Twice Bitten Once Shy

Or so the saying doesn't go. But it's how it happened, anyway.

Friday night my wife and I went to bed, read for a while, and turned off the lights. The only unusual difference was that instead of sleeping with a pillow over my eyes like I normally do, I put it down at my side. Insignificant at best, but it became important later on.

I was right on the edge of sleep when I realized I was uncomfortable. So I rolled over on my side. Our roadside-rescue kitten, Storm, was sleeping between us. Storm is still in the process of being de-fleaed, so I had reason to suspect I was getting flea-bit. Grrrr!

Shortly after rolling over, I felt like I was being bitten. Fleas... GRRRRR! I reached over my shoulder to flick off the "flea" and ran into something largeish. Funny how fast you can go from sleepy to wakey when something like that happens!

One of our cats, Nala, is in the habit of bringing play things into the house. Mice, grasshoppers, moths, mice, oh, and mice. @#$%???!!! What bit me?! Was it one of her presents?!

Apparently at this point I was still utterly incoherent. My wife later told me I said words to the effect of, "I just got bit by something, and it took a chunk out of me!" Not being incoherent, and being pretty sensible about such things, she sat stock still and said, "Turn on the lights. Now."

Lights on, nothing there. So I started pulling my pillows out of the bed. It came as no surprise to her, though it utterly shocked the bejiminies out of me, but an eight inch centipede dropped out from under one of my pillows and flopped onto the bed, only to scurry off and disappear somewhere.

Insignificant as it may have seemed, at this point I should've been really really glad I didn't sleep with my pillow over my eyes! That thought didn't occur to me until much later, though.

My wife checked me for bites. She found two. One was bad enough to draw blood, and the fang-to-fang separation was on the order of 8-10mm. It was a big 'un. The other bite didn't have clear fang marks, but it was already turning red. Pretty soon my whole shoulder/neck area was inflamed.

If you've never been bitten by a centipede, by all means keep it that way! Don't start now! But if you have, you probably have some idea of what I was going through. It feels like someone squirted lighter fluid all over you and lit it. And from what I've heard there's really not much you can do to cut the pain except ride it out. So I got busy with that while we tried to figure out where to sleep for the rest of the night. It was still in our room, for crying out loud!

At this point another worry started to nag at me: I'm allergic to bee and wasp stings. So far I haven't had respiratory failure because of it, but in high school I had skin reactions to a sting that convinced my mother to take me to an emergency room. This was way worse than any wasp sting I'd ever had! I told my wife to keep tabs on me in case I had trouble breathing or anything.
Luckily my wife knows her exoskeletal life forms better than I do. "It's not an insect. The toxins aren't related." What?! "Centipedes are arachnids, not insects. You get a histamine reaction to insect stings, but arachnid venom is a neurotoxin. I'll keep an eye on you, but I don't think you have anything to worry about."

A rational person would've believed a rational voice like that. But I still felt like I was being burned alive from the shoulders up, and it was starting to feel like things were moving around under my skin, from my neck all the way down to my left hand. I don't have anything to worry about?!

In the end, of course, she was right. We did finally drop off hours later, sleeping on our futon couch. In the morning I still felt awful, but it was better. It just felt like a really bad sun burn. By the end of the day things were back to normal, and I couldn't even tell where the bites were.

But I'm never forgetting what it felt like. Never again. Not if I can help it, anyway.

Tom