Baby's first wasp sting

[ailbhe]

Linnea was sitting on a bench in the community garden when she started to scream. I got to her, and she was screaming "A BEE STUNG MY EYE! MY EYE! MY EYE!" and panicking and hitting out at me. I talked to her and held her hands and let her hit me for a bit, and she calmed down enough to answer questions - "Did a bee sting our eye?" "No, my eyelid," which was helpful.

I carried her across the garden and sat her on a picnic table and tried to look. Someone handed me some antihistamine cream. I found the sting area - it looked like she'd been stung on her cheekbone, near her eye, and clawed a lump of skin off in scratching the sting out. There was a rough swelling area around it. When I persuaded her that the cream was not going in her eye, or on her eye, she allowed me to put it on her cheek.

Turns out a lot of what was wrong was fear of pain like she had when she got pepper in her eyes last week. Pain and not being able to see - not Linnea's favourite things.

I carried her home, most of the way, using the mei tai in a hip carry. She kept acting like she was falling asleep. I was a bit worried in case sudden falling asleep was a bad sign but she recovered, so I think it was the short-term exhaustion from pain and fear, not so much a physical reaction to the sting.

Much later, she found Little House in the Big Woods and spent a long time looking at the pages around where Charley gets into a yellow jacket's nest. Then she tried to explain to me that a bee sting is worse than a wasp sting because with a wasp sting you get better quickly but with a bee sting it takes a long time and you are very sick.

That was easier than the conversation we had earlier about absolute nothingness and the extent of the universe.

Comments

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

My first sting (wasp or hornet) was at the age of about ten, and it was right on the tender bit of the end of my nose. I had never experienced anything like that burning indignity. And then afterwards my nose ran and ran. And this was at the cottage, so there were no ice cubes.