Woman With Chronic Illness Was Ready To Die — Then a Swarm of Bees Changed Her Life Forever
It started in 1996, with a bull’s eye rash suddenly materializing on her flesh. Ellie Lobel was just 27 at that time. Ever since she had been bitten by a tick, her life had turned into a plot twist, a gloomy one. She spent her days walking in half coma while the remaining half of her brain burned in the inflammatory bacteria of Lyme disease. After 15 years, she gave up. She packed her bags and flew to Wildomar, a village in California. She had chosen to die. But right before she could really die, something stopped her.
All of a sudden, she heard a familiar buzzing sound in her ears. It was one bee, then two, then three, and then an explosion of them. Before she could run, the bees were crawling all over her body, stinging at every place they could sneak into. With aching pains shooting through her body and agony blazing in her mind, Lobel locked herself in a room and asked her caretaker to collect the body the next day, never realizing that the bees were actually angels in disguise, who had appeared to offer her healing from years of trauma, according to a 2015 report by the BBC.
When she was first bitten by the tick, she dismissed it as a meagre insect bite or spider bite. But in the next three months, hell unleashed upon her. Horrible symptoms started popping up day after day. Flu and pains shot through her body, sending her a suffering that she thought would never be cured. She had been an active, fit woman with three kids and her body didn’t seem to know how to handle these new invasive pains. All she could do was to get her head up off the pillow.
She visited doctor after doctor. Every doctor gave her a new report. Every report mentioned a new condition. But none of them was able to diagnose the real cause behind her pains. The culprit was a corkscrew-shaped bacteria called Borrelia burgdorferi that had seeped into her bloodstream and was now preventing her to live the way she had always lived. Her condition was constantly worsening.
But then, those bees appeared from behind the tree, jolting her in an almost life-sucking shock. In one moment, they were all over body, stinging her head, her neck, her limbs, her face, and in the next moment, they were suddenly gone. She thought she would die. “They were in my hair, in my head, all I heard was this crazy buzzing,” she recalled while speaking to the outlet. And just when she was ready to die, miracle unfolded. It was then. She didn’t die, neither then, nor a decade later. Only later, she realized that the bees had unknowingly packed her body with their poison, that would soon kill the tick’s toxins die inside her, and give her a new life.
To think that poison can save someone’s life seems implausible and almost impossible to digest, but if we delve into history’s chronicles, we would see that people have been using poison as the cure for centuries. From sages to psychedelics and apothecarists and chemists, people have been using poison of monster lizards, snakes, serpents, and scorpions to treat certain conditions. In Lobel’s case, the potent poison came from bees.
A study published in Antibiotics describes that a bee’s poison is laced with 26 amino acids bound in a peptide called melittin. This melittin triggers a burning sensation when it enters the body. Despite the pains, it has a brilliant mechanism that it carries out on the body of its victim. At first, it punches holes in the cell membranes causing them to explode. It gradually weakens the cell’s protective barriers, causing the cell to swell and pop like a balloon.
As a result, the body gets flooded with toxins from the dying bacteria. It’s like a resurrection that the bees offer to the stung person. Inspired by the healing magic, Lobel now has a “bee condo” in her house where she deliberately visits the bees and allows them to sting her. Moral of the story: Never underestimate the power of a buzz.
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