About our last hike… I post often on social media about the fun outdoor adventures that we like to take. It’s important to me to encourage others that traveling and being adventurous are possible with food allergies, celiac, and other special diets. Life doesn’t have to stop when we get new diagnoses (we have had more than our fair share). It just means that we have to do things differently, and that’s ok.
Labor Day weekend, we planned a family hike for Saturday. We wanted it to be a relatively short hike as we had done a few long hikes the prior weekends and didn’t want to burn the girls out. After all, we want them to love hiking and the outdoors as much as we do. 🙂 The hike we chose was an hour and a half drive from our home outside of Seattle, but the hike itself was only 1.5 miles each direction. When we hike, we get up early to beat the crowds, find a parking spot, and get home at a relatively decent time to enjoy the rest of the day. We made it to the trailhead about 7:30am and got one of the last parking spots in the small lot. After getting our gear together we headed up the dirt road to the trail. Soon after we started hiking my girls kept talking about hearing a constant buzzing noise. As we kept hiking, we kept hearing the buzzing noise. It was a similar sound to walking under power lines if you have ever done that. We looked around but didn’t see any power lines which wasn’t too surprising as we were pretty far out of town. On we went and tried to ignore the constant buzzing.
About 15 minutes into our hike, Super was hiking in front of me and got a bee stuck in her hair. She has long and very thick hair and happens to greatly dislike bees. My husband flung the bee out of her hair pretty far away just to have it fly straight back into her hair! This happened THREE times, no joke. We told her to put her hair up and then put her snow hat on, it was a bit chilly that morning. She put her hat on and then I got a bee in my hair. From then on, all of us girls had our hair up and snow hats on. We realized at that point that all the buzzing was BEES. For real, there were so many bees around that all we heard was constant buzzing. I have never experienced anything like it and I have spent countless amounts of time in the woods hiking and camping. My husband and I joked that we felt like we were being followed by the tracker jacker bees from the movie The Hunger Games. We just kept telling the girls to keep moving and not stand still for very long.
We made it to the small lake that was beautiful and serene. The girls enjoyed exploring the area we were in and Kiva (our mini australian shepherd) enjoyed swimming. Not long after we sat down to enjoy the lake, we actually saw more bees. Peppy got stung once or twice, but she has been stung many times and it doesn’t seem to bother her much. Then we heard a young boy across the lake start screaming and crying, he also got stung. We decided to keep hiking around the lake. There were a couple of gentlemen with their boys at one end of the lake so we struck up a conversation with them for a bit. They warned us that they had heard that the bees were really bad at the other end of the lake. We decided to go around the lake anyways and would watch out for bees. There was a beautiful rock on the other side that people cliff jump off and thought that would be a fun adventure for the girls. So, around the lake we went. We made it to the rock to jump off without any problems and enjoyed an hour there. It was getting late as we had another event to go to that evening so we needed to quickly finish hiking the rest of the lake to head home.
My husband, Peppy, Zippy, and Kiva were a bit ahead of Super and I. Super and I were chatting and enjoying our time together. We were about 100 feet or so away from the trail to head back down. I stepped up on a rock and walked across to end up being swarmed by bees and repeatedly stung. Super was behind me being stung and yelling at me to keep going. By this point, both of us were running and being stung at the same time. My husband realized we were being stung by all of our yelling and came back to see what was going on. Super had a bee stuck in her sock repeatedly stinging her and I had been stung about 8 times at this point with a bee stuck in my pants. We finally got the bees off and kept running to find that Kiva had been stung multiple times as well. She was rolling all over the ground and frantically biting at herself. There was no time to hang around as these bees were quite literally following us.
As we were now hiking very quickly down the trail, Super is still complaining that her leg hurt. Then she started to hyperventilate and said she was having pain up her whole leg into her stomach. My husband looked at me and asked if she was going into anaphylaxis (I was thinking the same thing). We are not new to anaphylaxis, but we were NOT prepared to have Super go into anaphylaxis an hour and a half away from any medical care and no epi pen with us. It had been several years since Peppy outgrew her life threatening food allergy to peanuts so we no longer carry an epi pen. We decided that we needed to stop quickly and look at her leg to see why she was having so much pain. She had a rash going up her whole leg and continued to hyperventilate. This was one of the scariest moments I’ve ever had. We quickly look through our first aid kit to see if we have any Benadryl, but didn’t have any in it. The only thing we could do was keep walking as fast as we could while assessing if she was in fact going into anaphylaxis. My husband has an inhaler so he decided to have Super use it to see if it would help in case she was not going into anaphylaxis, but just panicking. We are very aware that an inhaler won’t help in an anaphylaxis situation, but we had nothing else to give her. After we gave it to her we kept walking as fast as is possible with three kids and a dog. I kept talking to Super trying to get her to calm down, see if she could take deep breaths, if she was light headed etc. What seemed like forever, but was probably 5 minutes Super slowly began to breath normally and we realized her breathing was NOT her throat swelling but hyperventilating from panic. That was the fastest mile and a half we have ever hiked. We got to the car and dumped out of first aid kit that we keep in there and thankfully had children’s benadryl in there. She took Benadryl and hopped in the car. Meanwhile, my husband was getting the dog in the car and found a bee stuck in her fur. The poor pup had probably been getting stung repeatedly the whole way down.
Ten to 15 minutes into the drive down the mountain, Super had calmed down and the rash up her leg had began to get better. The Benadryl was working!!! Praise the Lord! We monitored her all the way home to decide if we needed to head to the ER. She seemed fine by the time we made it into town so we all headed home. As a mom, I look after my kids way before I ever take care of myself. I too had been stung many times and my legs were on fire. It had probably been at least 30 years since I had been stung by a bee so I didn’t have very much to go on whether what I was feeling was normal or not. When we got home, we all changed, and I realized that one of my eight bee stings had a HUGE red mark around it. It measured 4 inches in diameter. I figured it was no big deal as I had no other symptoms other than my leg was on fire so I moved on with my life. The next day, and the day ofter that, all of my bee stings still stung and itched like crazy. Three days after I had been stung, my mom came over and showed my mom my bee stings. She took one look at the big one and told me I needed to let my Dr know. I took pictures of my bee sting and sent them to my Dr. Her office responded that I should have come in earlier for prednisone. Umm, what?! Oops! My mom told me I was probably glad I didn’t go in for prednisone as it’s side effects are awful.
What started out as an easy family hike turned into our worst nightmare that ended ok thankfully. We have learned so many things from this wild event in the woods. The first and most important is that we need (and I would highly encourage you to as well) to carry Benadryl at all times hiking/backpacking. You never know when you are going to need it and are most likely far from any medical help when you are out hiking. We now have Benadryl stocked in our hiking bin, in our car, in our first aid kits, and of course at home. Super’s pediatrician has been great though all of this and we decided to get an epi pen just to take hiking with us. She consulted with our allergist to see if he thought we should be concerned about anaphylaxis in the future given Super’s body response to this one sting. He said he didn’t think she is at high risk. That being said, the pediatrician and I decided we would rather have an epi pen to hike with and never need it than to need it and not have one! You just never know what life is going to throw at you. I am so glad that my husband and I both jumped straight into assessing if Super was going into anaphylaxis. My husband asked me later if he thought that we handled the situation well. I think we did the best we could with the knowledge and tools we had. Now we have a new tool in our box, the epi pen. You can see below that I taught Super how to use the epi pen herself just in case she ever needed to use it on herself.
