Toe Update

A couple of the boys from Rico's place came to see me yesterday.  Since the toe issue, I haven't been as mobile as I usually am so not having seen me propping up their bar at Rum & Coke time for a few weeks, they decided to ride down and see how I was getting on, and get one of my increasingly famous ice creams each for which they very decently swapped a bottle of scotch.

I promised the Fifth Columnist I would not display any more gory photos on the blog but I am sure he will indulge me this, hopefully, last time.

I suppose I have become a bit blasé about injury confident, as I have always been, that if you survive the first couple of hours, you're probably going to be OK.  Pain, to me, is something to be borne rather than complained about.

In my last fight my opponent broke my nose and a couple of ribs in the first round.  In the last, I broke a bone in my hand returning the compliment.  Afterwards, both of us were loaded into the same ambulance and taken to hospital.  I was most of the way through training at Sandhurst and knew that if I took the medical ticket, I would be back termed and have to do it all again so I made damn sure I passed my medical knowing that any drop in the standard of my performance due to injury would not be considered a valid excuse.  It was called 'Soldiering On' in those days.

I was burned in Northern Ireland and ended up in the appropriate unit of the Military Wing of Musgrave Park Hospital in Belfast.  Due to the very bad reaction I had endured to the morphine with which I had been injected immediately after the incident, I refused any pain killers whatsoever and to this day, will not take even a headache tablet. After I left the Army, I obtained my medical records and note from that time the consultant's hand written remarks stating that my recovery rate was faster than expected and I had a 'well above average tolerance of pain'.  I don't know what that means really.  I was in agony when twice a day they peeled off congealed dressings and sliced away dead and often, not so dead flesh.  Of course my recovery rate was faster than expected.  I couldn't smoke, I couldn't drink, I couldn't sleep (I so desperately wanted to shag one of the nurses looking after me and you know what the difference between 'light' and 'hard' is?  You CAN go to sleep with a light on).  I just wanted to get out of there as fast as I could, hook up with anything remotely female and unload a few gallons of dirty water; you try wanking with burnt hands encased in plastic bags filled with Eusol.  I honestly think that the idea of having strip shows with a strictly enforced no touchy feely rule on the wards would do much to free up scarce NHS bed spaces as, the chaps at least, discharged themselves and waddled off with a John Wayne swagger back to waiting wives.

I had my fingers chopped off in Belize.  I knew I was a day's march away from any sort of medical attention so there was no point whining about it, all I could do was bind the hand, pop the fingers in my shirt pocket and start marching north.

I bust my ankles on the Nurburgring when I highsided a Ducati.  By then I was self employed and no, my personal injury insurance did not cover motorcycle racing.  Every day I spent in hospital was costing me my savings.  Every day I wasn't in the shop selling 'bikes, I was losing income so four days later, I was hobbling around on crutches doing what I did best in those days (certainly better than racing 'bikes), flogging motorcycles.  I even sold my trashed Dainese leathers for twice the sticker price to a client who clearly wanted to pretend he was a motorcycling hero.  I didn't care, I had just tossed a 'bike worth 25 grand down a track comprehensively destroying it so I needed to make up the bottom line.

In Moçambique I was contracted to clear a road from Quelimane to Malawi of land mines in six months and within budget.  I got sick with Malaria but carried on.  I finished the job, on time and within budget, but was then evacuated by air to a hospital in Jo'burg suffering from pneumonia and acute malaria; pulmonary oedema being a complication of long term malarial infection.  I arrived in Africa weighing eighty kilos.  When they weighed me in hospital, I was fifty-seven kilos.

I was on a 'Juice in, Smarties out' run to Lucapa in North East Angola during the war.  A juice in, smarties out run was where I flew in a Beechcraft to one of the Diamond buying offices up country bringing the buyers cash to by more diamonds (juice) and to carry the diamonds they had bought out (the smarties).  This time it didn't go so smoothly and by the time I had managed to pull the door of the aircraft closed and the fans where spinning for a shortfield, downwind take off, some of my guts had spilled out into my boxer shorts as a result of quite a nasty stab wound that missed the one organ I really cared about by only a matter of inches.  Instead of electing to be flown back to Jo,burg, I allowed myself to be operated on in an Angolan clinic and 24 hours later walked out of it, minus my handmade brogues which had been nicked while I was under the knife.

I came out of Sarajevo suffused with Malaria (once you've had it, you never really get rid of it and in cold climates it really can flare up and, believe me, Sarajevo was bloody cold) as well as a toothache that was driving me wild.  At 7.30 in the morning I was due to give a presentation of all my findings to those interested in clearing booby trapped mass graves in the Balkans and gathering enough evidence to convict the guilty of war crimes at a smart office in Central London.  At four in the morning, unable to stand the pain any longer, I was in a dentist's chair somewhere in Docklands being told I needed a root canal job and that the anaesthetic would take half an hour to take effect and the job itself would take another two.  The presentation was at eight, would take about an hour plus one more for questions, I then had two to get to Heathrow and catch my 'plane.  I still had to go back to my digs, collect the files and my bag.  'Forget the anaesthetic', I told him, 'you've got an hour.  I’m not an NHS client, I'm paying cash.'  The dentist was a Pakistani, a Muslim, but he let me take a swig from my hip flask every now and then but I did have to go outside for the one smoke break I needed.

I had my first heart attack and when I woke up, alarmingly in the same clinic of which I had so many horrible memories, I unhooked myself from the drips and monitors and had made it barefoot half way down the Ilha before hospital security staff caught up with me and brought me back in handcuffs.

I had another contract in Uganda to dismantle an oil rig, load it onto a three hundred and fifty tonne barge which had to be assembled from bits arriving by the truckload from America by the side of Lake Albert accessible by roads that I had to build and serviced by light aircraft landing on a runway I had to build.  Bilharzias is endemic to Lake Albert, as is malaria.  The only way I would be able to build the jetties capable of handling a 350 tonne barge was to get into the water, plant my surveyor's poles and encourage the local labourers to do no more than I was obviously prepared to do myself and, since I was the only one present who appeared able to swim, this included free diving with the cables and straps of the crane to hook up and haul out great rocks that were in the way.  The job was a success, part of which is down to a chap called John Lawrence.  He taught me to sail and, thanks to him, I could tie a bowline underwater in zero visibility.

Once again, I left an African country desperately sick and a fraction of my normal weight but went straight back to Angola to build power stations.  As usual, it was a project desperately behind schedule yet politically imperative it was delivered on time.  The last 72 hours I worked my team without any sleep whatsoever and at nine in the morning, Christmas day, the lights went on in Cazenga, a suburb of Luanda, Angola's capital city.

For the three years I worked for a Private Military Company I took only three weeks leave.  I took no leave at all while on the Uganda job.  I worked for three years building power stations here and again, took only three week's leave even though a typical expatriate contract gave me an entitlement to one month off for every two worked.  For years I lived with radios strapped to my hips.  I could sleep through all the chatter but awoke immediately when I heard my callsign, Delta Three.  Even now, I can hear a mobile phone ring a mile away.  If the dog barks in the night, I am awake.  If I hear a car pull up or an engine stop before its noise has faded into the distance, I'm awake.  If the generator just coughs, I'm awake.

Pushing the envelope of physical tolerance that far I suppose it was hardly surprising that I would keel over in a site office with another heart attack.  Lying there in that same Gottverdammte clinic strapped up to drips and monitors did make me wonder, ever so briefly, whether the salary they were paying me was worth it.  So I unhooked myself and walked out.

I am not a rich man by any means.  I am not even comfortably well off.  I don't even have a debit card anymore.  If I flew to Germany, I wouldn't be able to hire a car or book a hotel room.  Amazon on the internet leaves me feeling like a penniless kid with his face glued to a toy shop window.  At the two divorce settlement hearings I have attended, based on the evidence presented by the expensive lawyers my estranged wife had engaged and I was paying for, I recognised that living with me must have been truly awful so never argued.  If a wife really felt that way, enough to have such testimony transcribed publicly in a court of law and sleep with her work colleagues while I was away, I knew our differences were irreconcilable.

As a contractor, my income was sometimes spectacular but generally irregular and not something a spouse bereft of patience could count on for her fair share of in the future, ad infinitum.  So skilful lawyers always concentrated on something far more concrete, my assets.  In my time I have signed over three houses, furniture, cars and objets d'art.  I have to admire the lawyer’s arguments.  While recognising that my income was erratic, they averaged out what I had earned during the relationship and projected that forward to a highly optimistic retirement age of sixty five.  Then, as a concession sympathetically received by the court, admitting that all this poor woman required was a degree of security representing only a fraction of my projected future earnings best satisfied by the liquidation of my current assets.  The courts graciously allowed me to keep all my future earnings in exchange for all my current assets.

Twice I have walked away clad only in the clothes on my back and a half empty rucksack.  I have slept in ditches and beneath starlit skies scarred only by the branches of the trees beneath which I was resting.  I have taken comfort where I could find it and have even paid for it and felt no shame.

So perhaps it isn’t so surprising that something as minor as an irritating little snake bite would do no more than, well, irritate me.  Actually, I lie.  It annoyed me beyond belief.  After everything I have been through, after everything I have done, don’t I deserve a decent break?  I have built and opened the new shop.  I have built and moved the family into the new cottage.  The build of the new restaurant and cottages is cracking on.  And now I was to die horribly of a snake bite while engaged in something as innocuous as walking across my garden to switch the generator off?  Well, Fuck You, whoever you are in charge of the Greater-Scheme-of-Things, I won’t.  Not until I see the whole business up and running.  Only then can you come and get me and contract me to widen the highway to Hell and sort out an improved calorific return for burning souls.

‘Let’s have a look at the toe, then,’ my visitors implored, helping themselves to my present of scotch.

‘Eek!’ they said when I showed them.

That’s when they gave me their other present, John Visser’s and David Schapman’s book entitled ‘Snakes and Snake Bite’ subtitled ‘Venomous Snakes and Management of Snakebite in Southern Africa.’

After they left, I had a quick scan through it and decided I had been bitten by a juvenile Puff Adder.  Clearly, that's what they reckoned too as they had 'dog-eared' the appropriate page.

 

 

Looking at the blisters, I can see a resemblence here.
The thing that concerns me is that the poor bastard's índex finger in the top photo was amputated SIX months after the bite!
This begs the question: How long does it take to recover?

It's all in the mind, though.  Don't you think that looks much better?
And I was no burden on the local health service.
I will lose the nail but, so what?  They grow back better than amputated toes.

Addendum:

I think I still have a way to go.  I finished typing this post, uploaded it and then looked down at my foot.  This is what had oozed out of it while I was typing... I'm really pissed off about the substandard finish of the floor.



Trust me.  If you can possibly avoid it, don't get bitten by a snake, even a baby one.
You know the instant relief you feel when an inflamed boil finally bursts or is lanced by a sadistic nurse?
Well that's how I feel now.