The Christmas Sting
All of us missionaries have the stories that we don’t tell. Perhaps because we are ashamed of the story. It seems we can only share “sin” stories long after we have repented. Or maybe we don’t tell a story because we are worried someone will take it the wrong way. I have missionary friends who would never tell about any vacations, because they were worried their supporters wouldn’t like it, or think they were being too frivolous. And then there are the stories that we don’t tell because it might scare others away. This is one of those stories.
It was our second Christmas abroad, so we knew what to expect, more or less. We were serving seven degrees from the equator, so no snow and no real Christmas trees. We settled for the hand-me-down fake tree from the missionaries who’d left the field before us. We were settling in quite nicely, and I was enjoying the fact my children were too young to know the commercialism they were missing. The Sunday before Christmas we went to church, and sang “Silent Night” in Portuguese, because that one seems to be pretty universal.
Never before and never since has this happened, but our church is in a rural area where we have to carefully clean everything and still deal with various insects and reptiles. This Sunday, as we always do, as I brought the children to the classroom, I made sure to prepare the toy box. I opened it up and made sure everything was in place, and as I reached in, I felt a sting on my palm: like a bee sting. As I investigated further, I saw it was a small scorpion. Rare, in these areas, but not uncommon. I’d had one friend stung before, so I knew the routine.
I pulled all of the children out of the room with me and we stopped the whole church service as I grabbed my husband and a plastic cup. I pushed the cup into his hand and said, “Find the scorpion that stung me and put it in the cup- we are taking it to the doctor!” (The doctors may need to know what kind of scorpion stung you—some kinds are much worse than others) Unsure if I was going to be okay or not, and sure that I was feeling the venom creep up to my heart, I took deep breaths and found friends to take care of my kids. There was no Sunday school that day. My husband returned successfully with a dead scorpion in the cup and we were off to the local emergency room.
The medical team was kind and saw me quickly. In Portuguese, the word for take the medicine and take the shot are the same: “Tomar remedio” So I was expecting to swallow pills, not to be asked to pull up my skirt as they quickly gave me a shot in each bum cheek. Still unsure of what was happening, my husband whisked me home and I took a nap, wondering what all the fuss was about: it felt like a bee sting. The “medicine” had been worse than the sting.
I woke up at 2am that night, jolted awake by the pain, and found that my arm was completely paralyzed from the fingers to my elbow. Any movement of my arm caused shooting pain. My head throbbed in any light, and the heat exacerbated everything. It was 4 days until Christmas, and I was stuck laying in my bedroom with the light off and the one-room air conditioner on. We were away from all of our family, and most of our friends were off on holiday travel at the beach or farther away. Merry Missionary Christmas.
Today, I look back at that Christmas fondly. Time has a way of taking off the sting (literally), and mellowing it down. My husband had a lot of grace for me during that time. We didn’t have anything we had to get done, or places we had to be. By Christmas Eve, I was able to wiggle a couple of fingers. The day after Christmas, I was 90% back to normal, and we decided to take one of those last-minute family vacations that you remember forever, and that cost $50 a night because you got a good exchange rate. Our extended family didn’t notice my hand was stiff when we face-timed them for the holidays, and I kept the story pretty quiet. We don’t want to scare people away from the mission field, you know.