So. I got bitten once by a baby water moccasin. Wanna hear about it? Because apparently you’re gonna have to.
What,
you may reasonably ask, does that question have to do with my sometimes-but-not-quite-daily
blog about my cancer battle? Hang
on. We’re going to get to all that.
First,
my sudden compulsion to tell you about this damned snake. I’ve promised to write about just about everything
as it relates to my medical journey even if I don’t always see the connection
myself. But here’s the thing. Over the past few weeks—for the last several
times as I’ve sat down to start this blog—I’ve developed an almost irresistible
urge to bring you the story of this snake—for no apparent reason
whatsoever. The compulsion is getting
worse, and to make matters even more bizarre, it’s not even a new
incident. This did not happen yesterday
or even in this century. So I’m going to
give in to it and see where it takes us.
And in doing so, one of the questions I’ll ask is this: is there a medical reason why the words and
phrases like the ones necessary to tell this story would suddenly pop into my
mind demanding my attention, and yours?
What, you didn’t know you were going to have to hear about baby cotton
mouth snakes today? (Even if you close
the blog now the subject has already been introduced to you and planted in your
mind, so I’m afraid you’re hosed. At
this point you’re doomed to either hear the full story or spend the rest of the
day cussing me for having introduced the subject, or trying to ignore
everything you’ve heard so far, or all of the above).
Do
you think that perhaps some other kind of whacky-do thing is going on
here? Are pain meds finally pushing me
over the bleeding edge? Does it concern
you—should it concern either of us—that for the past last several blog entries,
my fingers have been demanding to talk to you about cotton mouth snakes while I
valiantly held off and talked about something else, leading the blog in a
different direction?
I
mean, what do baby cotton mouth snakes have to do with anything, especially as it pertains to a medical blog?
No,
I’m not making this up. If I were making
it up I’d certainly come up with a subject a bit more bizarre and compelling, don’t you think? Such as:
folks: there is a poltergeist in
my house and it is telling me it won’t let me rest until I’ve told its story. Or, when I was four I saw a figure walk out
on the lake that I’m now quite certain was a mermaid. You know, that sort of thing.
But
none of that happened. This did happen
but it’s much more mundane. No new
poltergeists. No mermaids. But there was a cottonmouth.
The
narrative phase from the climax of the story that wants to come out now, if I
were to write it down now and give it to you, would be along the lines of,
“Predictably, the baby cotton mouth promptly clamped down, whereupon I shook it
off my finger back into the water.”
Okay,
see, the point here is not that there was no incident involving a baby cotton
mouth water snake clamping itself into my finger in desperate need of a
shake-off back into murky, dishwater warm lake water. There certainly was. The incident was real and I remember it well. The point is: where does this image keep coming from that
for the past several instances of wanting to sit down and write a blog, it
suddenly rises to the level of seeming to be a matter so urgent that I have to
let you know about it right this very moment?
This
brings me back to my current medical condition as it relates to my cancer
diagnosis and the effect of meds on them—my mental word patterns are starting
to feel a bit weird to me now. Are they to you? As noted just now I wanted almost desperately to
write about this snake incident. And oh,
yes, I’m going to do it. And as I
finally break down and relate the story, ask yourself these questions: Where in the world did these images suddenly
come from? What made them pop into my mind? What kind of reaction do
they set up in you? I mean, do you have a thing about snakes? Does any of this make you cringe? Wanna laugh? Cry? Swoon? It's part of what I've been
telling you about lately, where unaccountable images fly in and out of my
brain, arriving for no reason and departing the same way. And here’s
another question: This event really did
happen, but I have other, even better snake stories I could be telling you, such as the time a four foot cottonmouth fell
into a boat with me. Why no compulsion to tell that story?
Well,
here it is, the true-life account of my encounter with a baby water
moccasin. It happened when I was
swimming in the back yard down by the lake where I grew up. A little mini
pontoon paddle wheel boat had floated up to our dock after a big summer storm.
I looked down and saw a tiny snake wiggling along the deck in a pool of
rainwater. I knew instantly what it was but I thought it was too small to
be harmful. It was SO CUUUUUUTE, only
about eight inches long, having just emerged from its mother, apparently. I was maybe 9 years old? So what
do? What do you think I did? With my cousin and friend urging me
not to do it, I reached down and picked it up. At which point it promptly
bit me. I jerked my hand back; the snake went flying into the water, and
that was the end of that encounter with that snake for all eternity. (I
presume it’s dead by now. Well, I’m not
doing so great myself, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call us even-steven).
Examining
my hand, I could not help but notice two
very tiny, very neat little rips in my skin where the fangs had gone in. That got my attention. There was no blood, however.
Now,
as noted, this snake was very small, maybe five inches long, eight max. The body parts were tiny, and the relative
velocity between its head and my fingertips was so fast that I assumed there was
little chance that any venom had been injected, if the snake were even old enough
to have yet developed venom in the first place. It struck me as a cute
little feller, not a killer, so I did not report this to parental authorities. No harm, no foul, right? Plus, the thought did occur to me that I
would look pretty stupid and could get into serious trouble for fooling around
with a live water moccasin (a water moccasin is a pit viper kissin' cousin to a
rattlesnake or copperhead) even if it was just eight inches long. In retrospect, of course what I should have
done, and would I do next time, I told myself, was to do the adult thing and
stay the hell away from it. Because that
is what responsible people do. Lesson
learned and no one needed to be the wiser.
Right.
A nine year old idiotic kid is going to be a nine year old idiotic
kid. That is one of the basic laws of nature. Lucky for me no
venom went in and I did not get sick. I
can't testify about the how the snake felt.
Why
am I writing about this now? Who
knows? Maybe someone out there in snake
land needs to know right now that water moccasin babies emerge directly from the
mother fully ready to rock and roll, and are not necessarily harmless. Consider yourself on notice. My work is done here.
What
else is done here is my compulsion to bring up the subject of poisonous cotton
mouth snakes. Funny how that works. We can now put this compulsion to bed.
Meanwhile,
my pain meds are still having me twitch every this way and that with little
myoclonic jerks and what not. So what are we left with, medically
speaking?
(1)
Strange scenarios that pop into and out of out of my brain that may or may not
have an actual significance or connection to anything at all....
(2)
Weird pains that set themselves up and then disappear.
(3)
Bizarre flights of fantasy that leave me wondering if I'm going nutsy
cookoo.
Today
was nurse day and my nurse wants to up my pain meds at night just a little bit
now, in hopes that I will not wake up in the middle of the night in pain as
much as I have been over the last two weeks.
That starts tonight, the belief being that if you get ahead of the pain
early on, you’ll stay ahead, but if you fall behind then it’s harder to catch
up. Wish me luck. Oxycontin delayed release x2 here I come.
I'd
better sign off this blog entry off before it gets any more out of control. Meanwhile, I’ll be looking out for other
bizarre compulsions to tell you about.
Let’s hope I don’t find any! Or
if I do, maybe it’ll be about something more fun, like egg-sucking hound dogs
or something like that (there is such a thing in the rural south, I’m here to
tell ya, although it’s been a long time since I’ve encountered one. About as long as the encounter with the baby
cottonmouth!)
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