Thanksgiving

This is a little late.
We had a good Thanksgiving weekend. It was our turn to go to the in-laws. The food was good and I ate a ton. We sat around, and ended up playing basketball outside until midnight. IT WAS FREEZING, but we had fun. Our favorite game is called POISON where it's a combination of Speed, PIG, and Dodge ball. So everyone gets a chance to shoot, if you make the basket, you yell POISON and everyone has to freeze and you get to throw the ball at them. Pretty fun.


The next night I really wanted to take the kids to the hot pots. I'd only been once, 6 years earlier. It was my first time to Delta and we had a lot of fun. That trip Rhett drove us all around the west desert for 2 hours until he found the hot pots, but this time thanks to google earth, he knew right where to go.


The most popular hot pot was CROWDED. Does everyone know what a hot pot is? It's a hot spring, so the water is warm. It's pretty stinky, kind of sulfur smelling stink. But it is really fun to go swimming in the middle of winter, in an outdoor swimming hole, in the middle of the desert, in the middle of the night. We trespassed to a different hot pot (there are three out in Meadow, UT) and it was perfect. Warm, just a sandy, rocky bottom, and no one else there.
It was Rhett and I and a few choice nieces and nephews, many weren't interested...lame-o. Conversation was great. We all revealed our crushes. Brock who's a freshman said he didn't have one. He said: "I know hot girls, I know nice girls, and I know girls that are fun to hang out with. But to have a crush on one just seems kind of pathetic to me." I thought that was funny and probably true.

Later I asked Brock "What's the difference between a girl that is hot and a girl that is beautiful?" He thought about it and said. "A hot girl just looks good--eye candy. But you can see a piece of candy and it looks really good, but you really have no idea where its been. But a beautiful girl still has the wrapper on. It looks good, and the wrapper is sealed so you know it's good inside and out."
We all were laughing and I thought it was a pretty good answer.

After we'd had enough swimming, we all got Rhett's mom's van to head back to Delta. About 10 minutes into the drive, I felt a scrape in the sleeve of my hoodie. I reached in, expecting a chunk of tumble weed or something. I felt something round, smooth and squishy. "Oh great." I thought: "RJ put one of his squished grapes in my jacket, he'd been spitting out half eaten grapes all over all day. I grabbed it and pulled it out, but it got caught on the ribbing wrist of the hoodie. I reached back in and this time the "grape" was wiggling. I pulled it out and saw it was a SPIDER! I dropped it in my lap and gave a screech and yelled "Pull Over!", flipping on the little light in the car over the dashboard. On my flannel PJ pants, was this spider with the largest butt I'd ever seen. The butt really was the size of a grape, a brownish purple, smooth and shiny! The weird thing was how small the rest of the spider was in comparison to the butt.

Yes, I had all this time to stare at the spider...at this point Rhett FINALLY pulled over and I opened the door, hopped out and brushed it off and jumped back in, leaving it's wriggling carcass in the middle of the desert to freeze.

All the kids were a buzz with the drama. I noticed then that I had a sting, which had been the spider bite. It felt like a bee sting, with the burning. A few minutes later, the surrounding skin had raised hives. Then I had a sharp pain in the arm pit of that arm. It was at this point we decided it had been a poisonous spider.
I was telling him the venom probably moved up in my lymph nodes in my arm pit. We kept driving the 45 minutes back to Delta and not much changed. We got to the house and I took some Benedryl. By then the pit pain was gone and I was fine. We ate some more, then I was trying to reply to some emails when my lower back started killing. I was trying to finish, as my hips started hurting too. It hurt so bad, I couldn't sit, so I went and lay down. My two little nieces came with me, concerned and asking if they could get me anything. Rhett came in and I told him it was killing.

WE got heat pads, and the little girls massaged my back, but it kept hurting and the pain spread slowly up my back. Apparently during all this time the rest of the family was online trying to classify the spider, the two nephews that sat behind me, the authorities on what it looked like.

Rhett came in with the info:

Diagnosis: BLACK WIDOW spider bite.

Symptoms: muscle spasms of the large muscles that can cause considerable pain

There's a lot more that can happen, but I didn't have nausea or anything, just muscle spasms.

Insurance is expensive, and I just have the high deductible basic coverage, in case I ever get seriously injured or something. So I didn't want to go to the ER if I could wait it out. Stupid. I know.

So I suffered from 8pm to 1 am trying to work through the pain. I always thought I was a pretty tough person, or at least had a high pain threshold. I gave birth to my son with zero pain medications. And I was induced by a rumored "pitocin flooder" physician. And I didn't ever loose mental control of the pain or yell, or wail, or say I can't do this, or ask for an epidural. I was in total control the whole time and it wasn't that bad. And the kid was a 9 1/2 pound rhino baby. And I definitely didn't cry tears out of pain. But that was nothing compared to this spider bite. Those muscle cramps KICKED MY TRASH! It felt like labor, but never relaxed. It was like a contraction that started at 8 pm and never relented, but spread. I think around midnight I got too exhausted and it hurt too bad so I started bawling and couldn't get comfortable. I just lay there writhing in pain. Finally at 1 pm I got on my shoes, and Rhett was like: Finally! He'd been sitting by me waiting for my stubborn self to get a clue.

So by this time I'd totally lost control and was just bawling in pain. The kids were wide-eyed as I was walking out to the car. One nephew, Mitch, came up to me and said: "I'm sorry you got bit by the spider Jess." I said: "Don't worry, tomorrow I'll wake up and be Spiderwoman." His head snapped up with huge eyes. "I'm just kidding" I sobbed as we both laughed and we left.

THe ER did fine. It was a resident moonlighting. I was in the most pain I've ever experienced. I was laying there just bawling as it spread down from by butt into my thighs. THAT KILLED! I found the bigger the muscle, the greater the spasm capacity, the greater the pain. I was feeling like such a wimp, but I think I was also just too worn out to control it and just sobbed. When he finally let the nurse give me some ativan, it didn't do anything, so she loaded me with 6 ml? mg? of morphine. That took most of the pain away, and I could handle the remaining aches in my lower back. By then the ANTI-VENOM had arrived from Fillmore, UT and after that titrated in, it was gone and I was ready to get out of there before I hiked up a steeper bill.

I went home and went to bed and woke up the next day at 1pm totally cured, and just a little loopy from all the morphine.

So it was a horrible experience, worse pain than labor and birth, and in the end I didn't even get a baby out of it. So if you live in an area with black widows SPRAY to kill them! Or shake your clothes out after swimming in a hot pot in the west deserts of Utah. In the end we were all glad I was bitten rather than one of the kids.