Mayday Meltdown

Sooo…today wasn’t so good. I just think the stars were aligned (against me) and I maybe should have stayed home.

I was already having a tough time walking because I cut my foot on a shell a few days ago when I jumped off my board (I know, I know, I “really shouldn’t do that”). In spite of my aggressive cleaning regimen of hydrogen peroxide and Neosporin, it has still managed to get infected.

So I was already battling that delightful reality when we walked over the dunes to the beach and saw the seriously dumpy waves. Maybe it’s the hurricane in the Yucatan, but whatever it is, the waves are super dumpy right now.

For me, this usually translates to getting thrown off the board (a lot), and you know how I don’t like that.  The only thing more frustrating than face planting into a wave is doing it over and over again.

To add to this delight, the surf hat (that I now have to wear to hold down the pterygium growth) is shoved back by the water when I face plant, which causes the bill to stick straight up on my head.

Because that looks cool.

And with the chin strap (I know), I can’t just pull the hat back down; I have to undo the strap, reposition the hat, and re-clasp the strap – which isn’t as easy as you’d think.  So that got old, real fast.

In addition, there was an incredible amount of algae in the water, which was getting everywhere – even in my eyelashes.  This of course made me nervous because, I mean, if dust is bad for pterygiums, algae can’t be good.  It must have also been an irritant because after just a few minutes in the water, my throat began to burn.

About midway through our time on the water, my leash got wrapped around my arm.  As I was trying to untangle it, a big wave crashed on top of me and tried to rip my board away…only it was affixed to my arm, via the leash.  It felt like a tourniquet that someone new to the medical field had tied with unnecessary gusto.  The bruise from that is deepening by the minute.  It’s a real beaut.

This was the last straw (well, second-to-last, really) and Mad Mo ended up coming out.  I unfortunately got way too sassy with Ted when he was only trying to help.  Lucky for me, he doesn’t take it personally when I get petulant.

The final kicker came when I was riding probably the best wave of the whole day and I lost my balance.  The Civil Corps of Engineers had recently finished a dredging project, which pushed in the sand bars quite a bit, and it just so happened that when I fell off the board, I landed in about 12 inches of water with very packed sand below that.  I fell on my side so my shoulder took the fall…hard.

So that was it.  I unlodged my shoulder from the bar, grabbed my board, and huffed into shore.

D.O.N.E.