Wanted: Baboon As Temporary Pet, Must Be Medicinally Potent

I’ll be honest, yesterday was not a very good day. Both kids were mildly sick, I needed to have a productive day of checking, but didn’t, and our evening was full of washing two week’s worth of cloth diapers, pumping a dozen jerry cans of water from a well that is drying up, washing a mound of dishes and the obligatory fulfilling the invitation to go to a Gmz friend’s house after dark to drink their homemade keya (ie “beer”) and eat their goat meat which had been barely shown the flame. After all this was said and done, (including my taking my second round of Pepto Bismo in two nights to chase down all the microorganism I had surely ingested), it was nearly an hour past our 10pm bedtime. Andrea, fulfilling her last duty of the night, turned off the house lights and pulled Grace out of bed for her nighttime feeding. And I, not wanting to go to bed before her (somehow I always feel guilty doing so, knowing that her day was likely MUCH longer than mine!), I looked around for one last thing I could do. Micah’s toys – as usual they were spread out all over the room, perfect for tripping the nighttime bathroom runner (that may be literal “runner” if the Pepto didn’t do its job properly!)

So in the dim light of a single 12-volt light bulb, I reached down and started throwing toys into a big box. Dinosaur flashlight, goofy and his helicopter, a stuffed turtle and its squeaking baby, you know the typical. Having finished cleaning up the normal “play area” in our house, I saw about a dozen of small toys: action figures, street signs, and wooden blocks all bunched together in the middle of the room. “Get those put away” I thought to myself, “and I could probably justify sneaking off to bed.”

Working in tandem, my hands moved in to scoop up the majority of the toys in one crushing blow, but much to my surprise, the toys had a secret weapon of their own and weren’t going to give in without a fight. My right hand no problem sliding under the toys on its side of the problem and arriving at the middle where it expected to meet its companion. However, the left never arrived! For somewhere between the left side of the pile and the point of rendezvous, lied a nasty little devil who was enjoying his new home, whose poison-filled, fang-wielding tail likely took pleasure in sinking deep into my wedding-ring finger. It didn’t take but a microsecond for the scream of pain to travel from finger, to my brain and then out my mouth! “EEEyao!”I yipped and Andrea guess it right away, “What, a scorpion?” I grabbed the flashlight with my only good hand and sure enough, there he was, a vicious black scorpion posed perfectly still in attack position.

Meanwhile, my ring finger was now throbbing in mounting pain. I ran it under cold water, didn't help. I raised it in the air, didn't help. I lowered it, made it worse. I tried pressure and ice and soap and everything else I could think of, but the pain only got worse…and spread! First my pinky finger join its neighbor in screaming out pain, then the outside of my wrist, then I could feel the army of venom marching down my forearm and before setting up a base camp at my elbow. All the while I am pacing back and forth in our small house to verbally release my pain in the strongest whisper I could muster.

After a few minutes, Andrea pulled out the medical manuals and with me looking over her shoulder we both read silently “some scorpion stings prove fatal...” Yea, not exactly what I wanted to hear. “…it is best to apply a tourniquet as soon as possible, releasing for five minutes every twenty minutes to slow down the progress of the toxin…” Once again, the “every twenty minutes” note was unwelcome news as it meant to me that I wasn't going to be seeing my pillow for quite some time.  Andrea helped me tie on a half-hearted tourniquet up at my shoulder, which then stopped the river of pain, instead allowing it to pool up behind the tourniquet damn. For the next twenty to thirty minutes I paced back and forth with a constant stream of ouches, ahs and groans in pain. I had to let Andrea, who, somewhere in there went to bed without me, know that I was still alive.

Shorty before slipping into bed Andrea started a thought, “I’m glad it happened to you…” Just a word of wisdom to all you wives out there, don’t attempt to start a sentence like that late at night unless you are confident you can finish it without an unfortunate break. Andrea, on the other hand, paused just a bit too long before continuing, “…I mean, I’m glad it happened to you, and not to Micah.” Now that I could agree with. Yea, the pain was not fun, but the worst of it was the longevity. How would we ever manage a 2-year-old who has trouble holding back tears for close calls, much less actual pain or injury. I’d take this one for the team, may earn an extra star sowed onto my cub scout dad uniform!  For two hours, I paced back and forth in our living room, before managing to relax enough to lay down in bed, and that still with a throbbing pain in my whole left arm.

This morning I woke up to the same throbbing pain, somewhat dulled and somewhat focused back in the ring finger where the excitement all started. I decided to drive the truck to Gilgel Beles for work this morning since the motorcycle required more use out of my finger than I wanted to entrust it with. When I arrived, the Gmz translators shared with me stories of their encounters with scorpion bites. First, I found it interesting Gmz witch doctors say that the toxin travelling through the body is really baby scorpions walking around under the skin, stinging as they go. Though I doubt its scientific basis, I’d say it’s a pretty accurate description of how it felt. The second interesting thing I learned was that the pain of a scorpion sting with disappear if one puts either the skin or the meat of a baboon onto the location of the sting. “Why is that?” I asked. “It’s because the baboon has a natural tolerance to the scorpion venom. In fact, if a scorpion stings a baboon, he feels no pain, he just reaches down picks it up and eats it.” I asked if that was a witch doctor lie, and one translator’s eyes got really big, “Its real, I did it and the pain went away immediately.” I don’t know about you, but that is enough reason for me to get myself a pet baboon and keep a sharp knife handy.