That one time I stepped on a bee

For those of you who never paid attention in Biology classes: do you know that bees are only able to sting once before dying? This is caused mainly because its stinger is attached to its guts. So when a bee stings a person (or anything, it doesn't have to be a person, really), the stinger sticks to whatever it stung and its innards would be pulled out altogether with the stinger. Resulting in death.

With that being said, let me start this story by saying that I am a kind kid. My parents always told me that bees only sting when they felt threatened. I never got stung by a bee, it's either because I was a kind kid, or because I always ran like hell when I saw a bee. Let's all silently agree it was because I was a kind kid. Apparently, a lot of my friends were stung by bees when they were a child. So, really, to some extent, having never been stung by a bee was something to be proud of. Or at least it was for me who had nothing else to be proud of.

Everything changed last week though. And I could never brag about having never been stung by a bee anymore.

It was five in the morning when my cellphone I put beside my pillow rang. It was not the usual alarm tone which would never fail to force me to wake up to hit 'snooze' and go back to sleep. It was my usual ring tone. I opened my eyes for a bit and saw the caller ID. It was an unregistered number that I had ignored for God knows how many times, so I instantly knew it was my dad. Ugh, what's with him?

I left my room hurriedly. My hunch told me it would be something super important if he woke me up this early. As soon as I flew down the stairs, he asked me where the car key was. Oh sure. Let's wake Kent up because you forgot where you put your key last night. Great.

So, being a kind kid that I was, I looked around and searched for the car key. The key that he misplaced the night before. I was glasses-less and sandal-less and as soon as I entered his bedroom, my nose was struck by a tremendous amount of cigarette smoke. I coughed and stumbled forward. It was then when I felt something on my left foot. At first it stung for a bit. Just like a small red ant's bite. Then the pain became more intense. Each passing second way more painful than the previous one. After three full seconds, I took a look at what I just stepped. A bee. A friggin' bee. I just stepped on a bee, and now it hurts. Didn't take a genius to realize that I just got stung. By an unconscious bee. I fell on the floor and pulled the stinger out. If the bee wasn't dead because I stepped on it, it surely was now after it stung me. Stupid bee.

So, my first experience with beesting was stepping on a bee. An unconscious one (by the way, cigarettes' smoke destroys bees' sense of direction and in turn, knock them unconscious. Oh I feel so smart...). Which means I just stung myself. Oh, in my defense, I was sure the bee was setting a trap by lying there pretending to be unconscious.The first 30 minutes after the beesting was hell. It swelled for a bit and it hurt a lot. Each step I took sent a jolting pain over my foot which forced me to cringe after each step.

To cut the story short, I found the car key and my dad left afterwards. In the evening when he got home, he noticed that the way I walked was funny and asked what was wrong. I told him that I stepped on a bee, and he laughed as he said, "Good thing you stepped on it. Otherwise I would have stepped on it. You took the fall for the team." I was really thinking to smoke a cigarette and blow the smoke to a bee, make it unconscious and plant the bee on his chair. Ugh. Of course I didn't do it since I was a kind kid. Teehee.

Now it has been exactly 10 days after I got stung. And it itches. It itches like hell. In fact, I'm writing this with nervousness and anxiety of me turning into a Beeman tomorrow. Kind of like Spiderman, but instead of shooting web to villains, my superpower would be being able to ass-bump someone I don't like and die immediately afterwards.