There's Nothing Worse Than...

...waking up with a spider bite on your face! Okay, I know that isn't true, but still it is one of my least favorite ways to wake up, for the obvious reasons. It means A SPIDER HAS CRAWLED ACROSS MY FACE--and who knows where else! And I can't help but wonder, where did it go after it feasted on my face?

Was it one of the seven spiders a year that experts say I swallow in my sleep (the only statistic that ever made me want to sleep with my mouth taped shut)? Or perhaps it crawled to the back of my head and is currently nesting in my hair? (You straight-haired people probably don't have to worry about this quite as much; you'd be able to tell if there were a spider in your hair!) Don't worry, I reassure myself, maybe it is not inside you or on you anymore. Maybe it just crawled down into your bed and is currently hiding between your sheets. I think I'll sleep on the couch tonight. Even if the monster managed to crawl back to it's home in the wall, what is to keep it from coming back out and crawling all over me again tonight? I'm reminded of the time my friend Jessica and I went to the beach cabin and someone had left the bathroom window open for over a month and there were hundreds of spiders all over the house. We hunted down as many as we could and then we pulled our bed out from the wall and sprayed a perimeter of Raid on the floor around the bed to try to make ourselves feel safer. But what will keep it from lowering itself onto me from the ceiling? Oh the horrors!

Plus, there's still the actual bite. On my FACE.

I can't disguise it. It's a big white bump surrounded by a giant red circle. It would take miracle makeup to camouflage this puppy! If it were on my arm I'd consider lancing it and trying to squeeze out the poison, but I've decided to let this one die of natural causes. (Of course, my paranoid mind is imagining my sad fate should it turn out to be a brown recluse spider bite and my flesh rots and they have to remove half my face. That would be sad. Although if movies and musicals have taught us anything, it is that half-faced people actually fare pretty well. They generally end up either ridiculously talented musicians, or at least rich misers with giant mansions. Well if my goal in life were to be ridiculously wealthy or astoundingly musical...maybe that wouldn't be so bad. But if I want to talk to people about Jesus, then it would be helpful not to frighten people away with my face.

I was going to write a short paragraph about the spider bite. How did this get so long? I'm stopping now. It's just a stupid spider bite. You'd never guess I once spent the night in a jungle hut that was infested with red ants. Well, I'd write more, but the spider bite is swelling so huge that there's no more room for my tongue in my cheek! ;-) I'm stopping now for real.