He's a scientist that turned his blood into snake poison. He's just concerned about his pet snakes.

You say that..........

When my wife and I got married back in 2000, we were pretty broke. So we went from Dallas over to north of Ft. Worth and stayed in a little bed and breakfast for a night. They had a little swimming pool in the lobby they pointed out as they showed us around. "Aww," we said, "Didn't know about the pool - we didn't bring our bathing suits." "That's no problem," they said, "The caretaker is gone for the evening and as soon as I finish showing you around, I'm off, so you'll be completely by yourselves and nobody can see in."

So, heck, sure, we went skinny dipping. After a while, she needed to get out and take a quick break. As she was walking away, she stepped on... glass? But she picked up her foot and it still hurt and she looked down to see........ a scorpion skittering away.

We were like.... okay, bees? No problem unless you're allergic. Spiders? Some are venomous. Snakes? Same there, some are a problem. Scorpions? Uhhhhhh...... So we called 911 who connected us to poison control. They found out where we were - just a volunteer fire service out there - we're like 30 minutes from a hospital. So they said, "Okay, basically, the question is: Car or ambulance?"

I found out where the hospital was - I used to live in Burleson, south of Ft. Worth, and the closest hospital to the bed and breakfast was downtown. Really? Nothing closer? Okay, well, we're not waiting for people to get down to the fire station, fire up (har har) the equipment, come up here and drive to the hospital - screw that, we're just gonna go.

So we quickly dressed and I... uh.... sort of didn't exceed the speed limit TOO badly..... Got into downtown and it was like 1 am I think at this point - completely dead. Stopped at the first traffic light, waited a sec, saw ZERO TRAFFIC, said "Screw this for a lark" and treated them like stop signs after that.

Dropped her off at the ER entrance, parked, went inside. She told me later about what I missed, which is the point of my anecdote. You see, when she walked into the ER and said, "I've been stung by a scorpion and poison control sent me here," they replied, "Where did you get stung?" and she said "In a little bed and breakfast up in Saginaw." And they said, "No, WHERE did you get STUNG?" and she said "Up in SAGINAW in a little BED and BREAKFAST." and they said, "NO. WHERE. DID. YOU. GET. STUNG?" and she said, "Oh, on my foot."

Then they asked, "Did you bring it with you?" and she was like, "The scorpion? Oh shit, did I need to?" and they were like, "NO. It's just that we've had several snake and spider bites recently and half of them brought the damn things here and we are NOT a zoo!"

There's more amusement I'll skip over, but I'll close with this: They got her into a room and closed the door and she was like, "no, no, leave that open. I just got married today and my husband is parking the car. He will get into this room no matter if that door is opened or closed, so we should leave it open so he doesn't knock it down." lol.

They were so sweet. We were out of there in like 15 minutes.

And the long story short was: Scorpions are like bees - fine unless you're allergic. But if you ARE allergic, every second counts or you could die from anaphalactic shock, so being that far away, we needed to get to the hospital. BUT, since we MADE it to the hospital and she wasn't dying......... it meant she was fine. lol

Also, while there are venomous scorpions in west Texas, we were in North Central Texas, but poison control apparently only gets the state, so venmous was a possibility as far as they knew.

Always wild how these things change as they go around. I heard it as "Red and yellow / kill a fellow. Red and black / friend of Jack".