Thursday, April 16, 2009

Rafa's Paw: Mystery Solved


When Beth's brother and sister were visiting, we had to postpone our trip to the spa because James noticed that Rafa's paw suddenly looked extremely swollen. When we made an emergency trip to the vet's office, no bee stinger was found in his paw, so we thought we would never know what happened to him. For the rest of the day, James referred to Rafa as his "Hellboy Kitty."

Since we didn't take pictures of Rafa, here's a picture of Hellboy so you can imagine Rafa's gigantic paw.
...Until James found this dead little "friend" on our patio yesterday....Mystery Solved!


If Tim and Robin would have known at the time there was a scorpion lurking nearby, we doubt they would've slept as well, or agreed to be in the apartment, for that matter! Interestingly enough, we abandoned a second night at the eco-lodge on the lake, in favor of staying in a different city and different hotel. Why? After spending one night in our rooms at the lodge, we had breakfast with a nice Irish girl who had stayed in the same room Tim and Robin had just spent the night in. The previous night when she stayed there, she had put on her pants, only to get stung by the scorpion that had crawled inside of them! She had a numbing and swelling reaction (probably like Rafa) for several hours, but it wasn't life-threatening. That, combined with the 2-3 inch spider that was on my pillow before bed in a room with no electricity, was enough to convince us that moving hotels to the nice one in Panajachel would be a wise move!


As you can see, Rafa is doing great now and still very relaxed outside.

2 comments:

kjl said...

I would have completely FREAKED if there had been a scorpion in my pants/house! Poor little Rafa--so glad he didn't have any permanent problems from the sting! He's so cute, but obviously also wicked tough since he killed the attacking scorpion!

Mandi said...

Ummm, I don't want to stay at eco-lodge when we come anymore.