Sleep Less

May 4, 2012

Of all the things I imagined about Wednesday night, waking up at 1:08, screaming, grabbing my back, and stripping my pajama bottoms off were not among them.

Now, I am left to ponder how I could have possibly angered the gods so much that they would have slipped a scorpion under the covers and down my pants right in the middle of my RIM sleep pattern.

 
You can tell this is not the scorpion that stung me four times in the small of my back as I slept.  For one thing I would have photographed the real scorpion on my Rembrandt rose colored Lands End sheets, not the stucco pictured here.  For another, my scorpion would have looked much flatter, smashed over and over in my frenzy by Walter's size 13 shoe until it lay in unrecognizable small clumps on the floor.

Lest you worry, the damage from this incidence is minor, except for the lost sleep (which is inevitable, because really, who wants to get back into bed after this happens?  At that point, there is no end to the places where your imagination takes you--though in honesty, all of them involve feeling small things crawling across your skin in places you can't see or reach.).

I have to say that I was mightily disappointed in Teddy, the guard dog, who has made the case for the last three years that she deserved to sleep IN THE BED with me and Walter so she can PROTECT US AT EVERY TURN.  I don't think she woke up until after I had stripped to the buff and pounded my assailant into paste.

I also mentally composed a letter of apology to my mother at some point as I sat in my sleepless state waiting for the morning to come.  Years ago, she was stung by a scorpion while gardening.  I won't describe in detail where she was stung, but you can form your own mental picture by imagining a scorpion in the grass swinging its barbed tail up to sting someone squatting to pull weeds.  I believe I had learned in Girl Scouts that the appropriate first aid for scorpion stings required a tourniquet between the sting site and the heart.  And I always founded it incredibly funny to remind her that it would have been nigh impossible for her to follow that advice.  Now it doesn't seem funny at all.