Out To Sea in San Pancho Mexico

I was sitting at my desk a few weeks ago and it was raining and raining and raining and it was cold….did I mention cold?  I was really kind of depressed and cold! I was doing a lot of thinking about the major surgery that was about to be performed on my back to my spine.  Tell me if this has ever happened to you …in a conversation you tell someone you are going to have surgery and without concern for you they will think long and hard and sometimes I think they have heard a story from somewhere, but don’t really know what they are talking about, but they start talking about someone who had a similar surgery and either didn’t make it or was totally disfigured or who limps or can’t see or talks with a slur or something horrible……Lately I have heard nothing but horror stories…yup..my fellow man building the confidence I need to go get my surgery.  Well I start to believe some of these stories and I feel like, if I am not going to make it out OK, I better get in one more vacation, so I head down to Mexico.  I had something go wrong with my foot about two weeks before I left, but my doctor was too busy to get me an appointment, so I left for Roberto’s Bungalows in San Pancho, Mexico hurting and limping. One beautiful hot sunny day I was out body surfing and I noticed the waves getting really huge and so I started to swim out further to avoid getting smashed and killed.  When I really took notice of what I was doing I realized, I was way too far out away from shore, so I started swimming towards the beach. The waves were smashing on top of me and making it hard to catch my breath. I found myself doing everything I could just to keep my shorts on and stay alive. I was doing cartwheels and front flips and back flips and eating my share of sand. When I finally got to where I could stand up and catch a breath I felt like maybe I wasn’t going to die. The water was up to my mouth and I was exhausted. I was staring at the beach praying I would get there soon. All the water I was standing in was being sucked out to sea and all of a sudden I looked behind me and a huge wave was about to break, right on me…so I knelt down and pushed off and darted straight up like a bullet…..the wave grabbed me and drove me into the sand like a really sharp pencil.. When my feet hit the sand I thought my foot and leg had shattered and I would never walk again.  It took everything I had to get to shore I was being battered and driven into the sand. When finally got to the shore I just laid there totally exhausted thinking I still might not make it. After I caught my breath and was able to think about what just happened It took me about a half an hour on my knees to go about 50 yards in unbelievable pain. I finally crawled up to some tables where some people were sitting and I asked for some help. I told them what had just happened and asked if someone could drive me home.  For 2 days I had to be carried around. Left San Pancho, Mexico and got back home and went for my Pre-Op for the spine operation and the doc started to test me and looked startled and said what have you been doing? You have about 50 % more movement in your foot and leg.  He asked if it was still numb and I told him it wasn’t numb anymore. I told him about my body surfing accident and we both came to the conclusion that something happened out there in the ocean…like the surf Gods knew I needed fixing and they fixed me…yup they really fixed me…He told me that even if I had done an operation on your spine I am not sure you would be in this good of shape. He told me to come back in six months and see if I still was feeling good. The next day I went to a foot doctor and it looks as though I had ripped some tendons a few weeks prior to the surfing accident and the final slam into the sand finished it off.  I got a cast up to my knee for the next six weeks and I hate it. The first day I got it on I pulled out my back…..the next day I was over a friend’s house and I was pulling my cast around to get seated and I fell off a chair on to the floor….Have you ever fallen and it seems to have changed all the bone structure inside your body…..kinda like the bones are all in a new place and the muscles are finding it hard to help you move….well that’s what happened and I could hardly move for 2 days….That’s not the end of the cast story….about 3 days later I was at work and I was cleaning up a bunch of cardboard around the Art Gallery and putting it in a dumpster….the dumpster was getting full so I jumped in…..I know what you are thinking….what and idiot….doesn’t he have a cast on?  Yup….stupid…  So as I was jumping up and down like a mad man and crushing the cardboard…. the extra weight from the cast made the cardboard easier to crush. I slipped when I landed on one of my jumps and when I did…. I bent back the fingers so far on my left hand so that they touched my wrist. The pain was incredibly intense. I didn’t want to go to the doctor, because I would have felt kinda dumb when they asked how I did it. The next day my fingers were as fat as ballpark hotdogs and my back felt like someone hit me with a truck and my foot in the cast was really hurting…I think I need a vacation…somewhere hot and at a really nice beach where I could go body surfing and just enjoy the sun and the time off….what do you think?