When the Bee Stings

Play it safe in the great outdoors

Rebecca Cunningham wasn’t overly concerned when her daughter, Sophy, was stung on the bottom of her bare foot by a yellow jacket. As an emergency room doctor at the University of Michigan Health Center, Cunningham tended to minimize most of the childhood scrapes that Sophie and her younger sibling, Ella, endured. Compared to what Cunningham saw at work every day, a bee sting was nothing.

She lifted her daughter onto a picnic table, calmly examined her foot, put some ice on the sting and comforted the whimpering little girl.
That summer two years ago, Cunningham, her husband John, and their two young girls were camping with extended family in a remote spot in a national park in Michigan. Hiking into the woods miles away from city noise and the stress of high pressure jobs was something this family, which resides in Ann Arbor, loved to do. Sophy had been stung once before. This was no big deal.

After a minute or two, Sophy, then 5 1⁄2 years old, said her foot felt okay and climbed down from her mother’s lap. But five minutes later, she was back complaining.

“She said, ‘Mommy, my mouth feels funny,’” recalls Cunningham, who was pregnant with her third child, Alita, at the time. And then, “‘My tongue feels funny,’”

Cunningham noticed Sophy’s lips were swelling. She took a quick look inside the girl’s mouth to check if her tongue was enlarging. It was.

“A child this age doesn’t know what an allergic reaction is,” says Cunningham. “So when she said her mouth and tongue felt funny, I knew instantly she was having a reaction to the bee sting.” Cunningham had only a simple first-aid kit with her. Luckily, it contained Benadryl which she quickly stuffed into her daughter’s mouth. They were in the middle of nowhere, at least ten minutes away from the nearest help, but because they were car-camping, their vehicle was close by. With efficient speed, she and her husband threw the kids in the car and raced to the ranger’s station. On their way there, Sophy’s face began ballooning.

“Her ears swelled up so much that one of them actually cracked,” Cunningham says.

“Mommy, Mommy! I can’t breathe!” Sophy cried, her voice growing hoarse. She started coughing. Her stomach hurt. Her blood pressure was dropping.
As they reached the ranger’s station, Cunningham jumped from the car and called out to the ranger her need for a first-aid pack and an ambulance. She tore apart the first- aid kit, searching for the auto-injector epinephrine, or EpiPen, that she hoped would bring her daughter out of anaphylactic shock. There was none.