Day 1,635: Anaphylaxis

This morning I maybe had run about 50 feet when I felt an annoying stinging sensation in my leg.

I looked down. It was a yellow jacket. There were a couple of others further down the leg, all stinging me.

Then I looked down and saw there were three more each on the tongue of each shoe.

I tried to brush the one on my leg away and then decided to dart back to my driveway where the garden hose was.

That didn't seem to get them off of me so I decided to scrape them off with a piece of bark. One of them flew up and stung me again before I decided to just mash the ones on my shoes into little pieces.

By this time the wife had come outside. Everything seemed ok -- I felt fine and the stings hadn't even swelled up.

So I continued on what I thought was going to be a 6.5-mile run. During the run, I felt crazy itchy on my head. And my right hand looked white for no reason.

I kept running. After more than a mile, I stopped for a second and realized that I couldn't really hear very well out of my ears.

I continued on and tackled the huge hill on Rock Springs Road. I had to stop at the top because I felt tired.

At this point I noticed it was getting hard to see. Things on white backgrounds were very bright and it looked like some kind of Technicolor video gone awry.

I walked down the hill and then turned back on Morningside to walk home the same way I came -- about 2 miles.

I didn't have my cell phone on me so I hoped for the best. I didn't feel dizzy, just a little itchy and there was that thing with the vision.

By the time I got home my vision was a lot better. But the only thing I could do was to just lie down -- every time I got up I felt woozy and it was impossible to really eat anything.

Unwittingly, I'd just suffered from an anaphylactic reaction from the stings.

I'd received nature's version of "a foul to give" -- a sting with no penalty -- in my summer after my sophomore season of college. While working on a landscaping crew, on my last day of my job there I'd been stung on the nose by a yellow jacket. It hurt like crazy but I'd only suffered a swollen nose.

Nearly 20 years later, this came back to haunt me, as it turned out my immune system had been waiting and ready with a vengeance for the next time this toxin came around.

I consider myself pretty lucky, as some people lose the ability to breathe and can die from this kind of anaphylactic reaction.

Hours later I feel better but still can see the hives from earlier in the day and also feel like my innards are all jumbled up.

My future likely will include carrying an epi-pen around just in case and being wary of insects with stingers.

It's pretty surreal this happened, but again I'm just glad since it could have been much worse.