Part 2: Hobbled and Humbled: A History of Hurt
(Be sure to read Part 1 of “Hobbled and Humbled” before diving into Part 2.)
Soooooooooooo ……
It turns out my injury is worse than doctors originally diagnosed. They recommend I have surgery to repair multiple fractures in my leg with “plates and pins.”
This is a reconstructive combination with which I am all-too familiar, as the aforementioned hardware is already holding together a significant portion of the right side of my face.
I’m not looking forward to having more metal mounted and riveted to my bones like some dentist’s diploma to his taupe-colored, office walls. But if I want to run again, let alone walk in a straight line, they are an unfortunate necessity.
So it’s with heavy heart and a yellowish-purple foot the size of a clown shoe that I head back to the operating room, making this the umpteenth time I’ve gone under the knife.
In addition to my most notable injury in Afghanistan, I have a colorful, multi-continent dossier of injuries and operations that could comfortably share the same file drawer with the late Evel Keniviel.
Granted the sometimes-expert motorcycle daredevil was hurt more, often during lucrative network specials, but my injuries occurred in more varied locales.
Here are just a few of them:
Cairo, 1999:
A negligent motorcyclist hit me while I was cycling through the city’s notoriously chaotic streets, crushing my rear wheel and sending me skidding to the pavement. I managed to shuffle home with my mangled bike despite searing back pain that I self-medicated with alcohol and valium for over a month.
Ah, to be in my twenties again.
Rio de Janeiro, 2005:
While surfing in Rio on a particularly heavy day, I caught a beautiful barrel that collapsed on me, forcing my face into the pointed nose of my board and tearing a ragged, gaping hole in my flesh, just to the right of my nose. A crack plastic surgeon deftly closed the puncture with more than a dozen stitches. However a week later a few tiny shards of my board’s fiberglass surface popped out of the wound. They’d been deeply embedded in my face upon impact and my body’s natural aversion to foreign objects worked them out.
Nature is amazing.
Miami, 2010:
I was producing a story for NBC News in Central Florida when I suffered a snake bite that made my hand swell to the size of a softball and complexion turn a sickly shade of pickle juice. When I arrived at the hospital I was slurring my speech and walking like a was a pint deep in some Irish whisky.
Afghanistan, 2010:
During a foot patrol through a small village, I heard a loud “WHOOSH!” and turned around to see a rocket-propelled grenade screaming toward me. Frozen by fear, the ordinance struck me in the side of the head, instantly blinding me in one eye and crushing several bones in my face. By freak luck, the explosive didn’t detonate and I managed to capture the attack on my video camera.
The injury is jumping off point for my upcoming book “Kissed by the Taliban.” (Gotta whore up the book. I’m still looking for a publisher. You understand.)
Zagreb/Split, 2016:
Croatia seems to have it out for me. A month prior to breaking my leg, I nearly sliced off a finger in the kitchen, an injury that required nine stitches. This gash doesn’t come with an exciting story, just a gross, blurry photo:
And that brings me back to my leg fractures. There were a smattering a concussions, car accidents and other injuries prior to, and in between, the major ones.
Some were my fault.
OK, most of them were.
It’s odd, a week earlier I caught myself thinking:
Other than my finger stitches, it’s been a while since I sustained a notable injury. Maybe my days on the surgeon’s slab are behind me.
Yeah, right.
Click here to read Part 3 of the “Humbled and Hobbled” series.
