At Least We Have Good Weather: A Life of Love and Loss

Chapter 38

I've never been one for doctors. I don't have any particular reason other than, well, other than my superhero complex I guess. I hate the idea of taking any sort of medication.

If I paid a psychiatrist a large sum of money, he'd probably tell you it stemmed from the childhood trauma of being forced to have my cholesterol medication mixed with orange juice in order to get it down.

I won't even take strong headache tablets or sleeping pills, I just tough it out and walk it off, whatever it is.

One family outing back in 1989 was to a trout farm in a town called Nelspruit, where, for some reason, I was chased around by a merciless dog, until I ran straight into a metal stake sticking out the ground and it ripped right through my leg. Clearly needing stitches, and lots of them, we set off in search of a doctor. Now being a Sunday, and 1989, nothing was open. My parents agreed that if it were still bad on the Monday we'd go see a doctor. It was, and we didn't. But I do now have a badass scar on my right leg.

Also as a kid, I came home one day not wanting to tell my mom the circumstances behind a newly broken arm - in fear of what she herself would do to me due to my own stupidity. I managed to survive about a week ignoring the pain, which I could no longer hide when my teachers noticed I couldn't even hold up a stick of glue without tears streaming down my face come project time.

Then back in 2003 I drove home after snapping my ankle during a tennis game. Only going to the doctor a few days later once I realized I really needed to be able to get a shoe on again one day.

But pain heals and chicks dig scars. Glory...lasts forever - Keanu Reeves (The Replacements, 2000)

In the years leading into 2010, my body had most certainly taken a beating, and nothing beats a body down like stress. That, in turn, not only makes you more susceptible to bugs and viruses that go around, but also makes your odds of battling them without medicinal help, a little harder.

Over the course of a few days into August of 2010, I started getting headaches so bad that they were becoming blinding to the point where it felt like my skull was about to implode from the pressure.

I excused myself from work, which I hated doing, and everyone commented on how pale I was looking, putting it down to "nothing too serious". I went home, hoping I just needed a good nap. I couldn't sleep though, the pain was just getting worse and worse, and eventually I began to wail in pain like a crazy person. Now I normally have a fairly high tolerance for pain, as my friend, Russell, would attest to, the day I let him saw through my hand with a ruler, but this was the most excruciating psychical pain I had ever experienced in my life.

I was also running a fever, and it just felt like my blood wasn't circulating anymore, I was freezing cold with chills and my body just refused to move. It was bad, real bad, but my hero complex told me I just needed to ride it out for a day...or two...or three.

By day four I had noticed that the section from my upper left thigh to just above my hip had turned pitch black in colour. My immediate thought was Frostbite! But at that point the memories of my recent Everest climb were more than likely hallucinations brought on by the fever. We knew this had suddenly become something serious...(yes, the last three days were more of a wait-and-see sort of scenario.)

Like an invalid, my mom helped me get dressed and raced me up to the doctor. I felt like I was dying. Eventually when the doctor saw me, it took him all of 30 seconds to say that I had in fact contracted Tick Bite fever, and that I needed to be hospitalized. I refused the hospitalization, but took the medicine he prescribed. All of it.

An insignificant memory from a few weeks before that suddenly re-emerged as I remembered waking up one morning to slight pinch in that exact area that was now the colour of night. It was indeed a small red tick that my cat had left on me. An annoyance that had happened many times before, but this one particular tick just happened to be carrying the virus. And, it just happened to have bitten me...twice. I've heard that only about 1% of ticks carry the virus, I don't know how true that actually is, but true to form, I was always an against-the-odds sort of guy.