Thursday, September 27, 2012

Bethany's 1st Scorpion sting!


Today I was washing some clothes by hand and all of a sudden felt like I'd been stung by something -I thought a bee. So when I looked through the article of clothing I was washing I found a scorpion. It took a minute for me to realize that I had just been stung by a scorpion. Let me just say, it was pretty anti-climactic. :)

It was mid-morning so Eli was up in the office. I thought it would be good to let him know I'd been stung because I'd never experienced it before and didn't know how I'd react. He and Claire were working on a project together so of course Nurse Claire wanted to help too. She retrieved her special electric zapper from her house and brought it over.


In the picture above you can see the zapper contraption. Don't ask me how it works except that you use the electricity from 4 D batteries and use the electric shock to neutralize the poison. We've used it on other people for scorpion stings and snake bites and it's been very helpful. Unfortunately the only set of batteries we have on this whole campus were dead so we had to move to Plan B.

Plan B was to go next door to FAR organization and ask them for D batteries. Then we realized they were out on a day trip to a village. Moving on to Plan C. I decided to look up online what to do. Meanwhile I could feel the poison/pain moving up my hand and up my arm all the way to my arm pit. It was the strangest sensation. Suddenly I remembered something the Donker family had left behind in their medical stuff - a little box called Aspivenin. I pulled it out, read the instructions and proceeded to try it.


Here I am hooked up to the aspivenin which works like a strong suction to pull out the poison through the skin. We were skeptical at first but it worked! We did it 3 different times, leaving the suction on for about 2-3 minutes each time and each time we took the suction off, there was moisture in the cup - which we're thinking/hoping was the scorpion's poison. The suction gave me a nice bubble pictured below.


All in all, it wasn't nearly as bad as I'd always imagined a scorpion sting would be. I was just so grateful it hadn't been one of the boys who got stung. Only 4 hours later, my finger felt like I'd just burned it, no big deal. Soooo thankful that God was by my side through the whole experience. I think he lessened the pain for me. :)

5 comments:

Katie said...

You have to be the toughest gal I know!! Super impressed! :)

Love,
Katie

Chris Daly said...

Glad to here that it wasn't a bad experience.... I'm Audrey and David's friend and I will be in Juba by the end of October.

Blessings,
Chris Daly

Sandy said...

Bethany, I'm so glad things worked out as well as they did! God helped you stay calm!!! And in a problem-solving mode! Hugs! Love, Sandy

Bruce Sollitt said...

Do you have an email address I can contact you on?
bruce@aspivenin.net

Anonymous said...

Some scorpions are worse than others. Kinda hard to tell.

Why does sickness like to hang around so long???

Only a few days after returning from our trip to Kenya, Judah started spiking high fevers. We took him to our clinic here in town for blood ...