Finger Sausage, Diamondbacks, and Double Demerol

The sun was merciless today, making a trip outside the house an excursion into discomfort, something you did to get things done, not to commune with nature. But this day would give me plenty of reasons not to consider the heat a major concern, despite the fact that my air conditioner was steadily sucking money out of my meager bank account.

It began with the wife's finger. We were not supposed to have the pin taken out until the 22nd of August, but for several days now the finger has swollen and the pain has gotten worse. This morning I found it necessary to contact the surgeon and ask about it, and Bob bless this man, he told us to get into the office for a look-see. There, after careful examination, he decided the pin might be a source of infection, as it had started to exit the end of her finger of it's own accord, and he went ahead and pulled it out. You would have had to knock my ass out before you even suggested pulling a steel pin out of MY finger, but stoic wifey said sure, and he did it sans any kind of deadening agent. But the finger is beginning to resemble a swollen sausage, and he thinks there may be pus in there than needs to be drained surgically, so he's scheduled her to be a the surgery center tomorrow to go back in and see what the problem is. Right now she is on antibiotics and is taking her demerol, which is now barely making the pain bearable. I try to empathize, but personally, and I think this probably this applies to everybody, I believe that the brain does not actually store specific memory of pain endured, and one must rely on the metaphors that most closely resemble what a kind of pain was like when it was being experienced. I myself once suffered a case of the shingles, and to this day, I rely on the statement, "It felt like someone had smacked my ribs with a baseball bat" to communicate what it felt like. But I can't really call up the sensation itself. So, I do not presume to know how much this hurts her.

Having gotten back from the doctor's office, I was dashing around trying to accomplish what felt like a hundred things at once. We had hung out laundry before we had left, and I needed to get out and take it down now that it was dry. While I was out there I noticed that the ants were still attempting to establish a civilization around our big tree from which the bird feeder hung, so I dashed back in to grab the ant-killer powder to lay waste to their efforts. I'm making circles around the base of the oak tree, laying down the powder, when I suddenly notice a buzzing sound coming from my left. OK, a little geography here; the tree is situated in the corner of the picket fence that we had put up to keep the goats out of the herb garden and shade garden. There is a stack of old metal and plastic lawn chairs next to the fence, almost to the corner. I am rounding the tree next to the chairs when I hear the buzz, and I instinctively know that sound, and without even knowing exactly where the source is, I head right so fast I'm standing six feet away from that stack of chairs before the air collapses in on the place I was standing when I first heard it.

My eyes are challenged by a sun setting in the west and the shadows beneath that stack of chairs, not to mention the goats all gathered around that area curious as to what I might have for them to eat. But in my new state of alert I focus in on a pile of coiled diamondback rattlesnake very close to where I had been previously and I'm wondering how I didn't get nailed, so close to him had I been. However, this is when "snakes must die" takes you over and I ran into the house screaming at the wife about how close I just came to getting bit while I retrieved my trusty Walther PPK/s, a pistol that was designed more for close in self defense rather than snake killing.

With the wife hot on my heels I returned to my vantage point, took aim at his head, and was greeted by a long forgotten memory of what a small .380 sounds like when you pull the trigger. It's LOUD! I saw the snake jerk a bit, but he remained the coiled menace, and I tried again. Still no real effect. By this time the wife is screaming that the goats are too close to the snake on the other side of the fence, so I dash around and thru the gate to chase the goats away from danger, shoving gentle little Ozzy out of my way while I knell down and take a bead on that pit viper head again. BAMM! I remove his lower jaw, and I glance to the side to notice that Ozzy is down, laying on his side. Oh, shit, the snake got OZZY!

A glance back at the snake convinced me that I had damaged it enough to not worry about further attack, and I turned my attentions to the poor goat who was definitely going to die if this snake had made a good strike. I searched all over him but could not find an obvious wound anywhere, and might not ever have thanks to his dense fur. However, as I picked him up to turn him over for a look on the other side, he ended up on all fours and stood there, steady as a rock, and he licked my face as though asking, "you all right?".

In retrospect, I think perhaps Ozzy might have caught a shell casing upside his little head and been knocked senseless for a moment, but there is no indication even up to this point that the snake got him. As far as the unexpectedly loud report of the pistol, I would have thought the goats would have been startled enough to scatter, but those dumb idiots were crowding into the danger zone to see what all the excitement was about. Luckily, I was able to dispatch the creature before they placed themselves into his strike zone.

While the snake was writhing around, wounded but very animated, I grabbed a shovel and repeatedly tried to part his head from his body, but was thwarted by the sand and the dullness of the shovel blade, so I gave up and grabbed one of those claw type things that old people use to pick things up with, dragged him out into the open, and used a meat cleaver to finish the job. Then, I took off his rattle, my trophy for having won that little war.

Strange thing about this encounter was the absence of a rush of adrenaline which normally I would have expected to overcome me when I first heard that buzz. I don't remember feeling that ramped up feeling, just a focus on protecting myself, my goats, my dominion, from a creature I otherwise would have no argument with. Even now I maintain a sense of numbness to the whole episode, and I'm hoping like hell not to wake up in the middle of the night with some delayed reaction. To tell the truth, in retrospect I probably overreacted to the threat, but at the time it felt like a very close brush with a trip to my very own Critical Care Unit, a place I don't mind so much working in but have no desire whatsoever to visit as a patient.

In the meantime the pain in my wife's finger has gotten excruciating, prompting another call to the surgeon, who told us to up the dosage of her pain killer and to be at the surgery center bright and early, as he would move her up to first in line to be dealt with. It's not going to be a good night.