Guess I don’t love all the animals
My first year of practice, I was talking to an owner in an exam room when I saw her eyes go wide and she yelled, “SPIDER!”
I looked down and saw a large arachnid crawling across the table towards her poodle. Without missing a beat, I grabbed a large drug compendium and put an end to the assault. The lady looked up, cocked her head, and said, “I guess you don’t love all the animals, then.”
I felt terrible, actually. My grandmother would not have approved. She would capture daddy longlegs in little glasses and transport them outside, or just as frequently, leave them alone. “They eat bugs,” she said. “It’s bad luck to kill them,” she said.
But I didn’t live with my grandmother, my dad’s mother. I lived with my mom, who learned from her mom that the best way to deal with a spider was a Dr. Scholl’s sandal, the one with the big wooden sole.
I think about that day, and how I would have to make up for it lest I be followed through my life by angry hordes of spiders. As you are about to see, I think I’m still paying.
Yesterday, the kids called me in to assess a spider situation in the guest bedroom. It was, they claimed, a huge spider, which could mean anything from “dime sized” on up. I went in, and yes, it was actually a huge spider. Probably an inch or two across, I didn’t get too close.
The good news was, it wasn’t a black widow or a recluse, and in the interest of being good to my grandmother’s memory I told the kids, “let’s just shoo it under the armoire. See? It’s as scared of you as you are of it.” I did not notice the tiny peals of laughter from the spider as it ran away. I did not realize she was simply approaching us with a familial sense of pride to show off her brood.
A couple of minutes later, my son came out again. “There’s a bunch more,” he said.
“What?” I asked. “Spiders?”
“Yes,” he said. “Like, 8.”
I went back into the office, a sense of disquiet taking over me. “Where?”
“On the bed,” he said.
And there, crawling all over the guest bed, was an army of teensy tiny baby spiders, which had apparently just hatched from whatever hellspawn was hiding under my armoire.
No. I do not love all the animals. This I can say now with great certainty.
Since I can’t find my flamethrower, I was stuck with simply tossing the entire set of bedding out into the courtyard with a scream and spending the next two hours vacuuming every nook and cranny in the room, stopping only long enough to call my husband on his work trip and freak out into the receiver. The mother spider, of course, was now nowhere to be found. Her work was done. For now, at least.
I was up until three in the morning startling at every shift of the bedsheet. If anyone can recommend a good pest control service in San Diego, I need one out stat. *shudder*
