Painful Yarns by G. Lorimer Moseley

Author:G. Lorimer Moseley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Noigroup Publications

Figure 4 The nasty customer that got me

It is important for this story to point out that I was walking with a small party, one of whom was a boring-talker. Everyone knows a boring-talker, although they may never have realised it. Boring-talkers are those people who, no matter what they are talking about, make it completely and utterly boring. Bores you almost to tears. Well I know one such Boring-talker, who I will refer to as Helen. That is not her real name. In my talks I use her real name but she might just read this, so I have called her Helen. I so-happened to be in a conversation with boring-talker as we were walking along the windy track through Lane Cove NP. She was talking about something, but as it is impossible to remember anything without attending to it, and as it is impossible to attend to a boring-talker, I don’t remember what Helen was talking about. I do remember that she was talking, because I remember having to reply every few seconds with a “Right” or an “OK”, with the occasional ‘Really? Wow!”28

Anyway, as I was walking, I remember, this time quite clearly, feeling a really sharp prickling pain on the outside of my left leg, just above the ankle. If I was distracted I may not have felt it. Distraction remains our strongest analgesic. However, thanks to Helen, I was not distracted!

The pain was immediate and really intense. It was an electric, burning sensation that quite literally took my breath away. The pain shot up my leg like an electric bolt. It really really hurt. I couldn’t help but yell out, partly I think in shock but then in pain. I doubled over, fell backward onto a conveniently situated rock and gripped my leg. I couldn’t stop my face from contorting and my eyes switching between looking for the snake like a madman for sanity, and then clamping tight. I was in agony.

I hadn’t just immobilised myself. I had mobilised the rest of the walking party. They were all attending to me. Jacko was on his mobile phone (the other side of having a National Park in the middle of the city) to the ambulance service: “Hurry! We have a bloke here who has been bitten by a snake, he has a minute to live!”29 Helen, I think, may still have been talking. Not sure. It wasn’t for a couple of minutes that anyone had a close inspection of the area, at which time we realised that I had indeed been scratched by a twig. There was a single, tiny scratch mark on my leg. I have drawn here another picture of what I think happened this time, biologically.

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