SECURITY ISSUES: MY SNAKEBITE STORY

            Sept 17 marks the anniversary of my personal encounter with a tercio pelo.  Now, I have broken my back numerous times, suffered through natural childbirth with a recently cracked pelvis, and had all my teeth pulled, but no pain can compare to a snake bite. Years later, I still have peculiar symptoms, and my big toe aches, especially on the full moon.  

On our journey back to Osa from what my son called his "terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad, five and a half months in the United States,"  we had a 10-month lay-over in the Dominical area, where I was supposed to re-open a healing arts retreat center, which had the distinct disadvantage of having the newly completed section of the Costanera Highway running literally through the middle of it.  As I was in the process of refurbishing the cabins and sprucing the place up, I called for volunteers to help me.  Ron came to my aid.  Our caretaker at the time was a Tica woman and her 4 kids.  So long-haired, barefoot Ron was to be the token male...i.e., the male presence to give us a sense of security on this large property, without phone or vehicle.  

I showed him his quarters and then asked if he'd like to see the waterfall a few hundred feet from his cabin.  Why not?  What else was there to do on this beautiful day? 

As we approached the trail that had not been maintained in over a year, I had a distinct awareness of the possibility of snakes.  Now, I know the smell of them. My brothers and ex-husband raised snakes as pets, and I had the privilege of sometimes feeding and cleaning their cages.  I know to keep my eyes on the trail and not in the air looking at monkeys, but we were in a rather heavy discussion. 

 One week after what had happened in New York with the Torres Gemelos, we were talking about security because that was what Ron was there for, besides his handyman skills. So we were walking along an overgrown trail near the creek, talking about security as a concept. I said, "You know, people spend billions of dollars on security, and really, you don't know from one minute to the next what will happen...."  I emphasized this remark by turning to look at him, following a few yards behind me, barefooted and trusting me to guide him through unknown territory.  Well...silly me, jungle woman, I took my next step forward without looking...and it was punctuated by the most intense pain shooting through my foot.  I knew without looking what had happened.  I kicked off my sandal (Who me?  Wear boots?)  and stepped back to watch a 2-foot, young Tercio pelo move slowly across in front of me.  I screamed, of course, and Ron moved up to see what was going on. 

 They say that the venom has a hallucinogenic property to it...and I can assure you it was in effect immediately.  I looked at that snake, and it was glowing!  Brilliant, opalescent black and white, turning his head back to look at me.  My head ached.  I don't think I have ever had such a bad headache, and I get migraines fairly often.  Ron said, "What should I do? Should I kill it?"  "No," I said, "I'm going into shock here..."  and I turned and ran, or hobbled as quickly as I could, back out of there, towards the driveway.  I stopped at the place where the road went up to the main house and yelled for Ida, the caretaker, but since they were sanding the floor of the yoga deck, no one heard me over the noise.  I didn't pause long, and Ron caught up to me. 

 We went to the highway, where a bus stop bench was right by the gate.  Oh boy, did it hurt!  Ron thought maybe he should suck the poison out of my big toe.  So there we are, with him sucking on my toe, and the first car drives by.  It was a chartreuse Chevy Luv pickup. (Not part of the hallucinations). I waved him down, and he backed up...inquired, in Spanish, "Snakebite?"  and I nodded...he got out, and he and Ron helped me into the car; Ron jumped in the back, and we were off down the Costanera to Uvita, the nearest clinic. 

 At Uvita, of course, the doctor was out, but they called ahead to the hospital in Cortez for an ambulance.  We got back on the road, and Ron suggested that we stop at the airport and have his friend Jorge fly me to San Isidro.  I sensed that would be a little too complicated and insisted that we keep going toward Cortez.  So there we were, speeding down the highway at 80 miles an hour, Ron in the back of the pickup. By then, it was pouring down rain, and he was soaked.  

I was holding my leg with my hands, trying to create a tourniquet to keep the poison from rising, and trying to maintain my breath, practice some biofeedback, and keep my heart rate down...and the nice man who picked me up was telling me not to worry, I was not going to die.   He told me if I felt like throwing up, which I did as soon as the words were out of his mouth, don't worry about his car; just go ahead and puke.  He said if I start to feel sleepy, just try to stay awake.  Early respiratory distress is likely to be masked if you fall asleep, and you could stop breathing and die. He kept talking to me.  The swelling and redness were already halfway up my calf.  

Turns out, this guy was actually somewhat of an expert.  He's been bitten three times, twice by Tercio pelos and once on the hand by a coral snake.  I listened to him and watched out the window as we passed big 18-wheelers going 85 miles an hour on the wrong side of the unmarked highway in the torrential rain.  I was thinking, "No, I am not going to die of snake bite, but we're going to go off the road and die in a crash...."

Some time later, the ambulance met us, and we pulled over. I got in on the stretcher.  And truthfully, I don't remember much after that until I was inside the hospital, and the lady was asking me all kinds of questions.  At that point, I realized that I only had one sandal on.  I asked Ron to go back the next day and find my other one, where I kicked it off.  I really liked those 99-cent sandals I bought at the Salvation Army in the States before I left. 

They shot me up with anti-venom, antibiotics, and morphine.  But nothing eased the pain.  I cried, and I moaned.  I could not relax.  A few hours later, a doctor came in and asked me if I was on any other drugs. My guess is that he's never been bitten by a snake, and therefore, He could not imagine that it was so painful that I would keep crying for hours even after they gave me painkillers. 

  They transferred me by ambulance that night to the San Isidro de General hospital.  I asked them to stop by the property, or at least the driveway where I lived, to let the caretaker, who I assumed was watching my 5-year-old since I disappeared in the early afternoon, know that I would be in San Isidro and not Cortez if anyone cared to come and visit me.  I could not let myself rest until they found the place.  Once Ida finally came down to the gate, after much honking and sirening, and I told her what had happened, I fell into a fitful sleep that lasted on and off for about 4 days. 

Once in the hospital in San Isidro, I was placed in the observation room, which is the next step after an emergency.  Let me tell you, there were all kinds of strange cases in there.  Thankfully, I slept through most of the drama, waking only when they came to measure the swelling on my foot and leg.  After the 4th day, the swelling started to recede, and they moved me upstairs to the women's ward. 

 My foot was ugly!  Where the bite was, it was still oozing, and there was a blistered infection.  My fever was high, and I was in major pain. 

 San Isidro is a bit cooler than the temperatures I was used to at the beach, but I could not let anything touch my toe, so my foot hung out free from the blankets.  I was, of course, the only gringa in the place.  There was another snake bite victim, a young girl, who was bitten in the thigh.  She had been there two weeks and was being released.  Everyone told me about another gringa who had been bitten a few weeks before.  There seemed to be a lot of snake bites that season.  Lucky me, I got to be a statistic. 

After the first week, I was thinking that I could treat it naturally at home, with herbs and time.  I had all the books about jungle medicine, and probably all the plants were growing right there on the farm, but they wouldn't let me go home.  Nine days after the incident,  the infection on my toe was huge and blistered, and I decided to attack it myself.  So, with the needle from the empty IV, I lanced it, squeezed out the pus, and with it came a small fang that had been stuck in there all that time.  After that, the fever finally broke, and I started to feel a little better.  I figured I could go home soon. 

Two weeks passed in the hospitality of the Dr. Fernando Escalante Pradera Hospital.  The doctor switched my meds to an oral antibiotic and painkiller, though I was still getting Tramol through the IV.  The next morning, I woke up with a rash all over, and within a few hours, all my joints froze, including my jaw, and I ached all over.  Apparently, they had given me a sulfur-based antibiotic, a relative of penicillin, and I was having an allergic reaction.  It took another week to recover from that. 

After three weeks, they released me to go home, although I still could not walk.  I returned to the farm, where Ron, bless his heart, had moved into my cabin and was caring for Mateo.  He continued to take care of me for the next couple of months until I was able to get back on my feet. He carved a cane for me, which I used well into December.

The amount of time it takes to completely recover depends on the kind of snake bite. In most cases, healthy children can recover from a bite in one to two weeks if there are no complications.  Most adults take more than three weeks, but up to 25% of patients need anywhere from one to nine months. I was in that category. 

I did not lose my toe, although my whole foot turned black and peeled at a certain point.   I still can't wear close-toed shoes for any length of time, including boots, and on the full moon, my toe aches.  I asked a local guy in Osa who had been bitten a few years before me about it, and he said the same thing...on the full moon, his snake bite wound still aches. 

20 some years later, I smashed my toe with a three-pound solid hardwood rolling pin that slipped off the counter onto my foot while making bocas for the New Year’s Day opening of the pottery studio/vivero in Lloroso, up the mountain.  The impact crushed my toe and, oddly enough, reopened the scarred holes where the snake’s fangs had entered.  I managed the rest of the night’s prep and was on my feet all the next day at the event.  Only when I sat down to see about wrapping it up or soaking it did I notice infection had formed around those two incisions.  During the course of healing, I noticed similar pain and symptoms as when I was laid up with the snakebite.  I Googled, “How long does snakebite venom stay in the tissue?”  Apparently, there have been no studies longer than twelve years, so no one really knows.  I believe that some of it remains in the scar tissue for more than 20 years, perhaps for life,  and can be reactivated by injury to the area.  

Months after I recovered enough from the snake bite to get around more, I went to visit a guy near Dominical who was considered a bit of a local shaman type. He gave me a seed with a cross indentation in it. He said it was to carry with me to ward off snakes. I told him I should have had it a few months ago when the snake got me! I still have it, though, and I haven't been bitten since.

CHOCOLATE IS A GIFT

Chocolate is a gift!  It is a gift, first of all, historically, to the Gods.  It's their favorite Earthly treat!  In Mayan days, to appease the gods, and royalty, and the priests, you gave a tribute of cacao.

Then, the Spanish soldiers and traders took it home to Europe for gifts to royalty and loved ones and as a special imported commodity for the well-to-do.

Although there's plenty of “gold in them there rivers” and hills and jungles, Cacao is the real gold of Central America.  Here it still maintains some of its value as an indigenous crop, mostly unadulterated by large plantation practices and exploited by multi-national commerce or industrial processes.

Chocolate is a gift you give to Loved Ones.  It tells them they are special.  It shares love and gratitude for "the good things in life."  Chocolate is one of those "good things."

Chocolate is a gift you give to yourself.  Out of motivation or reward, or just loving yourself and treating yourself well.  Often, people who feel guilty, out of a misinformed and misguided sense of propriety, feel they need to justify their love of chocolate.

There are plenty of studies that show the benefits of chocolate.  In general, "feeling good" is the consensus behind the science.

Many claim that the cacao tree is the Tree of Life, depicted in many traditions.  Not the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but the other one--the one they were forbidden to eat of after partaking of the duality.

Jack's beans may actually have been cacao...magic beans that were supposed to take you up to the heavens.  Alas, they were misused and ended up in a nasty confrontation with an angry giant.

  

YOU’RE NOT MAD, YOU’RE A POET

As a young person, not knowing how to grieve, feel deeply,  or express myself in an acceptable way and be understood, I considered the label “mad.”... That was long before the diagnoses for various post-traumatic impacts or anxiety, depression, ADHD, and spectrum neurodiversity, deviation from the norm.   I was just sort of “crazy”.  At least that’s how they called it back then.  

Some would say I was “wild,”...probably meaning that I had not been tamed by the dictates and doctrines of the Adventist society.  I was not a bad girl, but I did break rules when I thought the rules were stupid or merely contrived to control.  Secular music, dancing, drugs, short skirts, pre-marital sex, and sin were lumped into one big label of “don’ts” that I just didn't see the actual harm in.  Of course, in hindsight, I can tell you the potential harm in all of those things, but alas, I was naive and no longer desired to be “innocent” or be like everyone else. 

 I was different. At that time, I knew very few orphans, a handful of adoptees, and even fewer friends or classmates who had experience with venturing into the shadow side of the rules. I was an experience junkie.  I had a poet’s heart.  I had a deep longing for adventure and living outside of the norm.  So I could write about it, eventually. 

I kept a journal, writing out the things I couldn’t tell anyone: my feelings, my thoughts, and my observations.  I was trying to make sense of being alive on the planet after almost not being so.  

I was looking for meaning.  I was looking for joy, for peace, for love. 

I wrote poems, prose, lines of a song that I related to, and descriptions of the moments when I sat down to jot down something in my notebook.  I often took my notebook down to Sligo Creek, at the end of our street.  I would walk, and sit, and walk some more, maybe swing on the swings, or just follow the creek downaways and walk up some other street and try to figure out how to get home from there.  I was exploring, close to home, but mostly alone with my thoughts and my notebook.  

When we did Career Day, and I said I wanted to be a writer, they sent me to the Review and Herald publishing house to talk about careers in publishing and journalism within the walls of the institution.  I could not see myself in an office writing what I was told to write.  I saw myself having adventures and relationships and experiences out in the world and writing poetry about it that inspired others and gave them a peek into an alternative lifestyle.  That was what I wanted.  I wanted to be a poet.

  My high school senior yearbook projects me ten years in the future, stopping by my publisher’s in my Mercedes and dropping off my latest book.  And here we are, nearly 50 years later, in a slightly different situation. Apparently, there isn’t much of a market for poets.  Or so I thought until the internet self-publishing and connecting other mad poets and writers online.  We now have the digital version of coffeehouses, although everyone is making their own coffee (unless they are sitting in a Starbucks or a street cafe in Paris).   Thank God for Facebook and Amazon, for writers who still aren’t driving their Mercedes Benz to their publisher’s office. 

I am a writer.  I am a poet.  I may also be “mad”.  

.