no, seriously. i mean, not super seriously, but i’m not just making this up.
our story starts with me being a dumbass who needs to learn how to recognize plants when they don’t have those little plastic tags on them like you see at the store. so, d & i are coming out of blockbuster this morning and we’re parked right in front of this beautiful wild flowering plant. it’s all great pokey green leaves and bright pink flowers. i’m feeling sweet, so i go grab a hold of one of the blooms and bend it to break it off. all of a sudden, from inside the car i hear, “THAT’S OLEANDER!!!”
my response is a quick and snarky one, “Well, I’m not gonna eat it!”
fast-forward 20 minutes to us in the parking lot of the home depot. i take a sip of my coffee and feel a hair or something on my tongue. now picture, in slow motion, if you will, the same hand that picked the oleander, going toward my mouth to pick said hair off of my tongue. in doing so, i get something bitter on my tongue. without thinking, i just take another sip of coffee. it slowly dawns on me what that bitter something was.
“Honey, just how poisonous is oleander?”
“I don’t know. I mean, there was that movie, with Michelle Pfeiffer–”
“I know, and she made tea and someone died. But, like, how much does it take?”
“Why??”
“Um, I might have gotten some of the sap on my tongue…”
So, here we are, several hours later, and I have a pretty nasty case of gas/stomach pain. All research (meaning what wikipedia tells us) says that fatal/extreme poisoning is very obvious very quickly. So, in all likelihood, I’m fine. Just a dumbass. But still, now you can say you know someone who got oleander poisoning. Just leave out the part where I did it to myself, please.
