Allergic Reaction to Fire Ants, 1995, George Walker

From MemoryArchive

Who:George Walker
What:Allergic Reaction to Fire Ants
When:1995
Where:Waco, Texas

Throughout my childhood, I played soccer in a recreational league. During the soccer season, kids would normally practice twice a week on some local field that was willing to let the team use it for practice. My team practiced on Tuesdays and Fridays on the local high school track field.

One day, we had divided into two teams of six, and were scrimmaging. We had set up cones as the goals, and in one particularly heated moment, I was defending our goal, and slide tackled the ball away from our goal. I was successful, and knocked the ball away, and was momentarily happy about it. I got up, and was giving myself a pat on the back, when I suddenly felt a numbing, fire like pain that was radiating from my calf to my thigh. I looked down, and saw dirt. I didn’t know what it was at first, until I instinctively swatted at the dirt, and realized it was not so much dirt, but about a thousand fire ants biting me. During my slide tackle, I had gone straight through their mound.

Fire ants are tiny red ants, probably a millimeter long. They migrated from South America, into the comparable climates of the southern United States some decades ago, and had solidified their place in the ecosystem. They are the meanest ants you can run across in the United States. When their nest is threatened, they swarm the threat, and sting at the drop of a hat. A single fire ant sting is painful, and causes your skin to blister up into what looks like a whitehead. Thus, when I realized I was being stung by hundreds, I panicked, and quickly smashed and wiped them off, but the damage was done. When I looked at my leg, it was already starting to swell. The coach had me put ice water on it, and it seemed to help a bit, but then something else started happening. My chest started to tighten.

I didn’t know it yet, but the massive amount of fire ant venom was causing an allergic reaction in me. When my dad picked me up twenty minutes later, it hurt to breathe, and I was wheezing. He asked if I had been running a lot, and I said I had been earlier, but that I had been sitting out for a while. He asked why, and I told him I had been bitten by fire ants. He said “Oh really? Where?” And I showed him. When he saw my leg, his face just went white. There were hundreds of little pustules all over my legs. He looked at me, and said, “We’re going to the hospital.” I didn’t think it was that bad, but it scared me that my dad did, because he’s an emergency room doctor. On the way there, he kept asking how I was doing, and I kept saying I was ok, but it was hard to breathe. I guess I just didn’t grasp the gravity of the situation.

When we got to the hospital, my dad took me in the back entrance of the emergency room, and injected me with something. I think it was cortisone. We stayed there until I could breathe more easily. Later on, my dad told me that he had seen people die from fire ant bites before. I guess that’s why he was so worried.