Life Spider Man
Happens every year around this time. In the middle of the night. While I’m sleeping. Apparently I’m delicious.
Went to bed on Friday night and then woke up at 4:30 am thinking that something about my mouth felt funny. Got up. Looked into the mirror. My lower lip looked like two side-by-side Medjool dates. I could barely mumble. I looked like a cartoon.
And my wrist was itching. (Was I dreaming?) I found the source of the itch: a huge welt near the vein below my right thumb. I went outside to hail a cab for an emergency room. Impossible, even at Broadway and John, to hail a cab at 4:30 am, so I ended up calling one. While I was waiting for it I found another huge welt on my left elbow.
Spider bites.
The emergency room at Swedish was empty. The nurse checking me in made a crack about Angelina Jolie. She whisked me in. They put an IV in my arm—”The fastest way to get medicine into you,” the doctor said—and plugged me up to heart monitor. (Was I dying?) The first thing they put into my bloodstream was some kind of adrenaline, followed by Benadryl, and since adrenaline and Benadryl have pretty much opposite effects on your body (one gives you energy, one puts you to sleep) I began twitching around on the bed. Totally normal, they said. Then they gave me what I can only describe as a bong. Don’t remember what it was supposed to do, but I had to smoke it nonstop for 10 minutes. It gurlged and gave off smoke and everything.
Then I fell into a nap, and when I woke up the welts in my wrist and elbow were magically gone. My lips were slightly plumper than usual, but I could talk again. I left the emergency room shortly thereafter, stopped at Tully’s for a slice of coffee cake because I was starving, thought about all the ways it could have been worse, walked home, and went back to sleep. On the couch this time. Wearing a Swedish emergency room wristband and a chunk of gauze taped to my arm.
I too have the inevitable bedtime spider bites every summer. I've never had an experience as severe as yours, but I currently have enormous red itchy/painful welts on my elbow, in the crook of my knee, the back of my opposite thigh and on the top of my foot. I don't know how I've escaped the usual attack on my face, but now that I've typed that, I'm sure to wake up tomorrow covered in more bites.
I've been spending the day scouring every crevice in my room to try to flush out the bastards.