Paths to Maturity and the Role of Fireballs, part III

Continued from Part II

To the squeamish: At this point, the story becomes a bit more graphic. I wake up the next morning feeling hung over, but oddly, not in pain. The night’s events come flooding back to me. I slip the sheet off, which is a bad idea since it is partially stuck to my legs. Luckily, I can’t feel anything. According to a surgeon I talked to, 3rd degree burns destroy the nerves in the skin and muscle tissue that they damage so that no sensation of any sort is relayed to the brain. Hooray for that. Anyway, my lower legs are both now two gigantic welts. Seriously, they are pretty gross. So I enlist a friend to take me to the local hospital whereupon telling my tale I am derided and otherwise humiliated by the staff for my stupendous idiocy. They wrap me up and tell me that their hospital isn’t equipped for an injury of this magnitude (they really did tell me that), sending me instead to Van Nuys where, by some luck that I’m sure I don’t deserve, there lies the Grossman Burn Center, ranked #1 in the world for treating 3rd degree burns. Thus begins my two week stint in a bed, including such highlights as skin grafts for my legs, 6 days of constipation resulting from the intense pain killers I was on (ending in a self-administered enema…one hell of an experience), and a visit from my friends that had them kicked out of the hospital for doing wheelies down the hall in my wheelchair.

My Dad seems a little too full of glee in this picture.

My first moments in the joint involved the doctor cutting off the skin from my legs while I watched since, after all, I couldn’t feel anything anyway. Actually, that was pretty cool. Then I get stuck in a hospital room with some old, cranky guy who proceeds to tell me how he thinks skin grafts are the most painful thing he has ever been through, and he had, he says, been shot twice in Vietnam. This is the day before I get my skin grafts. The next day they ask me where I want the living skin taken from: my inner thigh, or my ass cheek. Is this really a question? Why not just ask me if I would like to stand for the next month since I can’t sit down on my butt without screaming in intense pain? I chose the thigh. So I guess they use something which is the equivalent of a surgical cheese slicer to remove living skin and transfer it to the parts of my body where my brilliant ideas had sought to remove it. Here is one picture and another, of my healing legs, which, seriously, you should avoid if you don’t like gnarly looking things. After about two weeks the hospital deemed me capable of self-care and I was discharged. Thus ended my time at the burn center, though I’m still on their mailing list. Why in the hell does a burn center have a monthly flyer? Are they hoping for repeat customers?

Some interesting things I learned in the burn center:

You watch a lot of movies because you are bedridden, but you have to be careful what you watch because people who have been “victimized” by fire (they actually use this term…as if fire “meant” to get you) are weak-willed and apparently freak right out anytime they ever see fire again. I picked out End of Days from the hospital’s stunningly shitty collection only to find out that it, too, truly sucked. I was warned, however, before viewing it, that it was laden with fire images. Hospital policy. The only thing I freaked out about was Arnold’s acting. I don’t see how he could possible be a worse governor than he was an actor in this flick.

By the way, in case you wondering, here is a plot summary for that movie: “At the end of the century, Satan visits New York in search of a bride. It's up to an ex-cop who now runs a security outfit to stop him.” Ok, ok, its true. I deleted the “elite” they had before “security outfit.” But still!

Another thing I learned:

When you sit in a bed for two weeks without using your legs even once, they don’t work anymore. I had them raised to keep the blood flow and thus the diabolical pain out of the re-growing nerve endings and I never even attempted to walk on them. Apparently, since leg muscles expect to get used repeatedly and on a daily basis, denying them that motion, even for the briefest amount of time (two weeks…), causes them to atrophy. I guess that’s why NASA made the astronauts run gravity-free loops in the shuttle and stuff like that. Needless to say I was on crutches for most of a month afterwards relearning, at 22, how to walk and taking showers in a plastic lawn chair my mother was nice enough to bring inside for me. Lesson? Don’t sit down for two weeks straight.

My parent’s knew, of course, that I was in the hospital, but I didn’t want them to think I threw a huge rager at their house. My story to them involved me on the beach in Santa Monica at a bonfire where I had to cover up a girl from an exploding beer can in the fire and was thus exposed, myself, to fiery debris. Actually, the exploding beer can is a real story, but I’ll save that tangent for another time. I think my parents believed that story for about a week, but I bet my dad thought the world of me for those seven days. Go chivalry.

So that’s pretty much the whole story. Well, almost. The afterwards to this story reads like a letter to Big Brother (a skateboarding magazine that Larry Flynt chose to stop publishing in 2004), submitted, with pictures, by the aforementioned accomplice #1, which they printed in the front of their November 2000 issue. I guess the fame did come full circle.

A special thank you goes out to my sister for not only having the amazing timing to be able to catch the fire photos in the insanely short time frame each was provided, but also for tending to a maddeningly drunk and injured brother for the rest of the night. Breaking leaves off of the aloe plant in the backyard to apply to my legs was really heartfelt. Kudos to her, also, for having a stomach of steel and taking the included hospital photos. She’s a trooper.

So, the answer to the burning (haa) question in your mind: have I become more mature through the trials of this incident? Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t really regret the fireball trick. I’d do it again, if the moment called for it. Only, sans the part that didn’t work. I guess I learned that if you are going to play with fire, do it right. And fire is a victimizer that haunts hospital patients in the form of Governor Schwarzenneger. Like you didn’t already know that.

And don’t ask me about the fire story. I’ve done told it.