Painted Lines and A Cactus or Two

"Jenny, ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! That’s what you made me do all year. I’m going to miss you. I have never known anyone to trip over a line painted on the floor!"

The above note was written in my Senior Memory Book by a basketball teammate. I had a reputation for tripping over the painted lines on the basketball court. We never knew when it would happen, but I am pretty sure it happened more when I was running backwards than forward. I’d fall and then pop right back up. On the basketball court, nothing less than a sprained ankle was going to keep me down for long. Later, off the basketball court (and off the painted lines), I would still find myself tripping over invisible items. I would laugh (it is better to laugh with the people who just witnessed the fall than to look sad and be laughed at) and then I would announce that I just had my own personal earthquake. A few months ago I “liked” a saying on face book -- “No, I didn’t trip. The floor just looked like it needed a hug!” Funny thing is that I am not alone in liking this saying! Apparently there are a bunch of us lurching towards floors all over the world. (I can just imagine what we might look like to God -- I wonder if our many personal earthquakes make a wave around the world like people sometimes do at a football game. Ha!) I have to say - add crutches to the mix, and I can be fun to watch! When I did have crutches, I learned quickly that I should not wait until the last possible moment to “run” to the bathroom. Flying headlong into the wall because my body went a different speed than my crutches does NOTHING to help hold the bladder! I’m just saying….

The other day I was thinking about the phrase “That’s one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.” For me it could be redone a little: “That’s one small step for man; one big trip for Jen!” I have a “tripping“ story for you. This one, though, might make you squirm just a bit. Years and years ago, I lived in sunny California. My husband and I would take off with friends to the desert to do some off-roading, hiking, and camping. I had a blast with this group! One particular afternoon, we found an abandoned railroad and decided to hike along it for awhile. After about a mile, we came to a tunnel. The tunnel was blocked off on our end, but we could see that it was open on the other side. We decided to climb the hill and enter the tunnel from the far side. Once on top of the hill, we saw that we were pretty high up. We had rented a video camera, and at this point I had a hold of it. I started videotaping the landscape -- including the tops of some palm trees that were very far down. (I had to use the full extent of the zoom to capture them.) As I was finishing, the guys were already down and inside the tunnel (which was still high compared to the rest of the scenery down the hill). I turned off the video camera (too bad I did that) and started my descent. I didn’t get more than 3 steps down the hill when I tripped and started to slide the wrong direction -- towards those palm trees WAY DOWN below.  I grasped for anything that would stop me from what in all honesty looked like my death. What I grabbed worked. I stopped. Oh, that is not the end of the story. What saved me was a cholla cactus! These nasty babies have needles shaped like fish hooks. The needles go in easily, but their barbed tips keep them from coming out without taking some skin with them. The needles are also filled with a poison. The poison was not going to kill me, but my hands started swelling and turning black and blue almost immediately…not to mention that there was lots of blood also in the mix!

At this point, the men were already in the tunnel. I called out, “Uh, can anyone help me?” I must have sounded pretty bad off because they ALL came running. I was sitting on the path with a battery-ejected video camera beside me. (Thankfully the camera only had a tiny bit of damage from my fall.) They guys ran up the hill and then suddenly stopped about 10 feet away. “Why aren’t you coming?” I called out. They couldn’t see the damage yet by the cactus and thought my dilemma involved a rattlesnake (something also common in that desert). I assured them that there was no snake but that I was injured from a fall.  In close inspection, we all found that I had needles in my hand, leg, and my bottom (how I managed to also sit on the cactus, I do not know). Later we were able to do some counting. I had over 150 needles in my hand alone! Amongst the men in our group, we had one National Guardsman and one guy who used to be an undercover detective in Los Angeles. They took over and began deciding how to work on me. Apparently I started to go into shock, so while I had needles being pulled from my hand, leg, and buttocks, I was also being asked to recite my name, address, telephone number -- anything to get my mind back to normal. The pulling of needles (four different guys were working on me) went on for 45 minutes until I was in a position where I could be moved and hike the mile back to the trucks. It was clear that my puffy, bruised hand was going to have to be looked at by the experts in the emergency room (which was 3 hours away). At this point, we were also concerned that I had fractured part of my hand during the fall.

We got to the hospital and they didn’t do much for me other than give me a very nice pain killer. They did x-ray my hand and verified that it was not broken. A few days later when we met up with the rest of the guys, they told me about that part of my hand. They reminded me about one particular moment out in the desert when one of the guys told me that at the count of three he was going to pull a needle that had bunched up my skin a lot in one place. When he pulled, the needle gave but it did not come out. With the pain that came, we all wondered if the needle had punched through a muscle or tendon or ligament (whatever is in that part of the hand). I still had a lot of needles in my hand and leg by the time we got to the hospital. They asked me to take off my wedding ring. I told them that I couldn’t, but when they threatened to cut it off, I figured out a way to get it off by myself. The problem was that my hand was still swelling. They did not want the wedding band to cut off my circulation -- another big reason I figured out how to get that ring off quickly. As for the rest of the needles, the hospital staff would not pull them out. The doctor explained that every time a needle got pulled, more poison would be released into my hand. He wanted the needles to come out on there own. You know how that happens? They fester and get puss like acne and come out that way. Yuck. My hand got wrapped in gauze so that I wouldn’t accidentally snag the remaining needles on anything. It remained that way for about a week. The longest needle to come out of my hand was a quarter of an inch long. The last one to eventually leave my body came out 2 ½ months after my accident. It was in my leg and was over a half an inch long! As painful as this all was, it sure beat the death that awaited me down the steep side of the hill! Just the same -- I bet you have not met too many people who have grabbed a cactus to save themselves!

Ever since that trip, my group noticed that I couldn’t enter a desert without getting poked by a cactus in some manner. I don’t do this on purpose!! I just think cacti like me! It became the running joke. “I wonder when Jen is going to get attacked by another cactus!” OR “Hey Jen, watch out -- this is what a cactus looks like.” At least I could laugh with them. One cactus poke, though, had no witnesses (thankfully) but still hurt a lot. Have you ever seen a Yucca cactus? It has long “leaves” with large, sharp needles at the end of each. I backed up into one of those with a bare rear end! How? Our group was known for going to remote places to off-road and camp. None of these places had any type of bathroom -- not even an outhouse. Girls went one direction and guys went another. Sometimes, though, you weren’t as hidden as you thought, or the guy-girl routes got confused and you’d suddenly hear footsteps (and a male voice) coming your way as you were still squatting. For these reasons, I tended to make sure my bare backside was towards a big tree or rock or something to hide it. In this particular moment, the rock that was shielding my backside also was the home to a Yucca plant. I backed up a little too far! Ouch! And then jumped forward probably a bit too far! Nothing like getting poked in the bottom to make sitting a little more difficult around the campfire.

I miss our trips to the desert. We moved from California in 1994, and I haven’t been back there since. I was recently reminded about my cactus adventures when we were in a desert in New Mexico this past summer with some friends. I was happy to see that the cactus curse has ended. I was able to enter and leave that desert without ever being poked by a cactus. The fifty or so tarantulas we saw, though, were a different story!