s good for skin issues.”
With the recent Ford government offloading of certain diagnostic and treatment powers from family doctors to local pharmacists, was this something included in his new remit? Unfortunately no. Still need the family doc or an ER doc to sign off, he said.
Great. Just what I wanted to do on a summer Friday, go to the ER.
Genuine Benadryl now in hand, on the way home I stopped into Beamer’s Hardware to stock up on a few cans of bee-murdering spray—regular and extra-foamy. We were going to pick them off one by one, if we had to, like snipers, but with compressed, long-distance Raid.
At home I started calling our family doctor, whose automated message swore they’d start answering the phones again after 1:30 and please don’t leave a voicemail. Approximately 20 attempts later and getting the same message I gave up, and dejectedly clicked over to the Niagara Health emergency room wait time web page to see which ER location would be the least hellish.
Oh, more fun. St. Catharines was a five-hour wait, and Niagara Falls and Welland were both in the three-hour range. And then this sad country song suddenly shifted key.
Why, what’s this? “Access Virtual Urgent Care” urged a shouty pop-up window. Appointments first come, first served. Okay, I’ll bite, so to speak.
It turns out—and I vaguely remember seeing a news release on this early in the pandemic—that for urgent but not emergency health concerns, it’s possible to get medical advice via video call, and it’s covered by OHIP. St. Joseph’s in Hamilton, Children’s Hospital in London, Hamilton Health Sciences, and Niagara Health have joined forces to provide live video conferencing.
Among the 17 general health topics related to adults (there’s a separate list for children, and one for long-term-care residents), was just the category I needed: “bites and stings.” Well, why not, I thought. Sure beats sitting in an ER waiting room for three-plus hours.
Incredibly (remember, this is Niagara Health we’re talking about), within a half hour I had connected with a nurse practitioner (the delightfully named Cara Panting), shown her my various red welts, and been told to head to the pharmacy to pick up the prescriptions that she was about to send over. (Because Ontario healthcare communications are stuck in 1985, that request surely went by fax.)
Before we disconnected, Doc Panting suggested that I use a pen or marker to draw circles around each swelling, so as to measure their increase or decrease by the next morning to help determine severity of infection. Then our new puppy wandered into frame and was suitably praised for being a good girl. All in all, the most pleasant medical experience I've had in decades.
A few minutes later I was at the pharmacy, with the pharmacist giving me just the slightest bit of side-eye.
“Did you tell her what to prescribe?” he asked.
“What? No. How could I even do that anyway.”
His eyes narrowed.
“It’s exactly what I told you yesterday—a steroid, Prednisone, and the antibiotic, Auro-Cephalexin,” he said, tapping the counter suspiciously, “although the steroid is just for one day, not two.”
“Guess that makes you very good at your job,” I offered, hoping for maybe an extra day of the steroid thrown in for free.
“You might be staring at the ceiling tonight, though,” he warned, since the Prednisone was likely to jazz me up. (It did. A countering whisky turned the bebop back down.)
The Prednisone worked its magic. The swelling and itching were well reduced by Saturday morning, and so I held off on taking the antibiotic (which I never did need).
Bouncing with 40 mg of Prednisone energy, I headed out to get a few news photos, and ran across a youth soccer fundraiser at the Food Basics plaza. Three cheerful girls ranging in age from 10 to 12 or so stood in front of the supermarket entrance, holding a sign pointing toward a BBQ grill operation set up down the sidewalk. Okay if I take your picture, I asked. Sure, the oldest one said. Then they all three went quiet and took a closer look at the old geezer standing in front of them.
“Um,” said the youngest.
“Um,” said the middle one.
“I’m not sure if I have permission,” said the youngest.
“Yeah me too,” said the middle one. The oldest gave me a cautious smile and discreetly backed up a step.
Okay, no problem, I said, and wished them well with their fundraising.
Only when I got back to the car, and pulled the camera strap off my shoulder, did I notice my hands and arms. I had totally forgotten that my wife and I worked together the night before with a bright blue Sharpie to draw borders around the swollen sting lumps.
“No, wider!” I told her at one point, causing the welt on my right forearm to be circled not once but twice.
So imagine how I appeared to these sweet young ladies. An old git in a Jays cap, camera swinging from his shoulder, much of his arms covered in blue circles, like a walking, talking isobar weather map. No wonder they had second thoughts. And good for them. Blue-circled Stranger Danger!
As I write this seven days later, the welts are gone but only just. The redness and swelling, and the hard lumps under the skin, stubbornly stuck around for days. After checking with Beamer’s on Saturday for wasp traps (none), on Sunday I ordered a quartet of them from Amazon. On Monday I put them up. By Tuesday a pleasing number of small and larger wasps had met their watery graves in a mixture of apple juice, vinegar, and sugar (beer optional). The body count is now past 40. I shall have my vengeance.
Think you need the ER? Give Virtual Urgent Care a try first.
See you next time.
