I was bitten on my right index finger many years ago by a European adder (Vipera berus) and I can tell you it was a real bitch. The story is a miniature case study in weird and stupid, and involves the unlikely combination of poisonous Norwegian snakes, drug addicts in rehab, and KAL flight 007, which was shot down over the Kamchatka Peninsula an hour before that bastard of a snake bit me. There’s a bucket involved, too.
I ended up stretched out in a hospital bed in Moss, Norway for three days after an unpleasent brush with death. This was due to a hyper-allergic reaction to the Zagreb anti-venom they pumped into me to counteract the snake venom. Turns out that Zagreb anti-venom (made from horse serum) is actually dodgier than the snake venom. Who’d a thunk it? Anyhow, after being repeatedly force-fed raw herring (which in retrospect was probably the worst part of the entire experience) I was finally released from the hospital. This was oddly enough the very same day they were staging Carnival in the streets of Oslo.
Carnival in Oslo was not something you wanted to hop over. It has since been outlawed for the exact reasons you just had to participate; it was decadence in motion. Wine, women, music and costume madness. Beat that. Being a drummer I, of course, just had to join in the festivities and therefore spent the next twelve post-serpent hours or so pounding on my African Talking Drum with a snakebiten finger, guzzling beer and generally making a fool of myself (see photo). Not too bright. The drunken pounding bit, that is. Because later that night, in the throes of an atypical late evening hangover (they're usually reserved for mornings), my abused index finger transmogrified into an excruciatingly painful throbbing Thing with a life of its own. Sleep was not an option.
I ended up stretched out in a hospital bed in Moss, Norway for three days after an unpleasent brush with death. This was due to a hyper-allergic reaction to the Zagreb anti-venom they pumped into me to counteract the snake venom. Turns out that Zagreb anti-venom (made from horse serum) is actually dodgier than the snake venom. Who’d a thunk it? Anyhow, after being repeatedly force-fed raw herring (which in retrospect was probably the worst part of the entire experience) I was finally released from the hospital. This was oddly enough the very same day they were staging Carnival in the streets of Oslo.
Carnival in Oslo was not something you wanted to hop over. It has since been outlawed for the exact reasons you just had to participate; it was decadence in motion. Wine, women, music and costume madness. Beat that. Being a drummer I, of course, just had to join in the festivities and therefore spent the next twelve post-serpent hours or so pounding on my African Talking Drum with a snakebiten finger, guzzling beer and generally making a fool of myself (see photo). Not too bright. The drunken pounding bit, that is. Because later that night, in the throes of an atypical late evening hangover (they're usually reserved for mornings), my abused index finger transmogrified into an excruciatingly painful throbbing Thing with a life of its own. Sleep was not an option.
So … back to the hospital—this one in Oslo—where there was idle doctor talk of amputating my afflicted digit. It was now so swollen that it more resembled a microwaved bratwurst about to burst. Did I panic upon hearing their muffled whispering? Oh, yeah. Index fingers are not the digits you want to lose. Think about … chop sticks, for example. Luckily, they ended up pumping me full of finger-saving cortisones instead and I am happy to say that I am still the proud owner of two (2) index fingers. The only aftereffect was that for years afterwards my finger would become numb and turn entirely white in cold weather, a syndrome amusingly referred to in Norwegian as ‘likfinger’ (‘corpse finger’). I guess now I have zombie finger, since it seems to have come back to life.
The astute reader is at this point probably wondering about where KAL flight 007 comes in. Well the story also involves four (4) drug addicts doing rehab, a plastic bucket and me having watched too many James Bond movies, but like most of my stories, it’s very complicated. Who really wants to go there?
The moral of the story: don’t put your hands into snake-filled buckets offered to you by small groups of questionable people out in the Norwegian outback telling you that the furious creature within said bucket is a harmless stålorm (Anguis fragilis – in actuality a legless lizard. I kid you not.) while you are being distracted by a television broadcast informing you the USSR has just shot down a large commercial aircraft over the Kamchatka Peninsula making WW III an eminent possibility and all this three days before Carnival comes to Oslo, especially if you are hyper-allergic to Zagreb antivenom. If you do, you might regret it. And get raw herring for dinner. Ugh.
The moral of the story: don’t put your hands into snake-filled buckets offered to you by small groups of questionable people out in the Norwegian outback telling you that the furious creature within said bucket is a harmless stålorm (Anguis fragilis – in actuality a legless lizard. I kid you not.) while you are being distracted by a television broadcast informing you the USSR has just shot down a large commercial aircraft over the Kamchatka Peninsula making WW III an eminent possibility and all this three days before Carnival comes to Oslo, especially if you are hyper-allergic to Zagreb antivenom. If you do, you might regret it. And get raw herring for dinner. Ugh.
"Cured of what we suffered from and suffering from the cure."
ReplyDeleteGreat story, and very funny to read, nice to hear more details!
ReplyDelete