Vacation update, part the second, wherein our heroine does indeed return home more or less in one piece, but manages to keep finding danger. After a sleepless night with my frenemy google to give me immediate access to all global, urchin-related horror stories, and no end in sight to the reinvigorated pain, I was seriously freaked out. Saturday morning, I discovered the difference between girlfriends with girlparts and girlfriends with boyparts. My girlfriends who are actually boys all agreed that the best thing to do was ride it out. (not a one of them thought it might be a good idea to see an actual doctor, either there or here). The real-girl among them turned out to be the sole voice of reason. That morning, her voice tinged with horror, she yelped “why didn’t you tell me about this yesterday when I talked to you from LA?! I would have met you at the airport and brought you to the ER!!! Find your insurance card. We’re going to urgent care.” My feeble protests of “how urgent can it be? It happened a week ago?” were met first with silence, then with “We’re going. Right. Now.” She might now be my mom, but she sure used that mom-voice you dare not disobey on me. I’m pretty sure I would have been even more entertaining at the ER had my stressed out body not given into a raging sinus infection which in turn triggered a migraine of biblical proportions. Still, I'm guessing I gave that doctor the best cocktail party story ever. He walked into the room reading my chart, paused, looked up at me, looked back down at my chart and then deadpanned: “I understand you fell into an, um, bed of sea urchins in the south pacific *dramatic pause* twice...” *insert crickets here* “Why?” he asked, with that drawn-out yyyyy that can only say ‘you look like a smart human being that would ordinarily stay out of harm’s way. What gives?’ I left with scripts for a cocktail of antibiotics and prednisone to speed the healing process (they seemed to only slightly relieve the swelling and redness) and vicodin for the pain. By the end of the day, I regained limited use of my hands again, which was a welcome relief. Unfortunately, I wasn’t smart enough to realize I probably shouldn’t be mixing all of that with champagne. Later that night at a "surprise! you can't run away for your birthday and not expect us to lay in wait for you to celebrate anyways even if it's a week later" dinner, my friends put a 40 candle-bedecked cake in front of a tipsy, jet-lagged, sleep-deprived girl having her first experience on vicodin. At the end of our dinner out Saturday night, I may have, perhaps, just a little bit, set my hair on fire blowing the candles out. Just a little bit!! but still... FIRE!!!! So much for the perfect vacation in paradise, huh? i guess the universe was telling me turning 40 isn't anything compared to celebrating with pointy, slightly poisonous, sea creatures. given the option, i'm picking 40 over the urchins.... and a footnote, just in case you ever find yourself just off the coast of a beautiful island in the south pacific: Leave sea urchins alone! Don’t swim with shoes on! (and for good measure: keep all flammable parts of you away from open flames!)
revisiting the big 4-oooh, part 1
Vacation update, part the first, in which our heroine does indeed flee to Bora Bora to try and out-run the big Four-OH-my-gawd-how-can-I-be-this old, only to realize there are worse things than birthdays. AKA, the one where I save the day, but lose the battle. twice.
Paradise was indeed beautiful and I couldn't have asked for better weather (80s and mostly sunny each day). The scenery is like nothing I’ve experienced anywhere. (blows what I’ve seen of mexico, the canary islands, greece and the red sea out of the proverbial water) There was, however, a bit of a mishap on day four. Actually, it was hour one of day one on Bora Bora (aka birthday eve), where we were slated to stay for four days on a remote, private island with no electricity, phones, etc. It was supposed to be the ultimate unplugged from reality experience. I have been trying to nutshell it, but it is a story that refuses to fit into such a small case, so here goes... (you may want to go grab a drink, cup of tea, or a snack. It’s a long one... If you don’t have time to read, just scroll to the bottom for a look at what is now officially on my “do not party with” list for all time)
"Best birthday idea ever!" I squealed to my travel-buddy, roommate 2.0, as we waded into Bora Bora's lagoon from our private island getaway. We were happy we'd sprung for reef shoes–the coral reef underfoot was more sharp than sandy. I'd soon become painfully aware of just how sharp it was. I called out I was going in to swap shoes for flippers so I could swim. While I was gone, he tried swimming to the next island over and got caught in a swirling current. Luckily, I’d already gotten back into the water when he started calling for help. Unluckily, I was at least 20' from shore and had flippers on my feet. He was repeatedly yelling quite frantic things like "i'm gonna die! help! get the boat!" which isn't exactly the soundtrack a girl wishes to hear any time, much less at the edge of the earth with only one other living being remotely nearby. (another time, i may wax poetic on the alternate universes that no doubt split off at this moment in time. Because for the life of me, I can’t understand just why he thought it was a good idea to swim alone, through unknown waters with his reefshoes on when i was back in the hut we were renting ... or why he didn’t kick the shoes off so he wasn’t trying to swim and getting fatigued because shoes become little lead weights in the water ... or why it never came up while we were planning a SNORKELING vacation that he’s never had formal swimming lessons!!! Or why he, moments before, remarked to the Proprietor that he’s a strong swimmer) Thank god I came out with my flippers to join him in the water when I did. I’d backed through the shallows until I got to a point where I could turn around and swim towards where I saw him (he didn’t seem in danger at this point, I guess mostly because he was disoriented and facing the wrong island looking for me). When I got halfway out to him, he reoriented, saw me, and started the aforementioned screaming bloody murder for help.
For the record, I have had LOTS of swimming & lifesaving classes. He's got a good 7 inches and 50 pounds on me. I can’t get out of him if he’s been bitten or stung, trapped in some way, or cramped up. No way I'm going anywhere near him without the help of the kayak that’s lazing in the shade under our hut-on-stilts back on shore. so.... I swam back in as far as I could, but still had a good 20 feet of shallow water to get through to reach dry land. have you ever tried running in flippers? not so much... so I took them off to go faster, unfortunately, I was then running bare foot over a knife-sharp coral reef.
You think you know where this is going now, don’t you? HA!
I DID cut my right foot on the reef! (but wait, there’s more!) In the process of falling, I ended up careening right into a colony of black, long-spined sea urchins. While I’d given them a wide berth, apparently 3 feet isn’t enough space to leave when you’re 5’9”. As I was falling face first into them, I opted to put my hands down to save my face (and eyes!!!) but that left me only one good leg/foot with which to regain balance and get the heck out of there. Sadly, my water yoga isn’t what it could be, because I then fell backwards into them. So now both hands/arms and a good portion of my back are covered in sea urchin spines and my left foot is bleeding. (and i’m not even the one in trouble!)
Finally, I do make it to the path by our hut, but I can’t pull the kayak out to go save roommate 2.0 alone, because my human pin cushion hands are on FIRE!! and swelling by the moment. (and the yelling? it’s continuing, getting more and more urgent sounding)
So now I’m forced to run my bleeding foot over a carpet of pine needles, crushed shells & small rocks to the other side of the island calling for the proprietor’s help. (to add color to the story, imagine a late 60s, rotund Polish Frenchman who speaks only halting English, and who, we later discover, gets through each day with a serious one-two punch of a waterglass full of vodka at lunch followed by bottles of wine throughout the afternoon and evening. Thank god we were at the beginning of his drinking day. Though he ran out to hear what all the yelling was about covered only in a traditional tahitian scarf wrapped into shorts (wasn't he just wearing a pair of khaki cargo shorts & buttoned down shirt?), he was quick to act.
After we ran back to the kayak, Proprietor-man handed me his satellite phone (which I promptly drop into the ocean. See hand injury, above), and fell the first time he tried getting into the kayak. Thankfully, he did manage to right himself quickly, paddle out to my drowning friend (whose cries have now escalated to a raspy “HURRY!” over and over again. “Dude!” I'm thinking, “save your breath!”) The roommate was able to grab onto the kayak and get towed back to shallower water where he could walk himself to shore.
He is fine. 100% unscathed, though still reeling a bit from the whole experience. (he commented after we got back that he’d had a fleeting moment where he almost stopped the whole struggle for life thing and just gave in to the drowning. It was a compelling option right up until he had a mental visual of me saving him from the sea, only to kill him with a kayak paddle...
I wouldn’t have used a kayak paddle. I think I may have used some well positioned sea urchins... Or the flippers he eschewed..
Unfortunately, sea urchin spines can't be pulled back out of you once they're in (pretty much all of them – I lost count at 120-something – broke off a millimeter or two below the surface), and they're slightly toxic to humans... (have you ever tasted sea urchin? I hadn’t, but can now confirm that all those nasty spines are protecting a tasty tasty treat). “Dr” proprietor-man gave me some fresh lemon juice to dab on them, and also some mystery pain pills left over from the last time his back went out, and suggested I just wait it out. “First hour, most bad. Very very painful. Very. After that, one weeks, maybe two, and all gone. Ok, three probably. But body will fix, the blood she carry them away.”
Though he was right that the first hour(s) were the worst (adrenaline is a powerful thing, it took me almost a half hour to pass out from the pain), I think islandman's guesstimate on just how long that pain would last was based on having one or two sea urchin spine hitchhikers. The first three days were the worst. I couldn't hold my camera or any of the books/magazines I’d brought with, couldn’t swim, couldn’t pick anything up at all actually (All hail ipod touch! I can turn you on and navigate around with my unscathed pinky fingers, and watch the three movies I’d brought with, over, and over, and over again). I lived day and night in a two piece suit that would never have seen the light of day in the northern hemisphere, and rinsed off in the ocean because my frankenstein-hands were of no real use to me. (imaging your wrists/hands ringing with that sensation you get when you knock your funny bone. Now multiply it by 100 or so and have it last for over a week. And just for good measure, toss in white-hot, searing, shooting pain any time any sort of pressure befalls an area where spines are (or now, are dissolving). Reflexes, I’ve discovered, make you drop anything you are trying to hold when the hand encounters that sort of sensation. I’m sure it’s meant to protect us from touching dangerous things. Ha! Not me!
The actual birthday was a day after the urchin misadventure. We had an 8 hour boat cruise / snorkeling adventure / open air picnic scheduled that would take us all the way around the main island of Bora Bora. I am nothing if not stubborn, I discovered. I soldiered on through the cruise (thank you mystery painpills!). I even made it into the water with the rays a couple of times, I think out of pigheadedness alone. (it’s surprisingly hard to climb a ladder up out of the water using only the crook of your elbows...) Luckily, the rest of the vacation was supposed to be all about relaxing, which is good, because the most strenuous thing I could handle was sitting quietly in the sun. We pulled a plastic lounge chair (and by we, I mean the roommate, because I couldn’t even pick up or hold a magazine, much less pull a lounge chair anywhere) into the shallows for me so I could chill out with the waves lapping on me. Beautiful place to convalesce to be sure.
(dad has interjected here that it was a good thing I had the roommie along since he had to do/carry everything for me for the rest of the trip. I am quick to point out that without him, I. Would. Not. Have. Needed. A. Sherpa!!! Still, we did manage to enjoy the rest of our time on Bora Bora, that one day lost to a scene out of the english patient notwithstanding: light diffused from the mosquito netting canopy I so wisely procured from REI the day before we departed, I drifted in and out trying to keep a stiff upper lip. There isn’t any sense whimpering for mom when she’s on the other side of the globe (fretting, as it turns out), and our only means of communication has been rendered inoperable because of the seawater it ingested, thanks to my dropping it in the lagoon)
After Bora bora, it was off to Moorea, the island next to Tahiti. We’d sprung for one of the overwater bungalows you see in French Polynesia travel pictures for our last two nights. I have never been so happy to see a proper hotel in my life. Air conditioning! Minibar! Pool! Concierge! Bar!!!! It was the most luxurious place I’ve ever been. If I could have, I would have stayed in that pool 24/7. As it was, I only got out and toweled off 15 minutes before the cab came to fetch us for the first of our return flights home. A small 18-seater flew us back to Tahiti that evening. It was the first of three flights over the next 24 hours or so, and the best of the bunch, lasting a cool 10 minutes.
The altitude/pressure changes on the 8 hour flight from Tahiti to LAX and then the 3+ hour flight from LAX to MSP trigged all sorts of re-swelling of the hands and ratcheted up the PAIN (!!) factor again. (most of the spines in my back had by then dissolved, leaving one particularly nasty one right below the shoulder blades. You know that spot you recline against when you’re sitting down? Yeah. That one...)
We were back in MN by 10 pm Friday night, which should be the end of the tale.... Almost. Not quite...
