A stone in my boot!
Well, there I was days from departing, my gear ready, my motorcycle prepared. My mind as resolute as it could be. The start of my adventure was within reach, I could feel it! I had packed all my belongings; sold all the stuff I didn’t need. My nights were consumed by the departure. I had handed in my last bits of my military equipment a few days before, itself a strange feeling of letting go. The shedding of my old self had begun. The day it all went wrong coincided with the last time I ever entered a military base as a serving soldier. It was a strange day, it was the last day within my old tribe. A tribe I had worked so hard to join, one I felt comfortable in: I had done the courses, earned the badges, climbed the rank structure and received the medals. I was walking out of my base for the last time to ride out on my motorbike and into the wilderness, I was excited, sad and afraid.
But on the journey home something felt wrong. I put it down to the stress I was feeling and thought nothing of it. Got home and continued my preparations, however something was wrong, my body was sending me signals I was ignoring. Suddenly I started pissing blood… I freaked out! Did what we all know we shouldn’t, self-diagnosed on the internet…yes, yes, I know you’re probably judging me, but we all do it, so be lenient! Not a great prognosis based on the digital oracle’s predictions…. A few doctor appointments and scans later no one could tell me what was wrong. Then suddenly, in the middle of the night, a few days before my departure, I woke to what felt like a huge punch to the stomach from a heavyweight boxer…
…It’s four in the morning. I’m screaming with pain and can’t understand what is going on. Finally, I accept my girlfriend’s pleas to call an ambulance despite male pride telling me I’m a wimp for doing so. The paramedics arrive 20 mins later. I hear the doorbell ring as I’m lying on the floor of my apartment, my girlfriend lets them in. Ten minutes later I get a phone call. They’re stuck downstairs “use the fucking stairs” I scream at them! Another 10 mins go by, the door bell rings, an out of breath, overweight paramedic is standing there. I start panicking, what if this guy has to walk me down the 5 flights of stairs to the ambulance? He’s never going to manage…Should I call the fire service to rescue us? I’m fucked!
Eventually we make it to the ambulance, his colleague admits he was too unfit to even attempt the staircase. I start laughing, this is absurd! In the end we have a chat in the blue lit back of the ambulance. Amidst my screams and the sirens, the paramedic that braved the stairs tells me he was once in the Army, and had been a prison guard for nine years. He then tells me a long story about how he was once kidnapped in a prisoner’s cell at knife point. His story is a good distraction. We make it to the hospital, I shake hands with my unlikely saviours. A few scans later and a heavy dose of morphine, I’m told I have a bigger than average kidney stone stuck in my kidney, and I need surgery, a fucking stone in my boot!
The first thing I ask the surgeon is “when can I ride again?” I explain my project to ride around the world and my planned departure in the next few days. I can see that he has a bunch of tattoos under his shirt, a kindred spirit, I hope. He grins and says he’ll do his best to get me fixed up and ready in the next week or so. But first he must operate. I’ll spare the details but essentially, I had a tube shoved up my private parts with a laser attached to it. Shoved all the way up to my kidneys to zap the stone. Then the tattooed surgeon used a mechanical claw to pull it out!
So, here I am, still in Toulouse. My bike is ready, my gear is packed and my body healing. In a few days I’ll be setting off. The last week has been a complete roller coaster of emotion. The frustration of not leaving, the doubts about my health, it all became a bit much. I keep telling myself it’s better to deal with this on home soil rather than in a far flung country all the same its bloody frustrating to have your dreams threatened before they even start!
I feel I’ve been living in a narcotic haze crossed with frustration for the last week. So close to finally experiencing freedom, just to discover a massive stone in my boot! Maybe this was the last thing I had to let go off to finally feel free? The last bit of internal anguish that had to expel itself. Jokingly, my writer friend told me that this was my refusal of the call to adventure manifesting itself physically. I think there’s some truth in that. It’s no coincidence that a few days before stepping into the unknown that my body just caved in, a final bit of panic needing to evacuate itself, a final stone in my boot.
Since this idea entered my mind I have been plagued with doubts, breaking away from the conventional path is not an easy one. The traditional route for people in my position would be to trade my uniform for a suit and look for a nice conventional job in finance or insurance, something safe that earns good money, secures you a mortgage and keeps you on the ferris wheel. But strangely, as I write this, there’s a young man sitting at his lap top having an online business meeting. His vernacular is making my skin crawl; “mergers, market trends, strategy, segmentation emails, customer targeting… blablabla…”
Well, if that isn’t a sign that I’m doing what I need to do then what is?...No judgement here, just not my path. It’s a path I very nearly took, in between the moment I received my call to get on the road, and since then there have been many moments of doubt, of questioning, of fear. “Keep to what you know, don’t stray too far away from the known world, or you’ll finish as a homeless veteran begging under a bridge somewhere…” My inner critic resents change, it fears it, it would rather lock me up in what it knows, even if that’s what has been slowly killing me over the years, rather than taking a risk and stepping into the unknown.
Well, fuck that inner critic, fuck that stone in my boot; life is too short not to be lived. Yes, it’s scary but so what?
Frank Herbert put it so well: “I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
Well, with this stone out of my boot that’s the rest of the fear gone. Now it’s time to be me, let my inner eye see the world for what it is without the shroud of fear obscuring it!
