I hadn’t been back in Rover for very long before I had a lifetime first.
It was just about 12:30 or so when, while I was sort of vegging out/recharging After a long day (I think I’ve become more and more introverted over the years, or maybe it’s just a stress level, but I seem to always need some winding down time by myself at the end of the day regardless of how good or challenging the day has been).
Anyway, it was somewhere around 12: 30 that I had been eating a couple of little personal pies from the Walmart bakery. A blueberry one and strawberry cream one.
As I finished up the blueberry pie, I noticed that I had a pretty good stomach ache, like my stomach didn’t agree at all with the little pie. That was odd because I had had the same pie just a couple of weeks before on our way out to Utah, as I recall. At least the same blueberry. At that time, I had bought three or four different kinds, but one of them was blueberry. The strawberry cream was a new one that I had to try, and with the stomach ache already being annoying, I figured I wasn’t going to make it any worse by eating the strawberry cream one as well, so I decided to go ahead and eat the strawberry cream pie.
Well, I’m not 100% sure which pie it was, or a combination of both. I think it was probably the blueberry pie, but shortly after eating the pies, the top of my head started to itch crazy badly.
The onset was so quick and so sudden that My brain was scrambling to come up with a cause.
When I scratched my head, the itch became so intense that with both hands, I just scratched and scratched and scratched.
It wasn’t too long before the itch decided to multiply, next moving to my nether regions.
😶
My brain was scrambling to figure out what on Earth was going on. I was thinking to myself, have I gotten myself into some kind of lice or bed bugs or something?
It wasn’t too long after that, however, that I realized what was going on. My body was going into an anaphylactic reaction.
My lips started swelling up, and my finger started swelling up as well. I had been eating the little pies with my pointer finger and thumb in an effort to reduce the number of crumbs that I might accidentally get on my bed.
The it’s continued to spread, my lips continued to swell, and my finger tips swelled to the point that it might as well have been broken. It was so swollen that it started to get cold from lack of circulation.
And all over my body, itchy hives appeared seemingly all at once.
It was pretty nutty.
At that point, I knew I needed to get some help, so I went inside, went downstairs, and woke my mom up– explaining what was going on.
She suggested that I needed to take some Benadryl or some kind of antihistamine right away, so I headed back out to the van to see if we had in our first aid kit that we had brought along, but we didn’t.
In the meantime, while I was looking, she And connected with makai, who is still awake, to see if they had any in the house, which they did. So my mom let me know that, and I came back inside, took some pills, and contrary to the wishes of my mother, went back out to the van for the night– promising to let her know if I got worse instead of better.
In relatively short order after taking the pills, the advance of the reaction, if it was even going to advance any further, was stopped, the hives went away, and my finger and lips started to return to their normal size.
Gratefully neither my tongue nor my throat started to swell.
Apparently, there are four stages or levels of anaphylaxis, and my symptoms had reached level 2 before they were stopped reversed.
Feeling a bit better, I was able to fall asleep, but first thing in the morning, I took more pills, which left me pretty tired.
I ended up staying in the van all morning and much of the afternoon, almost until evening–a combination of sleep/sleepiness, college football, and social anxiousness contributing to my stay in the van.
Eventually, however, I emerged and joined the party And I’m glad I did. Lots of wonderful people. And we had some great conversations. There were a few of us who started having a conversation about multiple different things that can be hot button issues, but we were able to just talk about it and express perspectives and what not without anybody getting offended.
I absolutely love that. I love understanding New perspectives because I feel like they often inform and enrich my own.
That conversation was a little microcosm and what I hoped to be able to contribute to on a wider scale in my hopes and efforts to bring people together on common values.
Anyway, we talked about those hot button things, we talked about technology and its progression and where it might lead in the future, and what not.
Great stuff. 🙂
I think I downed a couple of root beers, and three other drinks, so I was bladder filled by the end of the night. 😆
Falling in the footsteps of my nephew Jack who had mentioned he’d already had five drinks, when I showed up to the party and started downing a bunch of my own. 🙃
Anyway, it was a wonderful get together. I love that my sister did it again this year after doing it last year.
The rest of the night was filled with more talking and chatting and just… being together.
Good stuff.
Lift the world.
~ stephen
Lift the World 