Wednesday, May 21, 2008

A close call

I just called Graci to tell her she had to drive across town on $4/gallon gas to come kill an insect. Quit rolling your eyes. The fucker had 15 PAIRS OF LEGS.

I could picture ALL 30 LEGS crawling into my mouth as I slept tonight. The creepy crawliness would surely wake me up, but not enough to expectorate the creature, just enough to freak out and choke on it. And, with the current status of my immune system, beaten down by all this work, I would surely catch aspiration pneumonia. Repeated bronchoscopies to try and remove the dead and rotting bug would fail to retrieve all 30 legs, some of which would remain a source of festering lung infection.

In short, I would be dead in a month.

I'm not an entomologist or a pulmonologist, but I'm pretty sure that if you asked those people, they would say that's how it goes when something with 15 PAIRS OF LEGS crawls around your bedroom at night.

Graci, you saved my life.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm always glad to be of service, T.

And to be honest, anything with more than six legs is outside the realm of my admiration and definitely deserving of death...especially if it is to save you from a festering lung infection.

dive said...

Fry the critter first.
They're full of protein and lovely and crunchy, T.
And sheesh! Why is everyone over there complaining about $4 a gallon gas? It's $12 a gallon in my village.

Susanlee said...

I woke up one day a few weeks ago pretty positive that I had just inhaled a spider...thanks for triggering the PTSD, T. *grin* You should totally buy Graci a. a drink and b. one of those bug vacuums that they sell at toys r us.

MmeBenaut said...

So Graci didn't stick a pin in it and put it on a board? 15 pairs of legs? Perhaps you were hallucinating dear or was it a millipede or centipede? No, not the latter, they have a hundred legs not 30. I give up. What was it Graci?

j-dub said...

was this your foe? I used to call them "walking mustaches." I had a garden-level apartment that was prone to them.

(for those who don't know "garden-level" is a nice term for basement)

Anonymous said...

One of the worst things about my divorce is that now I'm the one who has to kill the centipedes. I ahte them. I call them devil bugs.

Maria said...

So, you read Z too...

Once, in med school, I had a patient with porphyria that we had lots of trouble diagnosing.

A few days later, my skin started to blister for no good reason. I immediately wondered if this has something to do with the valium that I had taken one night when I HAD to sleep in order to pull a 48 hour the next day. I was so sure that I had porphyria that I had myself tested by a co-worker.

And, of course, it was nothing...probably an allergic reaction or stress or something. But, this was the series of a list of illnesses that I was sure I had after seeing some truly strange stuff that can happen to the human body.

I hate spiders. HATE them. Mostly because they are so damn crafty. It is like they can read your mind and know that you will feint left and then they go right and disappear into a hole in the woodwork.