Kids, Don’t Do This At Home

Macgyver makes it look easy. It isn’t.

If you’re a fan of (fake) manly-man movies like I am, there’s an awful trap you can fall into when the hero decides to take matters into his own hands when he’s injured, snake-bit or something evil begins to crawl out of his skin. In the Hollywood version of our hero (or more increasingly, happily, our badass heroine) they take matters into their own hands rather than head to the nearest clinic where both proper training and a bit of anesthesia are on hand.

Hell, no. I’m a manly man. I can take the pain.

If you’ve ever been holed up at home with a manly-man with a slight cold, you know that most manly men are NOT Bear Grylls. It’s been both my observation and my hilarity that most manly-men have grave difficulty with a hangnail, much less anything busted, although the movies would have us believe that the (HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA) stronger sex can handle anything. Including three compound fractures, a spouting femoral artery and a snapping turtle attached to his nuts.

Well of course he can.

I’d love said manly-man to do this at home. Stay with me here.

Being a Girl of the Deep South, and I mean real Deep South as in Florida, I grew up slathering myself with baby oil and baking my skin like bacon in the tropical sun. I never claimed I was bright. Scorched brown for a while, and of course, now, as was my entire family, dotted with cancerous skin lesions. While I can make fun of this, it’s no laughing matter, as melanoma kills fast.

Suffice it to say that for years the VA has dutifully burned off, cut out or otherwise excised those bad boys from my body, leaving me looking like the family Dalmatian.

In the early days of quarantine, I’d just returned from five weeks in Africa. In my very empty house, being stuck by myself and what little I had taken to the Big Continent with me, I set up shop on the floor and in a stripped kitchen. Settled in.

And started to itch. Well shit.

After having had so many, you know what “a suspicious growth” looks and feels like. I had one now, on my right lower back, just above my kidney. I could just see it in the bathroom mirror.

Well shit.

The dermatology folks have emphasized getting in right away when something changes size, itches, has an irregular shape. Yes, yes, and yes.

The VA Dermatology department was about as interested in seeing me as a case of bubonic plague.

But then they felt that way about me before Covid.

All they would do was a Telemed appointment. What are you gonna do, Sparky, GLARE at the fucking thing?

Well, shit.

Of course I couldn’t reach anyone. So, being the Bear Grylls type, I decided to take matters into my own hands.

Of course I did.

I had a long metal dental appliance with a tapered end. Turned on the stove. Stuck it into the heat until it turned cherry red.

You can see what’s coming.

It would be fair to say that the resulting scream was very much NOT Bear Grylls/Macgyver. More like stupid woman presses red hot fucking metal against delicate skin.

I also missed part of the offending bastard and had to fucking do it again.

Unlike most Hollywood heroines I find it right damned difficult to lean into a red hot poker.

Will you fucking PLEASE.

Since I am not much of a meat eater, and cannibalism has yet to appeal (wait til the next lockdown, I am frying up the folks who won’t wear masks), the smell of roasting flesh, most especially my own, was less than appealing.

I am not Joan of Arc, but I have a feeling I know what she was smelling as she did a slow roast. Charles Roast can attest, I am sure.

The second time I pressed the glowing red tip of that dental appliance, about the size of a pencil eraser, into my tender flesh, I ended up attached to the kitchen ceiling, my fingernails embedded in the dry wall. It was a while before I could coax myself down.

Suffice it to say the accompanying banshee scream was better than any fucking big hair Eighties rocker.

I guarantee you, no Hollywood actor has EVER done something like this at home, even Daniel Day-Lewis, whose preparation for Last of the Mohicans was legendary.

NOBODY.

But it worked. The parbroiled lesion hurt, healed, granulated and disappeared. Yes. There’s a scar. One of a great many.

Just a typical walk in the park

Back in 2015 I had returned to Africa for another Big Adventure with the help of E-Trip Africa. Ben Jennings, the proprietor, had sent me on a riding trip with an Aussie-run horse riding outfit. One day we were heading through the villages, waving at the kids (as directed, which is great fun) when my horse, Thor, jinked to the right under an acacia tree. Said thorny branches swept me off the horse onto concrete-hard clay, giving me a concussion and snapping a few ribs. And I landed on a big rock which gave me a melon-sized bruise on my right hamstring. And a black eye.

I taped the ribs with Rock Tape (it helps to be double-jointed when you have to tape your own rib cage back to front).

then promptly river-rafted the Class V rapids of the Nile in Jinja, Uganda. By the time I left the water I had a few more concussions and two more broken ribs.

Of course I did.

But, wait, there’s more.

Not to be slowed down by a few bruises, I headed out by camel from Arusha to Lake Natrone. Three Maasai and one Meru man, (Raymond, the cook) and me. This was my second trip with these guys. Beyond fun, beyond hot, beyond isolated.

By the middle of the third day, untold hours from even a tiny local medical clinic, I noticed that a few spots on my side were itching. Long story short, my taping job had opened up three large, weeping holes in my skin.

Well shit.

I had left my first aid kit with Ben in Arusha on the floor of their office.

Well, shit.

Of course I did. Raymond the cook had a tiny, tiny, badly-worn bandaid and a miniscule bar of pink hotel soap. That was my first aid kit. African style.

Of course it was.

Every night Raymond would set up a small table for me just before he started making dinner and right after we’d set up all our tents. We’d stack what we had to create the slightest measure of privacy. Then he heated up water, and I would carefully wash the dust and dirt from those wounds. The rest of the team would busy themselves with gathering wood.

The camels would come stand next to me while I washed.

This was my view:

A forest of knobby knees heralded precisely what my own knees would look like. I was 62. Gravity works.

Tanzania is very very hot and dry in February, which is great for wounds like mine. While they slowly healed, Babu (the ancient Maasai man who led Dominique) and I got into nightly water fights around the campfire. You’ve never seen a supposedly crippled man run that fast. As it turned out Babu did NOT need that damned cane.

To get even, at four am, Raymond and I would start the pancakes (stupidly delicious, I still miss them, slathered with jam). I would sneak up to Babu’s tent where he was crammed in with Philip, my translator. I would grab the support poles, and at the top of my voice, scream

ELEPHANT ELEPHANT ELEPHANT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

While shaking the holy shit out of the tent.

You have never seen anyone move that fast out of a dead sleep.

Raymond laughed so hard he nearly fell into the campfire. That would set up the evening revenge cycle when Babu and the other guys would plot another attack. We had lots of water: it was supposed to be for showers. I had wipes; we saved the water, and gave it to the Maasai herding kids we met along the way. And threw it at each other with abandon, which had the superb side effect of making getting to sleep at night far easier as the water evaporated. Did I say it was hot? It might have cooled to about 80 by dawn.

Of course I hurt. I had four busted ribs, a black eye, a badly-bruised leg, multiple concussions, three big wounds in my side.

The wounds healed, not just because the weather favored us, but also because the whole lot of us, tired, hot and happy, spent a great deal of time laughing.

Humor heals.

Like most of the folks I meet the farther out I go, you learn to work with what’s at hand. It would never occur to me to cut a trip short for a minor injury that we couldn’t Macgyver.

Mostly.

There were two I couldn’t, I admit. I did a header down concrete stairs in Iceland, smashed my pelvis, broke my arm and wrist, and cracked my head open. That one, Rock Tape didn’t quite suffice.

Oh. And a spicy horse smashed my shoulder, kicked in my ribs, my face, broke my teeth and a few other minor details in Turkey. That one I couldn’t quite cobble together.

Ah. Yes. And three months later, a horse threw me at the gallop in Kazakhstan, and I broke my back in eight places. I did get up and get on another horse while feeling zings heading down my right leg. I’d have taken off after the rest of the mob, but after I mounted, I couldn’t turn my body in either direction.

I looked down at the expectant face of my guide, Jen Buttery, and said,

Hospital.

Well shit.

Sigh. The rest of the group continued through the Altai mountains without me. Man, that fucking hurt, a lot more than my back did.

I was 64.

Some time back I had an uproarious laugh at some mugwump who had decided to leap off his roof towards a nearby roof. Reason? He’d seen it done on an (animated) computer program.

Gravity works, Sparky.

This week I read this story:

Wild animals don’t like being stalked by stupid humans, Sparky.

There is fantasy and there is reality. The fantasy is that you can make it to the next door neighbor’s roof without having the laws of physics impede your progress.

The fantasy is that wild animals really love humans, speak English and love to pose for grams, after being hunted to near-extinction by humans, for whom they have every reason to have so very much regard.

Sure they do, Sparky.

The fantasy is that you can shrink-wrap a broken leg, finish a marathon and fight off hordes of mutant ninja turtles while a spike is protruding from your left lung.

Sure you can, Sparky.

While there are most certainly folks (please see Blair Braverman) who do incredible things and take incredible chances far harder than I do, I would posit that for most folks, trying to do any of that shit you see on the big or small screen might not be such a smart thing.

I wouldn’t recommend most of the stupid shit I do either.

Well, unless you have one hell of sense of humor.

So kindly, don’t try this at home.

Or at least if you do, please try to have more than a tiny bar of pink hospital soap on hand.

Tagging Roz Warren, Charles Roast, Sean Kernan and Kris Gage.