Biology 101

Once, when I was younger, I remember waking up with a horrible taste in my mouth.

It tasted like the smell of mothballs.

I don't know how else to describe it.

I was terrified and thought for sure I must have chewed something awful while I was sleeping. As I was telling my friends at school that day one of them said that I must have chewed a spider and that we eat something like thirty spiders a year in our sleep.

I almost died.

We. EAT. Thirty. Spiders. A. Year.

What?????

With my desperate fear of spiders at the forefront of my mind, this news was terrifying.

(The actual statistic is more like seven to eight spiders a year ... but I didn't find this out until I was a bit older.)

Last night I woke up with a similar taste in my mouth. And I was coughing.

Not just coughing ... choking.

When I realized that I had probably had an encounter of some kind with a spider, I got out of bed as fast as my pregnant body would let me and rushed as quickly to the bathroom as I possibly could without waking Bruce Lee. I drank a lot of water. And rinsed my mouth out for a good ten minutes. And then I went back to bed.

But I couldn't get back to sleep.

I just kept thinking about the fact that I could very well have swallowed the spider whole. And that the spider could be poisonous. And that he (or she) could be swimming around in my stomach. And that the spider could bite my uterus and kill the baby.

Yup ... that's what I was thinking.

That's the thought and the scenario that kept me awake for a good forty-five minutes after my bathroom dash.

Obviously my stellar biology skills were not kicking in to ease my mind in any way - in my defence it was three-thirty in the morning and I was really, really sleepy - but still ... a little dose of common sense and I may have been able to get back to sleep.

Or, had I been able to convince myself that poisonous spiders are terribly rare where I live (unlike Australia where there is any number of deadly and poisonous creatures just waiting to kill you ... I have no idea how people survive there ...).

But no ... I was kept awake by the dreadful thought that the poisonous spider I had just swallowed whole was swimming around in my tummy trying to eat my placenta and kill my baby.

And I'm one half of the team in charge of easing my children's irrational fears.

They really have no hope ...