This one was quite a shocker at the time.
When I was 13, my dad decided to send me off to summer camp. I, being the book-reading computer nerd I was, vehemently protested, but Dad was adamant. So, I was trucked off to North Carolina for a month.
What Dad had forgotten to mention to me though (or else I would have resorted to extreme measures to get out of it), was that this was not Summer Camp; this was X-treme Survival Mountain Hiking. There I was, my little chubby 13-year-old self expected to keep pace with in-shape 14-, 15- and 16-year-olds while carrying a 30-40 pound pack, for 15-20 miles a day.
The camp had a no-communication policy; we weren't allowed to write letters home, and communication from home was filtered through the councilors. This became a problem when I discovered that the hiking boots Dad had bought just for Summer Camp were a size too small for me.
I was nearly always the last person to reach the rest stops, which meant I got little to no breathers during a hike, which only made me arrive at the next stop later, and so on. It was by no means an enjoyable time.
When "camp" let out and I returned home, I had lost 40 pounds and couldn't stand straight for nearly a week. Also, I had at some point contracted a staph infection in both of my feet (I suspect the boots were at least partially to blame -- 7 of my toenails fell off at camp, the soles of my feet were layered with blisters, and the constant wading through pools and streams, often trekking for a day with wet socks, couldn't have helped). While examining my feet, the doc also remarked that I had somehow broken a toe, and it had healed naturally. I was in so much pain, I never felt it.
The staph infections were clustered around the outside bones of my feet (sorry, can't remember the term), and I had to go into surgery to have them literally scrape it off of the bones. I then spent nearly three months in the hospital, with gauze packed into the holes in my feet so that the skin wouldn't heal over and leave a hollow inside my feet, the gauze being changed twice a day and my feet soaked in an antibacterial bath before/during each change. Even after being released, I had a special concoction I had to apply inside with a Q-tip-like thing twice a day until it finished healing.
I still have the scars from that surgery, 10 years later, and it resulted in me having to wear "wide" shoes since. However, I found out later that the prognosis at the time I went into surgery was not in my favor, and I would likely have had to have part of each foot amputated.
I've had my share of other accidents (plenty of stitches, rocks shoved 2 inches into my knee, wrenching my other knee 90 degrees the wrong way), but yeah, that one pretty much takes the cake.
- WL
Edit: Wrong state.
When I was 13, my dad decided to send me off to summer camp. I, being the book-reading computer nerd I was, vehemently protested, but Dad was adamant. So, I was trucked off to North Carolina for a month.
What Dad had forgotten to mention to me though (or else I would have resorted to extreme measures to get out of it), was that this was not Summer Camp; this was X-treme Survival Mountain Hiking. There I was, my little chubby 13-year-old self expected to keep pace with in-shape 14-, 15- and 16-year-olds while carrying a 30-40 pound pack, for 15-20 miles a day.
The camp had a no-communication policy; we weren't allowed to write letters home, and communication from home was filtered through the councilors. This became a problem when I discovered that the hiking boots Dad had bought just for Summer Camp were a size too small for me.
I was nearly always the last person to reach the rest stops, which meant I got little to no breathers during a hike, which only made me arrive at the next stop later, and so on. It was by no means an enjoyable time.
When "camp" let out and I returned home, I had lost 40 pounds and couldn't stand straight for nearly a week. Also, I had at some point contracted a staph infection in both of my feet (I suspect the boots were at least partially to blame -- 7 of my toenails fell off at camp, the soles of my feet were layered with blisters, and the constant wading through pools and streams, often trekking for a day with wet socks, couldn't have helped). While examining my feet, the doc also remarked that I had somehow broken a toe, and it had healed naturally. I was in so much pain, I never felt it.
The staph infections were clustered around the outside bones of my feet (sorry, can't remember the term), and I had to go into surgery to have them literally scrape it off of the bones. I then spent nearly three months in the hospital, with gauze packed into the holes in my feet so that the skin wouldn't heal over and leave a hollow inside my feet, the gauze being changed twice a day and my feet soaked in an antibacterial bath before/during each change. Even after being released, I had a special concoction I had to apply inside with a Q-tip-like thing twice a day until it finished healing.
I still have the scars from that surgery, 10 years later, and it resulted in me having to wear "wide" shoes since. However, I found out later that the prognosis at the time I went into surgery was not in my favor, and I would likely have had to have part of each foot amputated.
I've had my share of other accidents (plenty of stitches, rocks shoved 2 inches into my knee, wrenching my other knee 90 degrees the wrong way), but yeah, that one pretty much takes the cake.
- WL
Edit: Wrong state.
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