Thursday, August 26, 2010

You want me to what??!!

*I'm back-pedaling to catch up on vacation and all that's happened since. I know, it's almost a lost cause, but I gotta try. So here's another installment.

We hadn't been at the beach more than five minutes when I heard Ashley (my friend's daughter) say she'd been stung by a jellyfish. We've been to Hilton Head and several other beaches over the years, and we've never had this happen! Apparently, the jellyfish were really bad this year, and it was pretty commonplace all up and down the beach. One family told us more than half of them had been stung, and the lifeguard barely batted an eye when we approached her.

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Of course, this was after Ashley asked us to pee on her leg. Yes, you read that correctly. No, not one of us obliged. I reminded her that this was neither an episode of Friends nor Survivor, and, on the advice of nearby vacationers, she took off for the lifeguard tower. The treatment was a good rubbing of the wounded area with sand, a spray of vinegar and water, and a recommendation to stay out of chlorine for a couple of hours.

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With a total of six jellyfish stings in our group in one day, we opted to run to Wal-Mart and buy our own bottle of vinegar. Impressively, though, we had no tears and few lengthy complaints. For all I'd heard about jellyfish stings, this was way less traumatic than I would have imagined, and they were right back out there in the ocean. We did also incur a smashed finger, a cut toe and a skinned knee. But that deserves a post of its own.

original blog date July 19, 2010

1 comment:

Kristi said...

Meat tenderizer also does wonders. I learned this when a school of Portugeuse Man of War came afloat while I was a nanny on vacation in Hawaii. Luckily none of my charges got stung, but lots of other folks did!