This is the story of my Saturday night. Even if I had wanted to share it at the time, it would have been impossible. For you see…I fought the Jalapeno and the Jalapeno won.
I love to garden. Grew a ton of jalapenos this year (and they’re still coming). My resourceful hubs founds a great recipe on line for cream cheese stuffed, bacon wrapped jalapenos. We tried it once, they were great. So we planned to serve them again with my folks in town.
Rather than bitch about how hot they were because hubs neglected to remove all of the white skin, I offered to scrape out the peppers. And to cut to the chase…I did it without gloves…for easily 50 pepper halves.
You know in the beginning there was just this little spot on one finger that stung–like I might have had a paper cut or something. Then a little more of that finger started to burn. Then? Yes, I touched my eye. I mean come on. How many bad stories have you heard about idiots doing this? I thought I was avoiding my eye–but apparently I hadn’t. Because all of the sudden I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t open it, I couldn’t close it, I couldn’t touch it. And in front of my whole family, my parents, my mother-in-law, her sister, my good friends B & S (immature chuckle) and their kids. If the episode had ended there I would have learned my lesson.
But then the real pain began.
The burning spread across both of my palms and around the tops of my fingers. I barely slept at all Saturday night from the pain. It was mildly better Sunday when I woke up…until I took a shower. This fateful step somehow unleashed the oils. I couldn’t hold the hair dryer to dry my hair. I couldn’t hold the steering wheel to drive. I didn’t want anyone to talk to me. I couldn’t get to a bottle of Solarcaine fast enough. It felt like the worst sunburn you could imagine exacerbated by exposing it to the blistering sun the next day.
While my fingers were in too much pain to type, I had time to think about what I would title this entry. Here are a few of my initial thoughts…
The Depths to Which I’ll Sink for Food
Channeling My Inner Dali
Let Down in My Hour of Need
I May Now Qualify to Join the X-Men
To elaborate, Let Down in My Hour of Need was to express the sadness I encountered when my friend the Internet did not readily provide me with an antedote to my pain. People had all sorts of suggestions (soak the skin in vegetable oil, soak it in milk, rub lemon/lime juice on the burn, wear rubber gloves–as if I’m looking for that advice at this point!). It wasn’t until my final grasp for relief on Sunday morning that I found a random comment to someone’s blog (thank god for comments). The suggestion called for the use of Solarcaine. Let me just tell you…the liquid of the Gods this weekend.
As for the X-Men? Until today, I could heat up anything I touched. For a while I thought I was going to come out of the experience with a new super power, but lo it is not to be.
Did I learn a lesson? Hell yeah! I will remember this experience with more clarity then I’ll remember either of the times I was numbed from the waist down to extract a nearly nine pound kid from my belly. Probably because for that I got drugs!
So dear reader, learn from my stupidity, because otherwise…I’m just an idiot.
I’m in Florida for work–in the town I lived during highschool.
