September 11- Day 19

To take our minds off all of the new information we heard yesterday, Tom and I decided to spend the day at our favorite beach, Pass-A-Grille. If you’ve never been there let me try to describe how serene and relaxing it is there. The town is at the very tip of the island just south of St. Pete Beach and is old, quaint and filled with charming homes, restaurants and shops. There are no buildings on the beach and you have to walk past sand dunes to get from the parking lot to the beach. The water is crystal clear and goes from a soft green closest to the sand to a pale turquoise and then a deep blue. At 10:00 am on a Saturday in September the crowd is pretty sparse and is mostly couples or a few families with small children. There’s a small jetty at one end and if you walk up and look over it, the ocean seems to go on forever into the distance.

On a typical day there, Tom and I will sunbathe, cool off in the Gulf, maybe nap in our beach chairs, and read if you’re Tom or flip through the latest fashion or shelter mag if you’re me. Today started off being typical with sunbathing and magazine flipping, but then it happened. Tom was out in the water about waist deep cooling off from the 95 degree cloudless day we were having when I decided to put down my Coastal Living and join him. Just as I reached Tom, my left foot felt like the sand was giving way and I was sinking deeper. Before I knew what was going on, I felt something bite me. And then, the pain came. Excruciating pain like I’ve never felt before! I was afraid to look down for fear my foot had been chewed off by a shark! I tried to climb up on Tom because I thought whatever got me might still be hanging around. I quickly started to drag myself out of the water and knew then that my foot was still intact, but was starting to swell up and hurt like crazy. I got out of the water and crippled over to my beach chair. My foot was bleeding from a puncture wound that was apparently from a Stingray. Yes, I was bitten today by a Stingray!! What next???

Advice started to come at us from several people on the beach who just witnessed what had happened. Scalding, hot water on my foot for the next 2 hours was what we heard from most everyone. Tom ran down to the beach shack and they gave him a pickle bucket filled with hot sudsy water to soak my foot in. I sat like that for about an hour but by then we had been there for so long the sun was baking me. Taking my foot out of the hot water was too painful, so….I had to drag the pickle bucket filled with water and my left foot inside all the way back across the beach up over the sand dunes and to our car. I was quite a site taking one step, dragging the pickle bucket, take another step, drag the bucket, stop to talk to a group of tourists about what happened and finally make it back to the car.

All I kept thinking as Tom drove us home and I winced in pain all the way was why? Was there a reason for this? Was this supposed to teach me some lesson? Am I learning how to deal with pain to prep for my upcoming surgeries? Today’s pain was pretty bad on a scale of 1-10 I’d say it was a 9 at times. Maybe I’m just getting my bad luck out of the way so the good stuff will come at me when I need it most. I’m going with that theory.

Karen