Desert Adventure

We had an incident last week at school that happened only because it's a desert out there. A student came to me, right after we got in the class room, and lifted up her thumb to show me, as she said, "I reached in my backpack and something poked me." Sure enough, I could see a little mark on her thumb indicating that, indeed, she'd been poked. I wondered what she could have in there that would jab her--an open pin, a compass with a sharp point? Weird. Then, she said, "I thought I saw something move in that pocket." Hmmm...a bug? Well, I told her that we should take her backpack out on the patio at lunch and clean it out. I decided to send her up to the nurse's office for some ice or calamine lotion or whatever. She complained a couple of times later that morning, I put some more calamine lotion on it and had her put a wet paper towel on it to cool down the little bit of redness I could see forming. We were having a crazy day, and I totally forgot the backpack.

The day was mixed up  because we were in the middle of our testing schedule. I had one group of students for the two and a half hours before lunch. We were deeply engaged in a writing activity on the laptop computers. Time flew by and they all went out to play. We ate lunch, we returned to the rooms, they all packed up their backpacks and she went off to math class, without me remembering that I was going to take it outside and dump everything out.

An hour later, we were moving our classes to their "specials" (PE, Art, Music) and I walked out into the hall to see my student, the math teacher and her back pack. The backpack was dumped across the corridor, everything scattered across the floor. At my questioning look, my colleague said, "There was a scorpion in there!!!" That got my attention.

My student had reached down to take something from the open upper pocket and saw the scorpion run across the zipper flap. She screamed, the poor math teacher screamed. A boy knocked it off the backpack, and another boy stomped it into the carpeting until it was just a smear. It was less than two inches long and about the same color as the backpack. But, still!!! A SCORPION!!! We were all quite non-plussed.

I took her up to the nurse to show her the red, swollen thumb. It wasn't that obvious, but now that I knew what had stung her, I realized that for four hours, she'd been telling me her thumb still hurt, and as I examined it more, I could see that it was a little swollen and there was quite a bit of redness. I felt terrible. First, I felt bad that I hadn't checked the backpack immediately. Then, I felt better knowing that at least I'd given her anti-itch cream and a cool, wet towel whenever she asked. I insisted that the nurse call her mother and explain, and give mom the option to take our girl to an Quickcare Clinic after school if she felt it necessary. My student was looking a little worried, but I assured her she would be fine. If she was going to die from that scorpion bite, she'd have been feeling really bad just a short time after the sting, and we would have already called the paramedics, and they would have already saved her. She looked more relieved when I explained it like that.

The next morning, she had a brand new backpack! Her mom threw the old one away, and from now on, the backpack would always hang on a hook and never rest on the floor at their house. She felt that the scorpion may have crawled in at their home, because at school, it was hanging on a chair usually. I hope it was from their house! We already deal with the occasional cockroach and bumble bee; I really don't want scorpions, too. Scorpions!! Good grief!!