Last year, on a family trip to Destin, Florida, I was splashing in the Gulf with my sister when a sand dollar scooted across my foot. I screamed and jumped out of the water. My nephews laughed and teased me as I freaked out.
They had no idea.
One Friday night in September, hurricane season, my husband Gary and I had dinner at Turtle Bay and shared a bottle of red wine. There were only a few tables, and the staff knew us. No rush to flip the table, so we took our time. Town was still small then. Most of the businesses in Akumal centered around the main beach, and many local families lived from the archway to the highway.
After dinner we walked over to the beach.
The moon was just rising, three-quarters full, glimmering on the water, and the breeze was heavy with humidity. The bay was flat calm, only the smallest surf washing up. The dive center was closed and dark. Only a couple of hotel rooms had lights on. Tipsy on wine, the moon, and the magic of the tropics on a beach all to ourselves, I skipped as I walked. “Let’s go for a swim.” I dropped my clothes right there on the sand.
Naked stepping into the water, egging Gary on to join me. A fisherman’s panga sat anchored a few feet offshore, in front of the dive center. Not waiting, I pranced into the sea. Something hit my right foot. Lightning-quick.
I pulled my foot up out of the water, blood. Bleeding like a hemophiliac, or a stuck pig. We could not tell what the injury was, or how serious. This was a Mexico with no 911, no first responders or ambulances, so Gary dropped my bare ass in the sand. Directed me to get my clothes on, while he looked for the security guards from Club Akumal Caribe, the oldest hotel on the beach.
He was gone several minutes. I shinnied into my shorts and t-shirt, not panicking, just bleeding. And then pain started.
Gary returned with a security guard. They were calling Nestor.
Dr. Nestor was the only medical care on the corridor without driving to Cancun. A young doctor the some folks referred to as “the doc in a box”, after the single-room clinic he ran on the highway across from Chemuyil. Gary and the security guy got me into the back seat of our SUV. I just remember hearing Nestor was on his way. My foot was elevated, covered with a towel, shoved into the bag of ice that Gary bought at the minisuper.
Waiting at the Akumal archway, the entrance to the beach and the road to the lagoon. Marcy and Memo, dear friends, stopped to see what the commotion was. Memo looks like Mr. Natural from Zap Comix. He always has, with his big beard. Marcy stuck her head in through the open back car door to reassure me, though the excruciating throbbing had me focused on my foot rather than the unfolding circumstances. Melting ice, tinted red with my blood, trickled down my leg.
Someone said Nestor was here. I don’t remember if they said it in English or Spanish.
I whipped my shorts down to my ankles before his car was in Park. In Mexico, shots are given in the butt, not the arm. And Nestor had seen my ass almost as much as my husband had over the years. Nestor shot me with morphine without a second thought, and I hadn’t one thought of refusing. Pharmaceutical drugs could be bought over the counter at any farmacia. Valium, Percodan, Percocet. Morphine had no shock value. This was field triage. MASH 4077 without a Klinger. With my half moon raised to meet the needle, he hit my right butt cheek.
Nestor could not say what had happened to me, but he knew he could not stitch me up under a parking lot light. He said to follow him in our car to the Robinson Club on Xpu-Ha beach, a small all-inclusive that catered to German tourists. I had always heard the food was great there.
We followed him up the highway ten or twelve minutes and down the short paved entrance. His clinic was at the far end of the resort. With help, I hopped from the parking lot. Funny, thinking about Nestor’s clinic at the resort: instead of one room he now had two, each a bit smaller than his previous box. But hey a step up. Two rooms. The waiting room could seat maybe four people in folding chairs. No coffee table, no magazines, kind of the quintessential items you would expect to find in a doctor’s office. It had neither.
Thinking back, I can see myself on the table from the doorway of the examination room, a momentary out-of-body experience. The head of the table up against the left wall. Perpendicular. My feet weren’t in stirrups, but my right leg was in the air under the bright operating light, Nestor on the left side of my foot, his assistant, a man I never knew, on the right, assessing what happened and the damage.
I’m back in my body. Two men working on my foot. Gary watched. Turning from them to me and back again. Me, focussed at the ceiling, raging in two languages the resounding cuss-filled agony. Fuck. Shit. Damn it.
They buried their fingers in my foot up to the knuckle to clean the wound thoroughly. Marine injuries tend to be riddled with nasty bacteria. The pain was such that I had difficulty isolating where on my foot it radiated from. More morphine. Nestor then took a needle and thread knitting my foot back together. Sixteen stitches sweeping across the top, from the big toe to the fourth.
But I still feel pain, and it seems like it’s coming from the bottom of my foot. “Look at the bottom of my foot” I screeched. Sure enough, there was a single cut. A puncture wound, deep enough to need a stitch of its own. The mystery of which sea monster attacked me became more curiouser. Loch Ness, the Kraken? None of us could think of any creature that leaves a bite like that.
Friday night was soon to be Saturday, 11:30 pm, bandaged up to go. I was too out of it to absorb Nestor’s at-home care instructions. He handed me his only crutches. Too short for me, I wobble-crutched on morphine, trying not to fall over.
How Marcy and Memo knew we were home, I have no clue. They just showed up at our house. Dropping in was common in anyone’s home, because most of the people in town did not have phones. We had one but people still just popped in.
Marcy, drinking a Dos Equis beer, asked if we wanted to smoke a joint. It might help me sleep. I was in our bedroom, so Marcy and Memo came upstairs. All of us on our king size bed. Me laid back, foot elevated, passing a joint, and watching a worn-out videotape we had all seen a thousand times. Seinfeld. Marcy and Memo left after an episode. The joint did not help me sleep. It enhanced the pain. Scream until I passed out, wake up screaming. All night.
Saturday and Sunday were ice, elevation, pain.
Monday. Work day. We had our company office on 10th Avenue in Playa del Carmen; there was no way I was going. I slid down the concrete steps on my butt like a child to the first floor. Leaned back on the uncomfortable concrete living room sofa, watching the morning news on our pirated satellite service. I saw smoke coming from the World Trade Center. Gary was getting ready for work upstairs. I mentioned it, not frantically, just loud enough for him to hear: “Hey, a commuter plane or a traffic copter must have hit one of the towers.” He came downstairs, and we watched the jet hit the second tower. We did not know what to think. There was no news report yet on the tragedy that had not fully unfolded. Gary went to work.
My day was filled with napping and hobbling from the sofa, to the kitchen for ice, and the bathroom. Late in the afternoon, the phone rang. I raced to it like a lame horse at the Kentucky Derby, crutches and all. Slipped. Down I went. I grabbed the phone before they hung up. It was my mom, calling to see how I was, while fresh blood seeped from where stitches had ripped open.
Gary got home to find me right where he left me. It was dead at the office; the world was glued to the telly. The sun started to sink, a cocktail to wash down the meds. We flipped on the TV to the bootlegged Discovery Channel. We love documentaries.
The segment mentioned that boat-bottom cleaners in Miami and the Keys had been attacked by barracudas. Fascinating. Since as dive instructors we had always told divers they were docile, just don’t wear shiny jewelry. But barracuda attacks are more common than people think, news to us too. At this point we were not thinking that this is what attacked me. We were just dive pros, fascinated by the research and the scientists talking about this fish.
Until one researcher held up a barracuda skull. It was unmistakable. The dental records in my foot, especially the deep puncture on the bottom, were certainly from a barracuda.
Holy shit. I was bit by a barracuda.
And it was only after the bite that the Barry stories found me. Akumal Bay had a resident barracuda, Barry, a local celebrity snorkelers visited in the bay. I’d seen him once or twice myself, 4-5 feet long swimming in the middle of a huge fish ball. Now I heard he’d nipped a snorkeler’s swim trunks. I’m not saying it was definitely Barry. But he was a suspect. Even I was taken in by the tourist gossip.
So the barracuda bit me. But why?
The panga it was likely hiding under. Fishermen weren’t shy about cleaning their catch and dumping the entrails overboard.
Through the local rumor mill I’d heard that a woman in Tulum, the week prior, had been killed swimming with a silver necklace on, the fish hitting her jugular. And another attack along the coast. Phase of the moon? Who knew?
We presumed the culprit thought my foot hitting the water was a baby turtle. It was hatching season. Hatchlings swim toward the moonlight. Plausible.
Then I realized I had nail polish on, barely noticeable, a pale yellow, yet iridescent. Did the moon and the splashing make the light hit just right to catch the fish’s eye?
Something we will never know.
But the story does not end there.
In subsequent days I probably should have gone back to see Nestor. He never mentioned a follow-up, and as the ends of the gash grew closed, I carefully removed one stitch at a time myself, with a pair of nail clippers. MacGyver medicine. The worst of the gash was just before pig #4, where my Kentucky Derby slip had ripped it a little wider. The fourth toe, the little piggy that did not get roast beef, drooped. I could not flex it up, get it in line with the other toes. Ligaments had been cut, leaving it dangling.
I called my little sister. I still call her by her childhood nickname, Bugger. Bugger has a hardware store in her feet after so many surgeries. Could she ask her foot doctor if anything could be done? If so, I’d fly to Cleveland. His verdict came back: it would be like trying to connect two pieces of linguini.
Life settled back into the regular dramas of day-to-day life in Mexico. A couple weeks later the phone rang. Friends calling from Xcalak, a remote fishing village just north of Belize. I answered, and the caller was shocked to hear my voice. She had called to express condolences. They’d heard on the coconut telegraph that I had died.
Ah, the chisme. Gossip.
The toe and I worked out our arrangement over the years. I could curl pig #4 under; I just couldn’t uncurl it back. It wasn’t open-toed shoes that gave me trouble but closed ones, the toe getting caught under my foot. I even tried a string to pull it in line while I put a shoe on. The future was wider shoes, room to wiggle the pig into place. To this day I trip over it, stub it on door jambs, and have broken it a few times in the process. Only to give it a yank and straighten it out. And I cuss the same as I did back then.
The scar still hurts if you touch it. Yet I balance fine and can even do a tree pose in yoga, vṛkṣāsana. My foot aches when it rains sometimes. The scar on the bottom, the callus, molts like a crustacean. Twenty-five years later, I recently had my first follow-up since that night. My sister’s doctor. Yes, the same one. My pinky toe now looks like it’s humping pig #4. I had x-rays taken for the first time too. He says the damage makes me list to the right a bit, maybe reaching my lower back, and eventually it will tweak my knee. A custom orthotic is in my future.
Although I am not afraid of the water, I can be a nervous nilly. I don’t want anything touching me. Seaweed. A guppy. The sight of a barracuda makes my heart race, and not in a good way. So when that sand dollar scooted across my foot in Destin, my nephews got a good laugh out of my freak-out. What they didn’t know was who they were laughing at: a dive instructor, a cave diver, a woman who spent years teaching strangers that the water was safe.
I used to think feet were sexy. That my feet were sexy. Now not so much. I look at my foot every day and still think of that night. Too unbelievable to be true, yet it is. And I still love to dive. With gear on I feel a bit more on par with the sea monsters of the deep in their watery realm.
And skinny dipping will remain an activity for a pool, not the beach.
Sink your teeth into these…
Diving is #1 and you are #2 a love story
You just met Gary on a beach in Akumal. I met him at a quarry next to Three Mile Island, and told him where he ranked.
Lunch Alone: A First Day in 1992 Playa del Carmen
A four-page resume, a $400 salary, and nobody to sit with in the cafeteria.
Cenote Wedding, 1993
Some people book a church. Some book a beach. I booked a hole in the jungle full of water.
I never heard so many cuss words out of K before or after. Dr Nestor adored you but could not quit laughing because you were cussing so much. Memo gave the shirt off of his back to Gary because Gary didn’t have one on. You squeezed my hand to the point of no circulation all the way to Robinson club. The worst part is when Dr Nestor put his thumb in your foot. You’re tough.
I never knew that barracudas would bite, and I didn't know about their attraction to shiny things. Scary stuff for a Mexico buff.