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9. This Little Piggy Was Decapitated
My attraction to risk, danger, and challenges, regardless of any merit they held, extended beyond my pushing the limits of the law. It was part of my nature, and a part that was growing with my increasing testosterone production. It may also have been related to my weird dopamine levels, a common side effect of autism, or my ADHD, which has similar side effects. Spectrum people are typically risk averse, but I was also in that 30 percent group of spectrum children who had ADHD, a group typically risk prone. I don’t know the technical reasons why, but the result was I shied away from people and ran toward whatever edge was closest. Maybe it was related to the hunter gene that research has shown may be a contributing factor to ADHD.
I had been extremely lucky up to this point. So far I’d only managed to tear up the ligaments of one leg and fracture my skull once, both on the ski slope and neither were showstoppers.
I saved up money to buy a motorcycle. I was too young to drive, but there were plenty of woods to disappear into if a cop saw me on the road. Nothing thrilled me more than riding my motorcycle. I would go as fast as I could and through the most difficult terrain. Being on the motorcycle felt like freedom, but I wanted more. I wanted to fly through the air. Why? Because I could! All I needed was a nice, big jump.
In an attempt to make that jump, I used a tractor mower to clear a patch of thick brush on a hill, but the slope was too steep to climb with the mower. A smarter me would’ve driven the tractor around and headed down the hill, but the idiot me decided to get in front of the tractor and pull it up the hill. Without my weight on the seat, the tractor made a wheelie, knocking me off balance and making me slip under the spinning blades. When the tractor came back down to the ground, the blades made mincemeat of my right foot. My adrenaline-fueled reaction, and the tracker rolling down the hill, limited the damage to one blade cutting across the top of my foot and neatly slicing through my sneaker and my last three toes, and the second blade cutting laterally through the side of my foot.
On the ground I saw my toes inside my sneaker lying a few feet away. I carefully picked them up and limped back to the house, leaving a trail of blood from the field through the vegetable garden, up the stairs, and across the porch to the back door. When I entered the house, I calmly told my mother, “I think I hurt myself.” She looked at the blood-soaked mess in my hands holding the missing parts of my foot and the pool of blood growing on the kitchen floor and flipped into hysterical mode, understandably. My father came downstairs, told my mother to call the hospital, threw me in the car, and raced me to the small country hospital on the other side of town as the ambulances passed us going in the opposite direction on their way to pick me up. I found that very funny.
The emergency room doctor didn’t have time to use any anesthetic before vigorously washing my bloody stumps with salt water and then sewing all my toes back onto my knobby foot. I was impressed with how much my body was dealing with this disaster. The sensation of pain had changed at a certain point, as if my brain had a safety switch to reroute pain signals when they got overloaded.
My first exposure to narcotics, at age fourteen, was not through illicit channels. It was in the emergency room after surgery when they pumped me full of morphine. Oh, that was wonderful! My body was in heaven floating on a warm cloud of delicious love. Even the constant vomiting didn’t detract from the morphine bliss I floated in for a number of days. When the morphine stopped, the bliss was replaced with searing pain. My body, which I’d generally tried to ignore, was letting me know it was not to be taken lightly.
Looking back, losing my toes was probably a blessing. Putting a powerful machine between my legs was like giving a chainsaw to a hyperactive monkey: eventually he would kill himself or someone else. One of my motorcycle friends had already been decapitated; he was speeding through the woods and didn’t see the thin, rusty wire that marked a farmer’s territory. Although I’d imagined myself as the next Roger DeCosta (Motocross world champion and icon of all that was awesome about dirt riding), I was closer to Woody Allen—not terribly coordinated, small, skinny…and my mother had just converted from Roman Catholicism to Judaism. Not that this had any bearing on my athletic ability, but it did make me more like Woody Allen. As much as I imagined myself doing killer 360 tail whips, there was a much better chance I would break my neck, but as I never imagined myself landing head first, that possibility didn’t exist in my mind—especially as the part of my brain that said “That’s really stupid!” couldn’t hold a candle to the part that was screaming “WHOOOHAAAA!!”
A side note: A couple of years earlier my mother, in an attempt to figure out what was wrong with me, had discovered much of the commercially processed food they were feeding me, and themselves, had a lot to do with one’s mental and physical health. After fourteen years of instant, fast, processed, preserved, new and improved artificial food-like substances, my mother decided to try something radical—eating healthy! She went to great lengths to buy and prepare food that was natural and wholesome. She removed the processed sugar from the house, made bread from scratch, and started a regimen of vitamins and herbs. It had a dramatic effect on me. I was calmer with more ability to focus and concentrate. The hospital fed me the worst food possible: white bread, processed cheese, pressed ham, sugar-saturated pudding. My mother made a grotesque concoction of vitamins, minerals, and herbs in a slurry of brewer’s yeast that she fed me twice a day. When the hospital discovered she was bringing in her own food for me, they reprimanded her and told her she was prohibited from giving me any food or vitamins, but she continued to smuggle in the forbidden health food. Much to the doctor’s surprise, in six weeks I was pretty much back to normal, minus the parts I’d lost to gangrene.
Next -> Part 1: Chapter 10 -- The Fallen
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Duncan Stroud can currently be found dancing tango in Argentina. His book, "Legally Blind", is available in eBook and hardcopy