During last year’s hike in the Turkish mountains, a scorpion stung me. Now I will probably become Spider-Man and spend day and night saving humanity. But while I am still a normal person, I can spare a couple of minutes to tell you about this incident. If you suddenly want to become a superhero too — now you will know where to find a stingy scorpion.
An ordinary scorpion is not hard to find in Turkey — every evening they crawl out of their hideouts and wait right on the trails. But they do not seem to hunt tourists at all. So for most of the hike we got along with the scorpions just fine. Only once did I manage to find a scorpion hungry enough to attack a human.
It was evening. All day we had been losing altitude — descending from Mount Tahtali toward the sea. Already at dusk we passed the “botanical establishments” of Ulupinar and camped for the night not far from the river. The place was, in principle, fine, but something about it put me off, and for a while I wondered whether we should walk a bit farther — but people were damn tired… We decided to stay.
To keep from falling asleep (it had been a long day), I went for firewood. I had even managed to collect a decent bundle of brushwood when a wild pain shot through the hand I had lowered behind the next branch. For a split second I thought I had jabbed my finger on an especially hard pine needle (fallen needles covered everything around). But a needle cannot pierce a finger through and through. And that is exactly what I felt — an incredibly sharp, endlessly long needle boring deeper and deeper into the hand (into a hand that had already been yanked away).
What caused the pain I could only guess — poking through the needles with a stick, I found no one, and there were no bite marks on my finger. Thank God — so it was not a snake. So, a scorpion. Probably a scorpion… Who the hell knows.
Just in case, I take out a lighter and cauterize the sting. I had never played with fire this way before, but this was a special case, and the pain in my finger was such that I barely felt the heat. I listen to my body — the pain is clearly spreading. Three minutes have passed since the sting, and I already feel it in my wrist. I wonder what comes next?
Although my mind is perfectly calm, my heart in my chest tightens with an unspoken fear…
Time to act. I drop the firewood and hurry to the clearing, to the group. I did not want to start a panic, so I quietly pull Sasha (second instructor and first biologist) and Ira (a medic by training) aside and share the good news. We confer.
Ten minutes have already passed since the sting, and the pain has reached the elbow. The pain itself is easy enough to bear; the uncertainty and the fear inside are much harder.
I remember that while preparing for the hike I had written down the number of an English-speaking doctor who lived somewhere in these parts. Luckily I found the number, the phone caught a signal, and now Sasha and I are running together to the nearest botanical restaurant (no more than a kilometer away). The doctor will come straight there as soon as we can explain what the place is called.
A marvelous moment. In front of a perfectly respectable little restaurant, in the heart of resort Turkey, two smoke-blackened hikers (us) sit on the steps looking bored. From time to time, diners tired of food emerge from the feeding hall, crawl toward their cars, chatting in Russian. And then the show begins — a small car pulls up to the restaurant; after a short dialogue its driver pulls a syringe from his bag and, under the curious stares of the public, injects my arm. snatches a syringe and a pack of ampoules from somewhere. Magical passes follow, and there I am sitting behind the wheel with my arm out the window. The doctor stands outside…
This is dragging on. In short: they gave me an intravenous injection right in front of the restaurant, in full view of the holidaymakers. After that I rode with the doctor to the next village, got a couple of blister packs of painkillers and a brief set of instructions. The doctor was perfectly calm, I calmed down too, the pain stopped spreading — all in all, life was back on track.
From the explanations of the esteemed Ali Benli (that was the Turkish Aesculapius’s name) I understood that a lot depends on personal sensitivity to scorpion venom. If mine had been high, we would have noticed long ago, and since nothing dramatic was happening, it was time to sleep. I was offered a choice — stay in the village until morning (to be closer to a medical facility) or go back to the forest, to my group. Naturally I chose the second (no point demoralizing the hikers with my absence).
Ali kindly agreed to drive me back, stopping at a shop on the way so I could buy treats for my people (a bucket of yogurt and bread).
An important point — on the way back I called home, the insurance company. I warned them that there had been an incident, that I had used medical help, that I would have to pay. The guy from the assistance service grumbled a bit about the inflated price (Ali quoted 165 bucks, mainly for the after-hours call and the house visit), but after speaking directly with the doctor he gave the go-ahead, i.e. confirmed that insurance would reimburse my medical expenses.
The hikers were so glad to see me back that they even wanted to pour me some cognac, but they caught themselves in time and scooped me some porridge instead :) My arm still hurt, but that did not stop me from sleeping soundly. In the morning the pain remained only in the hand. By evening it was gone completely.
So, just 24 hours after the scorpion sting, my body had fully recovered. But the memory of a red-hot stinger piercing my arm did not want to leave my head for a long time. I relived that moment again and again — not as something terrible, but as something REAL and soberingly real.
I will try to explain what I mean. We spend most of our lives acting unconsciously, following well-worn rails (yes, for me the rails had been laid even in the mountains). Even this text I am writing while running the standard subroutine “Do a little reflecting on the blog.” The world fades, and any minute now the Buddhist theory of the illusory nature of all things will stop feeling repulsive. But there are rare moments when a sharp experience or an especially clear “thought” suddenly blows away the fog of Maya, and the world takes on the ringing reality of a high-quality video ad. That is the clarity I lived through in the second the scorpion’s stinger went into my finger.
A wonderful experience, but I do not want to repeat it just yet. So now in Turkey I carefully inspect every stone, tree, and other bit of landscape I am about to touch.
P.S. The insurance company kept its promise and returned the money spent on the doctor. True, for that I had to write a statement with a detailed description of the situation, provide the original insurance policy and the doctor’s invoice, and wait 2 weeks.
P.P.S. Superman or Spider-Man abilities have not shown up in me yet. Apparently I need a catalyst, like a meteorite from a distant galaxy, or some other nonsense.