The Perils of Parks

Today I was being carefree and partying with friends at at a park. And nobody really needs shoes at parks, right? That was what I thought. So I left my shoes by the swing set, while my friends and I were sitting in the grass a ways away, eating ice cream. After a while of this, I was given the task of tracking down one of our friends who had wandered away. I decided that in my search for him, I could also go get my shoes, because those might be good to have. I was walking back to the swing set, when all of a sudden I stepped on something that hurt like crazy! I fell to the ground saying, "ow, ow, ow, make it stop, ow, ow." There was something on the bottom of my foot that I pulled off, but it left a little tiny thing stuck in my foot, that I couldn't pull out. I hopped on my other foot to go get my shoes, then hopped back to where the rest of my friends were. By this time, it was bright red around where the thing went in, and kind of swollen, and the red area was getting bigger. We decided that the friend I was in search of could wander back to us on his own (he did eventually).

I'm pretty sure I either stepped on a bee, or a poisonous plant that's going to make my foot turn mottled green and black and fall off. Let's hope it was a bee.

My foot was progressively looking worse and worse, so my two of my friends did the fireman's hold and carried me down the hill to the playground, where I sat on the spinny thing while they looked in their cars for first aid kits. They were able to find one, but it had no tweezers, so I couldn't pull the thingy out. We decided I could at least clean it, but the anti-septic wipes were dried out. So was the tube of anti-septic cream. The first aid kit was from 1989.

I live pretty close to the park we were at, so it was decided that one of them would drive me home, I could remove the thing stuck in my foot, and then we could go back and party. But when we got back my mom said, "Agh! Now you need a tetanus shot! I don't know what you stepped on, but it's a puncture wound! Your last tetanus shot was in 1999!" So my friend who drove me home went back to the park and proceeded to have a marvelous time with everyone, while I was stuck at home being lectured on how I should know better than to go barefoot. But my mom found my immunization records, and it turns out I've been immunized since 1999, so at least I didn't need to go get a tetanus shot.

Good news: I never took out whatever it was that got stuck in my foot, but it's stopped hurting, and the redness and swelling is going down!

And that's my adventure for the day.