Vacation: Relaxing and Terrifying

Wonderfully relaxing.
Days in the surf. Children old enough for you to be able to read books and let them play in the sand and surf with only the occasional glance up from the pages. Afternoon bike rides with the whole family (11 of you). Early evening thunderstorms forcing you to stay inside and play lots of Mexican Train dominoes. Just all around relaxation.

To add to it all, you have a great brother in law who brings his restaurant sized soft serve ice cream machine for making lots and lots of cones. He kicks in the "chocolate dip" so that we can all have Dairy Queen style, chocolate dipped, ice cream desserts. They're really great after breakfast, lunch, snack and dinner. And also after dessert. Also fine between beers.

This same brother in law also brings his movie theater sized popcorn machine. He make yummy plain pop corn and the most fabulous caramel corn ever. We ate too much.

We also had lots of nature encounters. Still relaxing. Seeing baby sea turtles trying to make it into the surf without getting toppled warms your heart like nothing you can imagine. Seeing large alligators in the ponds next to bike trials - very cool. Also viewing the snakes and possums at the Nature Center at Night Heron park were still relaxing...they were behind glass.

Terrifying could have kicked in many places. Alligators could have run toward us instead of toward the ponds. Lightning could have struck the house or trees. A snake could have gotten loose from it's aquarium. But the odds of those things happening are pretty small.

And as my husband told one of the guys that works with him last week. "Tell your wife not to be afraid of getting out of the boat to walk to the beach. I am almost 40 years old and in all my life I've never known anyone to get stung by a stingray. The odds of that happening are almost impossible." Sounds like good advice to me.

Well, as of Friday, my husband is now the guy he knows who has suffered the sting of a ray. And did I say suffer. I meant SUFFER. I suffered just watching him suffer. It was awful.

He stepped on it in the surf as we were trying to recover my brother in law's sunglasses that had been stripped off of his head in a wave. We had all been doing the stingray shuffle all up and down the surf feeling for the glasses. Bryan stepped once and POW. Right in the foot.

Lots of blood. Lots of pain. Immediate swelling. Immediate scary.

Did you know (cause I didn't) that VERY HOT water is the anecdote? None of us did either. So now you know. Keep that in your knowledge vault for the next time you need it. Something about heat neutralizing the protein in the venom. And it really works. The doctor's office kept his foot in water that came straight from the coffee maker. As long as he was in the heat of the water- he was good. When he was out, he wanted more heat. Approximately 5 hours after the initial sting he was finally able to keep his foot out the water. The stinging had subsided.

There were no pieces of the barb left inside the puncture wound. Luckily.
The wound required no stitches and currently there is just a gracious amount of swelling and bruising. And some minor aching. I don't think he can get his foot into a shoe, so tomorrow he may go to work with one foot in a sock and a Teva and the other in his dress shoe. Otherwise they'll have to take him barefooted.

Overall - a very relaxing vacation though. Glad the stingray thing was on our last day.