OR
AN AUTHORS REAL LIFE HORROR STORY!!!
So what could be better than starting off your summer with a three week visit to family in Spain? Sun, sea and evenings sipping beer and whisky once the kids are in bed.
Plenty of visits to the beach with cooling dips in the sea when the temperature gets you to melting point. Splashing around in the water with the kids, a perfect family holiday, well it should have been. There was one small cloud on the horizon, the seas off the Costa del Sol had an unwelcome visitor and on the first day in the sea I met one.
Swimming around quiet merrily, watching the kids splash around I lay on my back to float, swinging my arms out behind me. Suddenly something stung my arm, now this wasn’t like a bee sting, not unless the bee had ganged up with about ten of its mates and brought a Taser gun to numb your arm into the bargain. Stumbling out of the sea and ensuring the kids were out too I saw the reason for my discomfort, an angry red mark on the inside of my upper arm. A jellyfish sting, a gift I would soon discover would keep on giving.
Now I hear you all scream “Why didn’t you get someone to pee on it?” Well firstly no one is going to pee on me (Well apart from when the kids were little and would wait until you unfastened the nappy to aim a stream at your face.) and secondly no one is going to pee on me, it may sting but it won’t sting for that long. Now I know just how stupid not letting someone pee on me was.
A couple of days later I began to get a real bad rash as my skin came up in blisters and then my hands began to swell up. A visit to the chemist to get some cream stopped the itching but didn’t stop a visit to a jeweller to cut off my wedding ring. (Now here’s a good part of the story, the Spanish jeweller didn’t have the tool he needed so he sent his wife back to his house to get it. Then with great care he cut the ring off and wouldn’t take any money for his trouble.)
For the next couple of weeks the rash and swelling persisted as I applied cream and took anti-histamine tablets while the area of the sting went from swollen and red to angry red and after I pulled out a number of tiny little splinter like spikes it began to heal quiet well.
I believed my jellyfish nightmare was over but in the true traditions of all great, and not so great horror films the bad guy wasn’t dead. It just hid itself and waited until I wasn’t expecting it to strike, and boy did it strike.
We had returned home and all seemed well with the world until about the second or third morning when I awoke. Now half asleep I shuffled to the toilet with a full bladder and got the fright of my life. Nothing should ever look like that, it wasn’t just the swelling but also the area around covered in the tell-tale blistered rash. I don’t know if I screamed out loud but the primal scream inside my mind rattled the windows of my sanity. I was sat before a doctor in under two hours, my dislike of going blown away in an instant with an image I will take to my grave. There is an ancient statue found in northern Europe of the goddess, probably the oldest religious carving ever. You should never pee out of something that looked like that.
I explained to the doctor that while on holiday I had been stung by a jellyfish and had been having a rash and at the time my hands had swollen badly but this morning I had woken up and my thingy was swollen.
Aghast he asked “You were stung on the penis?”
I explained no I was stung on the arm and then showed him the injured item and he noted in his notes ‘badly swollen.’ (understatement of the year) and sent me off with tablets that he promised would start to help within a couple of days.
Now the horror of the jellyfish had been defeated….
Guess again, another week or so passed and again I awoke to soreness around the top of my arm and discovered that tell-tale blistered rash all around my armpit and as the day progressed a wrist that swelled to twice its usual size. Smothered with cream the curse of the jellyfish was again defeated but still it may return. Jason and Freddie have nothing on the resurrection capacity of this thing as I’m told it could return many more times before the final conflict is played out. I awake in fear not knowing what part of my body will be affected next….
a nose….
a foot….
Or… the return of the goddess statue!!!!!
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