If you’ve been around The Lo Zone any amount of time, you have undoubtedly heard of Snakes On A Plane (try the ten previous posts). Well, a different animal made its debut in the friendly skies: an arachnid.

It seems a passenger was bitten, not once, but twice by a scorpion while aboard a United Flight from Chicago to Vermont.

David Sullivan, a 46-year-old builder from Stowe, was aboard the United Airlines flight on the second leg of his Jan. 3 trip home from San Francisco, where he and his wife Helena had been visiting their sons. He awoke from a nap shortly before landing and noticed something strange.

“My right leg felt like it was asleep, but that was isolated to one spot, and it felt like it was being jabbed with a sharp piece of plastic or something.”

The second sting came after the plane had landed and the Sullivans were waiting for their bags at the luggage carousel. Sullivan rolled up his cuff to investigate, and the scorpion fell out.

“It felt like a shock, a tingly thing. Someone screamed, ‘It’s a scorpion,'” Sullivan recalled. Another passenger stepped on the two-inch arachnid, and someone suggested Sullivan seek medical help.

Fortunately for him scorpion stings are rarely fatal, except to babies and older people with health problems. According to Dr. Stephen Leffler, director of emergency services at Burlington’s Fletcher Allen Health Care hospital, who was also quoted in the article.

USA Today: Scorpion stings Vermont man on flight from Chicago

Posted by Rich (subbing for Lo).