About ten years ago, I was very sick with bronchitis; so sick that I could scarcely get out of bed. As the saying goes, “The weather outside was frightful” and it took its revenge upon me.
Days went by with my taking an antibiotic, smearing Vick’s Vapor Rub on my chest so I could breathe and burning up with a temperature and then freezing. If you’ve ever had bronchitis, you know it is not fun. Not fun at all.
When I was out of bed I could have been mistaken for Tim Conway in one of his skits with Carol Burnett: I walked just like he did, all bent over and trembling.
By the fourth day I knew I had to take a bath. Even though the sheer thought of it would equivocate to climbing Mount Everest, I managed to half walk and half crawl into the bathroom while thinking to myself that this was the right thing to do. In a crumpled form, I turned on the hot water and poured in way too much bubble bath and waited for the tub to fill up.
Meanwhile, I had forgotten that the newly put on tub surround was not glued very well to the tile; in fact, the surround was put up over a big hole that once had been tile covered. It was the farthest thought out of my mind and oh, I wish it hadn’t been.
By some spirit that seemed to move me, I placed one foot over the tub and then the other and got on my knees in the deep hot water that was full to the top with bubbles. There was no way I could sit down for I was in too much pain so I stayed in that position hanging onto the spigot for dear life while soaking in the bubbles.
Out of the corner of my left eye I saw something long and black slither down into the tub. Before I knew it, whatever it was, was slithering around the back of my legs and I was hysterical! I think I almost pulled the spigot off the wall attempting to get out of the tub while the black thing was slinking around in the bubbles. I screamed out to my then husband who thought I had gotten scalded: he came running in and I told him that there was a snake in the tub. He couldn’t see anything till this creature, that was submerged in the bubbles, reared its head and then its feet were visible: I knew then it wasn’t a snake but a lizard. Just the thought of that thing being in the bath with me sent me into fear overdrive for it had been all over the back of my legs.
My then husband told me to go in the kitchen and get a knife to kill the thing. There was no way I could even walk that far being so sick and also now freezing as I was dripping wet with a big towel around me. Eventually, he went and got the knife, jerked the lizard up out of the bubbly tub water and threw it into the bathroom sink. It lay there wriggling its feet and it was ghastly just to look at it. He cut up the lizard into a gazillion pieces and promptly picked them up and flushed them down the commode.
After drying off, I was back to my “Tim Conway” way of walking and somehow managed to get back into bed where I think I must have passed out from not being sick but from fear.
Days passed and I would not go into that bathroom: I even went so far as to put a towel under the shut door from the outside when I was alone. During those days I used the master bath for I had always heard that where there’s one lizard, there’s another.
Well, another did not appear but it took much longer for me to recover from bronchitis and lizard fear. I would strongly advise anyone is very sick to never take a bubble bath ever. You never know what might crawl into the tub with you and like me, you just might get the shock of your life.
In the summer, fall and spring I will not touch the ivy that surrounds my house for I know that lizards are lurking somewhere in there----just waiting to terrorize me all over again! Like “Adrian Monk,” I suffer from a phobia too only mine is not on his list. Mine is called “Lizarditis.” Thankfully, the tub surround has been long gone, new tile adorns the walls all around the tub area and at least if a lizard decides to enter the bathroom, it isn’t going to crawl down the wall.
And I don’t think about that specific incident until I start pouring bubble bath into the bath water----and then it all comes rushing back into my mind. Popeye said it best: “Shiver me timbers!” And no thank you, I don’t care for a lizard with my bath.
Sherry Hill
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