Swamp Olympics the Third

Final entry of 3

“Dude, I read somewhere that you got like two minutes to live,” ran through my head as I stood a moment staring at the beauty of my imminent death. I considered how the sun reflected off of that perfectly washed, shiny black Cadillac and wondered if the journey I’d undertaken to preserve our lives would be for naught. I’d made it well over my two-minute mark but was beginning to seriously consider the old adage of “borrowed time”.

“I’m going home,” my friend said abruptly interrupting my thoughts. At this point, I was already losing most of what little wits I had at that age from both exhaustion and fever but there were a couple of things that entered my mind and still do to this day looking back.

Some basic questions needed asking. Firstly, how the hell was he planning on getting home when it was still about a mile to his house and I had already practically dragged him from the swamp? Why wouldn’t he just come to the hospital with me and my grandfather? These were obvious questions that I decided needing rapid articulation as succinctly as possible.  So I did.

“Are you retarded!? You could barely walk a minute ago.” And, “Are you crazy?” left my mouth before he had made it three wobbly steps.

I do not remember all of what he mumbled as he began limping in the most athletic way possible down the street, but I do remember catching something about not being allowed inside someone else’s house without permission and that he had no intention of being murdered by his mother after being switched by his father for taking a ride in someone’s car without asking.

I was a terrible friend looking back but mostly an idiot of the same caliber as he. His reasoning at the time made perfect sense to me as I myself had seen a belt a time or two for being places without letting my family know. Neither of us took it upon ourselves to use common sense and come to the conclusion that emergency trumps a possible beating every time. As long as you had ample evidence of course.

In any case, he went trudging off down the road and I went in to light a fire under my grandfather.

I burst through the front door and he was of course right where I knew he would be. Where he always was. Sitting in his armchair watching CNN sipping a beer. I led with the most obvious exclamation, “Grandpa! I was bitten by a cottonmouth and I need a doctor!”

He looked up at me in his minimal effort fashion. As in, he tilted his head up just enough that his eyes cleared the top of his crossword puzzle and then peered at me over the frame of his reading glasses. He stared at me for a moment considering�"something. Old people were weird and smelled funny. It was known.

He cleared his throat and slowly set his paper down on the end table. Then, his pen was placed on top of the paper and he folded up his glasses slowly and placed them in the container in his breast pocket. This was all followed by him leaning back comfortably in his chair, crossing one leg over the other (in girl fashion I thought at the time) and taking a noisy slurp of beer.

“Did you hear me?! I got bit by a snake!”

He sat there a moment completely disregarding my attempts at panic and asked me, “How long ago?”

I told him that it had been about an hour and a half and he nodded, took another sip of beer, and proceeded to pry himself from the chair. I knew better than press further at this point as he was finally in motion and that was the best I would get. However, my patience was tested when he told me to go grab him a “Coors” and dump the old one. “Don’t forget to grab me a pack of smokes while you’re at it...” he said to me as I started toward the kitchen.

I must have been truly bereft of all hope as this had been the first time in probably a whole year or so that I did not pull a “one for him, one for me” on his carton of Benson and Hedges. I snagged him his pack of smokes and a cold beer and he met me at the front door. Eventually.

Another situation that needs explaining at this point is the obvious issue of getting a cold beer for my grandfather for our trip to the hospital.

My grandfather never drank anything but Coors. As far back as I can remember he drank nothing else. No water. No soda. Nothing.  The one exception was the occasional small glass of baking soda mixed with water to settle his stomach. He had taught me to mix those quickly and well. It had been explained to me that he had a stomach issue where they had removed approximately half of it at some point leaving him with certain challenges. I did not know the whole story and still don’t but what I did know was how to mix his baking soda and fetch him beer.

I need to be clear at this point because all this sounds quite bad. He never got drunk and he never drank more than four or five in a day. Add to that the fact that most of those went down the drain when they got too warm or down my throat if I lacked an immediate audience. The only real issue was the fact that Mississippi had drinking and driving laws even then. Drunk or not I knew it was wrong and it always made me nervous but he never went for a drive in the “Caddy” without a cold one.

I think the reason he never got in trouble was simply this�"No cop in his right mind pulls over a black Cadillac with a military license plate sporting a “Mafia” border inscription around it when the person driving it looked older than dirt and drove 35 in a 55. He wore his aviators and military haircut with pride.

We hopped in the car (he strode laconically) and set off down the road toward the hospital. It was about a thirty or forty-minute drive to Singing River Hospital and about fifteen minutes or so in�"I checked for like the tenth time that we were still cruising at the break-neck speed of thirty-five. I couldn’t take it anymore and asked quite nonchalantly if being bit by a snake was considered an emergency. He nodded in affirmation and jerked his head in the general direction of my foot and said something like “looks like you got bit good too considering the size of your ankle.”

Not sure how you can be bit good but hey, whatever, I had bigger questions.

“Then why are we going so slow?”

“We have to get there alive. The goal is to make it.”

It was a bit difficult to argue with his logic other than the whole 35 in a 55 so I let it go and resigned myself to listening to Tanya Tucker whine about loving her like I want to or some-such. The truth of the matter was that I didn’t love her at all at that age and all I wanted was to live.

Honestly, I do not remember much of the car ride after that. The next memory I do have of that day was pulling in to the E.R. and my grandfather ambling up to the sliding doors and gesturing a bit only to be trailed out by someone with a wheelchair. They loaded me up and took me in. The irony being what it was, I had the honor of somehow coming in second place for the last race of the day. There in the waiting room of the hospital sat my friend, already checked in and foot propped up on a chair. The Swamp Olympic's last event was to be a loss for me.

He had walked almost a mile to his house and had to have driven the same distance and yet he beat me by a fair margin it seemed. He had probably started his trek from home at about the time I was grabbing a beer from the refrigerator. I didn’t blame him. It was not his fault that his parents actually understood what the word emergency meant. That did not stop me from telling him in a not so quiet whisper that he was an inbred mongrel that had relations with sheep and other various farm animals.

I did not word it quite like that as you can imagine but the important thing was�"he lived and we got to spend the next hour or so sneaking middle fingers and lip reading cut-downs across the room�"but my fate, however, was still in question.

The next thing I knew I was laying on a table in a wide open exam room and my ankle hurt something fierce. I looked down to see my grotesque horror show of a foot. So big.

I will never forget what happened after my parents arrived. They were actually the first people to come up with the grand idea of pain medication. Yes, finally someone who actually cared. They had the doctors begin the process of getting me something while (I will never forget the Einstein’s name) Dr. Winters consulted a CHART on a wall about how to deal with a snake bite.

A chart.

That's like watching your mechanic trying to order blinker fluid in a McDonald's drive-through.

It gets worse.

My mother lost her mind. Next came a moment so funny and so out of this world that even then, through all the pain, I laughed. The doctor asked me in a serious and slightly secretive manner as if he was including me in some grand adventure, “Okay son, can you tell me what kind of snake it was and whether or not it was poisonous?”

My mother was trying to pick her jaw up off the floor and I began giggling maniacally. No drugs yet just laughing as I thought somewhere deep in my head that it was all just too much. I made it to the doctor and he was going to kill me. I won’t go into the anatomy of snakes, fangs, and a giant fricken ankle here but rest assured ladies and gentlemen, it was poisonous.

Perhaps he hadn’t gone to the same school I had for his Doctorate in "holy s**t that's big." I may have been a kid but I could diagnose the hell out of major injuries with one-hundred percent accuracy. No chin rubbing required. I was that good.

Another chunk of time passed as I laughed with my mother about doctors being jackasses (I got away with this on the account I was dying and all) and then it happened.

Morphine.

Ahhh…glorious morphine. I remember saying something about having fat toes and kankles followed by nothing….

In case you all were wondering, I woke up. Alive. Waking up dead would have sucked. I only say this because I asked myself when I woke up if I was alive and someone in the room told me yes.

They had cut out of a bunch of necrotic tissue and stuck a drainage tube in my ankle and sewed me up nicely with quite a few stitches.

I had lived and participated in the Summer Swamp Olympics and didn’t get a single medal or crown. I didn’t get money or fame. Not even a T-shirt. What I did get was a big scar and argued by many�"severe brain damage. I’ve been told I’m a bit addled. My father convinced me though, that the snake probably died from biting ME and my brain problems were probably from rabies I'd had earlier in my life.

I will never know for certain.