Taking the sting out of youthful trauma

This simple act of four-year-old curiosity became the seed for a lifelong rote response to that most important of medical getting-to-know-yous: "Any allergies?"

Bees, I'd say.

Right ... okay ... the doctor or nurse would reply, brow furrowed, not sure I'd grasped the thrust of the question but satisfied enough I hadn't said "penicillin" or "propofol".

That desiccated blowfly on the carpet that turned out to be a fully hydrated and fully operational suicidal stinger sent me to hospital with a rapidly inflating face, a hand resembling something seen punctuating the bleachers at baseball matches and an inculcation I was to avoid black-and-yellow insects for the rest of my precarious life.

This proved difficult considering the bulk of my childhood was spent in a backyard under a jacaranda tree.

As summers intensified, the four-storey venue for much of my preadolescent endeavours would drop its exquisite bells on the lawn, gifting a corner of our block a stunning violet carpet and several square metres of apparent deadly danger.

As if the floor were truly lava, each afternoon I'd tip-toe through that buzzing biomass of booby-trapped blossoms, praying today's perilous journey from the house to the rope swing wouldn't end in that inevitable return to the emergency ward.

For an accident-prone boy injured in several road mishaps and seemingly incapable of making it 24 hours without some manner of self-inflicted drama, it was a miracle I avoided another sting until age 16.

That memorable assault took place a centimetre from my left testicle as I foolishly rode a motorbike while wearing billowy shorts through a paddock of knee-high grass.

So, it was back to the hospital, presenting - based on the alarm in the attending physician's eyes - what could have been the world's first case of elephantiasis acquired 2000km south of the tropics and, again, the golden rule bees and I shouldn't mix was painfully reinforced.

For the next 27 years, I remained pretty much unbothered by bees. Although I'd continue to keep a furtive eye on any exposed vessel of outdoor drink and would freak a little should I stumble across a late-night rerun of 1978's The Swarm (I'd still welcome a viewing of 1973's The Sting, though, and sing along to anything by Gordon Sumner), I decided worrying about something that may never happen was a waste of time; if it did, I'd deal with the consequences.

It was as I was running down a dirt road, flailing my arms about and ripping my shirt off, I felt somewhat less blasé about what those consequences might be.

On that crisp spring afternoon, I'd happily been chainsawing (as happy as one can be manhandling the mechanical equivalent of a perfidious wolverine) a nice fallen trunk when I disturbed a hive.

Given the machine's noise and the fact your senses tend to be dulled under all that lumberjacking PPE, it wasn't until the bees were upon me, I realised what was happening.

I ditched the saw, fled to the nearby ute and slammed the door but all that achieved was to seal myself in a confined space with the most competitive of my attackers and during those few seconds many of them managed to get under my shirt. I kicked the door open and took off down the road, heading for a culvert some hundred metres in the distance, hoping the stormwater from a deluge a couple weeks prior hadn't yet drained away.

Thankfully, within about 50m, my pursuers trailed off and it became obvious I wouldn't have to go all Looney Tunes and use a hollow reed as a snorkel in a swamp but in those mad moments I'd copped seven or eight stings and a number of barbed ovipositors remained buried in my skin, still pumping me full of toxin.

Waiting for venom to take effect is an odd, centring experience.

There's little you can do other than calm your breathing and hope things will be okay and I walked back to the ute assuming I'd soon balloon to the proportions of a decaying dugong in December and maybe, given my age and the region of the bites, experience full-blown anaphylaxis and even cardiac issues.

But nothing happened.

This time, there was no severe reaction, no bloating, no inflation; only localised swelling at the site of each sting.

I feel lucky to have escaped that genuinely frightening encounter with nothing more than a collection of itchy, rock-hard welts that vacillated between numb and tender for about a month, because, as the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reported this week, dicing with the invertebrate world can be surprisingly fatal in this country of overrated, endoskelatal maneaters.

According to the institute, of the 3520 hospitalisations following contact with venomous animals and plants in 2017-18, 927 related to bee stings and, in that period, bees and wasps were responsible for 12 deaths, while snakes killed seven people. (And just this week, we learned of Australia's first box jellyfish-sting fatality in 15 years).

One of the study's co-authors, Canberra's Dr Raymond Mullins, said it was also possible the rate of bee-sting deaths might be underreported because the majority of victims were middle-aged men with other conditions such as heart disease (no mention of chainsaws, but I wouldn't be surprised).

I sometimes wonder how that firewood farce didn't result in hospitalisation or worse and can only assume I've outgrown my allergy rather than the highly adrenalised situation having rendered me momentarily immune from the poison, the same way, in Peter Weir's Fearless, a 10-foot-high-and-bullet-proof Jeff Bridges is able to knock back normally lethal strawberries after surviving a plane crash.

In many ways, my not-so-great escape cured me of a lurking fear of bees (we even keep a hive now, our second after failing dismally with the first) and serves as a reminder of how we carry what happens to us in childhood to the very end, a handy thing on which to ruminate when you're in the middle of raising kids.

Parenting seems to be about harnessing all those terrors of childhood to better prepare the next generation and while I mostly keep a lid on my enduring little traumas, I'll invoke them now and then to maybe teach the kids something about life, perhaps even give them a useful scare.

Like the time a tiger snake was in my bed.