“Ow! It hurts! It hurts!”
It must have been four in the morning. My partner Kyoko was in bed beside me, and her screams pierced through my foggy sleep-filled brain.

My Kyoko talks in her sleep a lot. Just an hour before, she had been modulating her voice like a TV interviewer, saying,
“Tell me what your thoughts are on the An-an.”
She cries and shrieks and suddenly bursts out laughing in her sleep on a regular basis.
She’s got rather a wide repertoire for someone who isn’t even awake.

So at first I just thought she was talking in her sleep again… but she got up and really seemed to be in pain.
Oh no! I panicked and jumped out of bed.

I turned on the light and looked around and, yep, there it was.
A 15 centimetre-long mukade – a poisonous centipede – was scurrying to hide under a pillow.

I hurried to get rid of the mukade, and then checked on Kyoko. She had one bite on her head in amongst her hair, and two on the middle finger of her right hand.
It wasn’t really the time and place to give a running commentary: “Hmm, she must have gotten bitten on the finger when she tried to brush it out of her hair after being bitten the first time.”
The mukade got some good bites in, and I knew if we left them they were going to swell up a lot.

We’ve been living up in the mountains for seven years now, so we’ve gotten used to dealing with this kind of thing.

First, you’ve got to extract the poison.

Before the mukade’s poison can circulate through your whole body, you’ve got to suck it out of the place where you’ve been bitten. In the movies, they cut the wound with a knife and suck the poison out using the old-fashioned suck-and-spit method, but I don’t think that’s very healthy for the sucker. For a mukade I guess I could handle it, but I wouldn’t want to try it with a mamushi snake bite.

Not to mention, if the wound is on the person’s arm or something it’s doable, but like tonight when it’s the head that has been bitten, just the thought of chomping down on someone’s head and sucking away like it’s a coconut just doesn’t paint a pretty picture for me. Beloved wife or no, I’d like to avoid it if I can.

If you want to do it wild-style like Steve MacQueen I won’t stop you, but these days there’s a handy tool you can use instead.

“The Poison Extractor”

They sell it in outdoor supply shops. It’s a special suction tool for extracting poison.

I took care of the finger first, then on to the bite on her head.
Kyoko really seemed to be in pain, but her hair was in the way and I couldn’t get a good seal; the suction was too weak.
There was nothing else to do but shave a little 1cm patch around the bite and try again.
Then, I got good pressure and out from the wound came some yellowish serum-looking fluid mixed with blood. “Aah, it’s out. It doesn’t hurt so much now.”
This woman, the makings of both her body and soul are relatively simple to understand.

After extracting the poison, it was on to Bach Flower rescue remedy.
We have the drops you put under your tongue as well as the external spray type, so first I put some under her tongue to calm her down, then the spray on the wound to lessen the pain.

On top of that, a homeopathic remedy for insect bites.
One little pellet under the tongue for it to be absorbed gradually.

To top it off, the secret elixer of the amazon, a balm called Mali-mali, which uses extract of a plant called copaiba. We put a bit of this on and that was the end of the treatment.

Phew!

In the end, most of her pain was eliminated right there, and by the next morning, Kyoko had forgotten that she’d been bitten by a mukade at all.

She didn’t have any swelling, and all that was left was a little one yen bald patch on her head.

I’m thinking of getting an extra extractor for the KAIR artists to keep at their housing complex, who aren’t used to mukade and get upset whenever one comes around. What does everyone else think?

It seems like this year’s artists all have a bit of witch in them as well…