My mid morning Pilates teacher no showed today. I waited for 6 minutes online and decided that instead of waiting longer, I would get dressed and head out the door to get a ride in before it starts getting hot outside.
I won’t bore you with my routine of getting dressed and ready for a ride, but today was no exception and within 15 minutes, I was out on my bike, heading toward Boulder Creek Canyon. My goal: ride up Four Mile to Poorman’s and down Sunshine.
I even stopped on the way to snap a photo of the gushing Boulder Creek. Snow is melting in the high country and water is rapidly flowing downstream. I continued on my way, climbing up the canyon and turned up Poorman - a dirt road with some deeper gravel washboard sections. Today - I encountered a garbage truck. We played leap frog up the hill - the driver stopping every so often to collect garbage, as I slowly ground up the steeper pitches. I even slowed down to not impede his stinky progress.
Once I crested, it was smooth sailing downhill until I came across another road cyclist, who was a little more hesitant on the dirt. Back on the tarmac, I took a sip of my water and started the fun descent, the best part in my opinion. I love getting low, weight the outside foot, inside hang, looking through the corners and zooming downhill. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to flying and it usually invokes a flow state.
Setting up for the first left hand corner, I caught a flying bug out of the corner of my eye, which landed and stung me on the collar of my jersey.
Shit. I’m allergic to bees.
I stopped quickly, skidding on the gravel on the side of the road with little shoulder. Grabbed my Epi Pen from my back pocket, and prepared for the gruesome stabbing. The auto injector is supposed to go into your quad and you’re supposed to hold it for 3 seconds. Every time I’ve used one before, I slam it into my thigh, only to pull it right back out and definitely not keeping it in for three seconds. Today was no different.
If you use an Epi Pen, medics advise to make your way to a hospital just in case. And while I usually have mild to severe reactions to bee stings, my face swelled up like Jennifer Lawrence once and it wasn’t pretty. I’ve been stung while riding my bike in the mouth (bottom lip) while riding, on the neck twice, on the forehead once (hence the Jennifer Lawerence look) and on the foot while climbing in Yosemite. The somewhat recent swollen face in 2015 was a wake up call to get some meds. I didn’t feel like my breathing was impacted - but should a bee sting me in the back of the throat? Game over.
Ready for it?
This is about 2 hours after the initial sting. Here’s one from about 4 hours later:
So, I stood on the side of Sunshine Canyon, mustering up every ounce of courage I could as I flipped off the safety tab and prepared for the quad stab. Pulp Fiction runs through my mind every time and so does the image of my swollen face. One, two, (a truck drives by, the driver glances in their rear view mirror) THREE! As soon as the pen lands on my skin I pull it out. That wasn’t 3 seconds. I immediately feel a rush of epinephrine, quickening my heart rate, enhancing my senses. .2 seconds will have to do.
Again, you’re supposed to go to a doctor just to make sure you don’t have an allergic reaction to your allergic reaction. I figured if by the time I was at the bottom of Sunshine canyon and started to feel woozy, I’d make my way to the hospital off of Broadway. At that point, I didn’t feel it except my quad was SCREAMING!
Have you ever been sucker punched in the arm and it hits just right and hurts really bad? You feel like you broke a bone or something? That’s what this is like except it doesn’t go away. And every time I tried to push on the pedals, it sent a message to my pain receptors that all was not right in my world. Never mind that Ben is in Wisconsin along with my bail out option. This bee sting is my cross to bare.
I make it home, composing a meme in my head:
Bee: 1
Epi Pen: 1
Jen: -2
(In my heightened state - I thought I was hilarious!!)
I make it home, safe and sound. Crisis averted. Except I can barely walk my quad hurts so bad.
I’m listening to the “Fluke” audiobook and a lot of the chaos theory concepts get my mind turning. The main premise is that often small, minuscule actions can leave a lasting impact on entire ecosystems, trains of thought, actions from others and beyond. In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state. (Source: Wikipedia)
What if my Pilates teacher showed up that morning? What if I had kenneled Mochi and Oskar instead of leaving them free to roam, taking an extra minute to do? What if I hadn’t stopped to take a photo of the raging creek? Or encountered the garbage truck? What if that bee dying will send a ripple effect into the world?
Coincidence or just poor timing? Hard to say. Now to find those other epi pens…