The morning had the feel of a Saturday, but then again, when you’re living on island time, most days feel like a Saturday. It wasn’t like living in New York or Indianapolis or even Fort Lauderdale. On Turks and Caicos Islands, you decide, every day, what you’ll do. If you want to go to work, you’ll go to work. If you want to go for a swim, then you’ll go for a swim. I owned a restaurant, so if I wanted to work that day, I’d open the door, and people would know that I was open for business. And on a day I felt like not going to work, I’d just keep that door closed and find something else to occupy me. On that particular day, it was fishing. It didn’t have to be a holiday or a weekend—it just had to be what I wanted to do.
The sky was cloudless, and the ocean was as pristine as the air, the water so clear that it was more like hovering in space than floating on the sea. So immaculate was the water that we could see 50 feet down to where our bait and hooks were waiting, clear enough that if a fish approached that looked too skinny or runty we’d just shake the line to discourage it. We wanted something big, something with some fight to it.
Be careful what you wish for.
The four of us—me and my son Josh and two of his friends, Brian and Mark—were fishing past the reef just off Club Med. We were fishing off a 22-foot center console boat, named BriMar after the two boys, that their dad was kind enough to let us use. We used spinning rigs, hoping to catch something delicious.
“That one look good?” Josh asked. He was only eleven but loved every day on the water, just like his old man.
“Nah,” I said, wiggling the line to dissuade the fish. “Looks slow and lazy. And small. Let’s find one that’ll be a decent dinner.”
We were fishing for grouper. Now, some of these fish can get huge. The Goliath grouper can be up to 600 pounds and could feed a family of five for two years. We weren’t going to hit a strike like that, but we could still get a good 10-pounder. The grouper was one of the ugliest fish you’re likely to see, a nasty-looking bigmouth bass. Lots of ugly animals are delicious. Grouper, lobster, monkfish—all incredibly tasty.
“What about that one?” Josh asked. I looked down and saw a good 12-pounder orbiting the bait on his line.
“Yeah, that’ll be fine,” I said.
The grouper gave it a little more thought, and then he struck, the line going taut.
“Reel him in!” I said.
Josh was excited to get the fish, and so was I, but there was another reason that I felt some immediacy to landing the grouper: barracudas.
There were plenty of barracudas in the waters around Turks and Caicos, and they were basically the hyenas of the sea. They’d wait for someone to catch, kill, or injure a fish, and that’s when they’d make their move.
I’d seen it happen up close and personal. I was fishing with my buddy Rusty, hunting for lobster—or, as we called them, bugs—and carrying our Hawaiian slings, these pretty rudimentary spear guns. He spotted a nice-looking mutton snapper and thought it would be an ideal target of opportunity. He took aim and released his sling, the spear going right through the fish. As it was going through its death flop, I got a little closer to get it in my lobster bag. My fingers were just grazing the scales when the fish seemed to convulse, and then there wasn’t any fish there anymore. Or, to be more accurate, there was just the head.
I blinked to get my bearings, and then I saw what happened—a big 5-foot barracuda had ripped that fish from me, tore the body loose and left me nothing but the head.
The speed of the attack got my heart rate going. Mentally, I knew I should be okay. The barracuda was big and fast and strong, with fangs like the stalactites of a cave, but they didn’t want to eat people. We are not part of their food chain. They operated under the rule of “Attack what you can digest,” and a 185-pound man was too much of a meal for even a hefty barracuda. They were just scavengers, and as long as I didn’t get between him and his dinner, I should be okay. Unfortunately, if I did get in the way, that fish could take my arm off without much of a sweat. To avoid any confusion, Rusty and I swam to our inflatable and puttered about a mile off, but when we stopped to resume our fishing, that barracuda had followed us. They’re fast, can swim close to 50 miles per hour, and our little dingy wasn’t going to outrun it. Our day of fishing was done.
This is all to say that I didn’t want Josh to lose our dinner to some damn scavenger fish.
“Let’s get him up,” I said.
The grouper put up a fight, and it was strong, but at about 12 pounds, it wasn’t going to require a sport fish chair bolted to the deck and an afternoon of fighting to get him in the boat. After a few minutes, we hauled him in.
Groupers can be fighters. When you get them in a vulnerable position, they’ll flare out their gills and all their fins. Dorsal fins will go rigid, their pec fins will stick straight out, and if you’re not careful, you could get a close encounter.
Apparently, I wasn’t careful.
As Josh swung him into the boat, the fish spun around, and its dorsal fin stabbed me right on the inside of my knee. He kept spinning around, the motion snapping one of those spines right off, leaving it buried in me.
“Damn!” I said, my hand going to my knee. A lot of the time, you get a sharp pain from something, it’s just a pinch, just a poke, no big deal. This time, when my hand came back, it came back bloody.
“You okay?” Josh asked.
“No big deal,” I said, reaching for some paper towels, wiping the blood away. More blood rushed in to replace what I’d wiped. I wiped at it a little more, figuring it would clot pretty quick, but it just kept going, bleeding down my leg, the blood pooling in my deck shoe. I kept wiping, and it kept bleeding, and pretty soon, I was either going to run out of paper towels, or run out of blood, and neither option seemed ideal.
“Well, hell, this ain’t right,” I said.
Something was wrong. It wasn’t that big of a puncture, so it shouldn’t have been causing that much bleeding, but it just wouldn’t stop. I didn’t know the spine had broken off in my knee, preventing the wound from closing up.
Then it started going numb.
Grouper aren’t known for having poisonous spines. So why was my knee losing sensation? There were plenty of things around Turks and Caicos that could poison a fisherman, no doubt. The scorpionfish has spines coated in a powerful toxin that could cause pain, nausea, and paralysis, but those were pretty easy to spot. Stingrays could also spike you with a pretty nasty poison that would hurt, cause nausea, give you fever-like symptoms, and ruin your day. Jellyfish, like a sea wasp, or a Portuguese man of war, could also inflict a pretty nasty sting, but those were fairly easy to avoid. Cone shells were another venomous creature in the water, a kind of poisonous sea snail. They attack their prey with a venom-filled dart containing a powerful neurotoxin that could cause paralysis, respiratory distress, and even death. But they were also mostly nocturnal.
So, what had the grouper hit me with?
There was a chance that the grouper had rubbed up against something that had some kind of toxin on it, or, more likely, the spine from the fish had spiked me near a nerve. Either way, the bleeding wasn’t stopping, and the numbness wasn’t going away.
Close encounters with sea creatures happened all the time in the islands. Usually, it ended up in a meal. Rarely, you could end up on the receiving end of some pain. Another time when I was out looking for lobsters with my friend Rusty, I’d had a run-in with a shark. We’d collected about eighty lobsters when Rusty spotted a 7-foot nurse shark sleeping in a coral head. He gestured to me that there was more lobster inside that coral. When I went in closer to collect, he jabbed the nurse shark in the ass with his Hawaiian sling and it came flying toward me, slamming into my face and knocking my facemask off. It didn’t cause any serious damage, but it sure got my heart going, not to mention making Rusty laugh so hard that he spit the mouthpiece to his snorkel out.
That close encounter ended with just a fat lip and a bruised ego. But this time, I had a limb that wouldn’t stop bleeding. This one was serious as a heart attack. Normally, there weren’t many situations in a fishing trip that I couldn’t fix on my own. I would have liked to stay out and finish the day, but my leg was telling me something else.
Change of plans.
I got ready to make a call. Not on the phone, as the phone system on Turks and Caicos back then was pretty much nonexistent. That, combined with being on the water a lot of the time, meant that we ex-pats relied more heavily on our VHF radios. Portable, dependable, and relatively affordable. I got on the horn to Nancy Logue, the mom of Josh’s two friends on the boat, who also happened to be a veterinarian, to see if she could help at all.
Nancy was based in New Jersey, but she loved the islands, and she and her husband, Kenny, a good friend, had bought a house in Turks and Caicos and set up a small veterinary clinic. She’d rotate in a few people when she’d come to visit, a few vets who would be able to spend some time in paradise and, while there, help treat the pets of the islanders. Kind of a working vacation. On the islands, it seemed that most the ex-pats worked as a working vacation.
“Hi, Lee,” she said. “How’s the fishing?”
“The fishing’s great—just hooked a big one. The boys are all having a blast, and they’re all doing well. Wish I could say the same.”
“Trouble?” she asked.
I filled her in on what had happened and my current condition. “I’m thinking that maybe I should see Doc Menzie?” I said.
“Let me see if I can get ahold of him,” she said. “Get to Turtle Cove, and I’ll see if I can set something up so he can take a look at you.”
Ewing Menzie was one of the two non-animal doctors on the island. Tall, blond, thin, dapper, and reserved, he was quintessentially British. By the time I’d docked the boat, Nancy got back to me.
“I got in touch with Menzie,” she said.
“Should I just go right to his clinic?” I asked.
“If you do, you’ll be all by yourself. He’s playing tennis at the Yacht Club right now.” We may have been in the islands, but we were not totally uncivilized. After all, we did have our Yacht Club, complete with all the amenities.
“What kind of doctor is playing tennis at eleven in the morning?” I asked.
“The kind that doesn’t come to work on Saturdays,” she replied.
That, at least, answered the question of what day of the week it was. So, it was Saturday after all.
“So where should I go?” I asked. “Is he just going to come by my place for a house call?” Back in the day, it wasn’t that uncommon for doctors to actually visit their patients for a house call.
“I’ll pick you up and take you to Dr. Faber’s office.”
“Nancy, there must be some kind of static on the line. Why would I go to Faber’s office? The grouper got me in the knee, not the jaw.” Dr. Faber was the local dentist, who seemed unsuitable for the task at hand. Not only was I suffering from a pain that wasn’t tooth-related, but I knew Faber was off the island, anyway.
“He’s not here, but his reclining exam chair still is, and that’ll be something we’ll need.”
Such was the way of things for island living. Nancy was a vet, and a semi-vacationing one at that. Menzie was a proper doctor, but he didn’t have an office in a larger, equipment-filled hospital. His clinic was only a few rooms and not set up to treat gunshot wounds or heart attacks or some of the other more serious things that you might encounter at a large, urban hospital. He was more accustomed to sunburns, STDs, dehydration, intoxication, and the bumps and bruises that came with that last condition.
Great. I was going to the dentist’s office to get treated by the off-the-clock doc and assisted by the off-the-clock vet. But Nancy was a friend, and I trusted her judgment. On the islands, there was really no such thing as an emergency. The general philosophy when facing some injury or accident was basically that shit happens—now let’s just deal with it.
Nancy told me she’d pick me up at Turtle Cove, and she was waiting for us at the dock when we arrived. We told the kids to find their way home, and that we’d see them at dinner, but that plan ran into a lot of resistance. The boys, after all, wanted to keep fishing. They weren’t the ones who got stuck in the leg. It might have seemed a little uncaring for them to be so blasé about me having to go to the doctor, but it was, now that I’d learned, a Saturday, and they didn’t want their weekend ruined.
They could navigate their way home without any trouble. They were eleven, and it was a small island. Years later, that might be the kind of parenting that would lead Child Protective Services to knock on your door, but in the eighties, on Turks and Caicos, an eleven-year-old could still walk home without it being a horrible case of neglect and abandonment.
I gingerly boarded Nancy’s Jeep, a vehicle without roof or doors, designed for island transport, trying as I did to keep the blood off the seats. It would just be lousy form for the island’s veterinarian to be driving around in a car covered in blood. It was only a five-minute drive to the dentist’s office, but my leg was still bleeding the whole way.
My leg was pretty stiff and numb by the time we arrived at Faber’s office. Menzie was already there. He’d apparently come directly from his tennis club, since he was still wearing his tennis whites—white T-shirt, white shorts, white wristbands. It was a good thing he liked tennis instead of golf, because being greeted by a doctor wearing loud checkered pants would have at least looked less sanitary.
“Lee,” he said, shaking my hand, gazing down at my bloody leg. “What seems to be the trouble?”
Like I said—very British.
They took me into the dentist’s office. I don’t know if he kept it unlocked while he was away, or if they had access to the key. On the islands, lots of people had a pretty casual unlocked door policy. And what was someone going to do to a dentist’s office? Steal three miles of dental floss and five hundred paper bibs? Not very likely.
We didn’t have a ton of crime on the island, and the kind we did have was mostly taken care of by letting it take care of itself. If someone got their car stolen, there wasn’t going to be an army of CSIs on the scene dusting for fingerprints and analyzing shoe depressions in the sand. It was an island—where was a thief going to go? Pretty much every stolen car was solved the next day when the police or a neighbor would find the car, the gas tank totally drained, abandoned on a beach somewhere. Drugs were a problem, but there wasn’t a lot of violence, no gunfire exchanges between rival groups. Some guys just got high, and some guys used their business partner’s cash to finance their habit, and everyone would try to live and learn from the experience, but for the most part, there wasn’t a lot of crime or a lot of precautions, so getting into Dr. Faber’s office wasn’t a huge ordeal.
“Have a seat,” Menzie said, indicating the dentist’s exam chair. I complied.
“You say you got spiked with a grouper’s spine?” Menzie asked. I nodded. He looked closely at my knee.
“And your leg is feeling numb? That’s not right.”
“I’m glad you think so,” I said. Always a relief when the doctor believes your paralysis isn’t normal.
“Groupers don’t have poisoned spines is the thing,” Nancy said.
“I was thinking the same thing,” I said.
“Doesn’t have to be a toxin. Could be that the spine nudged a nerve. Maybe broke off inside the knee. That could account for the bleeding, and the numbness.” He tried a few drawers, some of them locked, some of them open, eventually finding what he was looking for—a pair of steel, angled scissors.
“Just in case we need to cut your shorts off,” he answered.
“Let’s focus on the knee, and not the shorts,” I said.
“Suit yourself,” Menzie said. He placed the scissors on a table near the chair.
“Don’t you want to put that back where you found it?” I asked.
“Your shorts won’t be touched, Lee, but your leg is another story. I’m going to have to open it up a bit to see if that spine is still inside.” He opened his doctor’s bag and removed a scalpel and a few other instruments.
“Can’t you just take an X-ray or something to figure that out?” I asked.
“Sure. You know where I can find an X-ray machine on the island?”
He explained that the only way that he would be able to determine if and where that spine might be in my leg was just to go in and poke around. Island living didn’t have a lot of diagnostic equipment, apparently.
“That going to hurt?” I asked.
“It’s going to be . . . uncomfortable,” he said.
Why is it that when doctors are about to do something that will cause you to scream like a little girl, they say, “This is going to be a bit uncomfortable”?
“Can’t you give me a shot? Something to numb the leg?”
“If we were in a proper hospital, I probably would, but that’s not the sort of thing I usually have on hand. I tried looking for some Novocain, but if Faber has it, it’s behind the locked drawers.” He once again fished around in his bag a bit before producing a couple of pills.
“What is that? Tylenol?”
“Basically.”
That was how we were going to do the surgery. The doctor wearing his tennis whites, being assisted by a veterinarian in shorts and a tank top, cutting into a patient sitting in a dentist’s chair medicated with headache pills. That was pretty much island living health care in a nutshell.
He scrubbed up, then put on some rubber gloves. Nancy did the same. I just waited in the chair for the “medication” to take effect. After twenty minutes or so, they started in. It was like getting surgery in the wild west, except instead of a bottle of whiskey, I had a couple of aspirin, instead of a belt to bite down on, I had the vinyl arms of the dentist’s chair in a death grip. Piece of cake.
First, they poured some antiseptic on the wound. That let me know that the pills Menzie had given me weren’t working nearly as well as I had hoped. I inhaled sharply at the sting.
“Sorry about that,” he said.
Why are they always sorry? “Let’s just get this over with,” I said.
If they had some kind of X-ray, they’d know exactly where to go. But all they had was my bleeding leg as a guide. To find out where the spine was, they just had to go in after it and look around.
From the patient’s perspective, it’s a hell of a lot more painful looking with your fingers than looking with an X-ray.
Every time they’d stick a scalpel or a retractor into the wound, it felt like they were sticking a hot poker into my leg. Since the spine had stuck me straight in, it made it harder to find. The missing spine would only look like a tiny dot. If they could even see it through the blood. If it was even there. Which required a lot of poking, prodding, and cutting.
It was exploratory surgery with pretty much zero anesthetic, just cutting into the knee until they finally found something hard and sharp that didn’t look like part of my knee. But there’s lots of things in a knee that are hard, like bone and cartilage and tendons, that don’t feel great when you try to pull them out to test whether they’re a foreign body. The instruments hurt like hell, but at least they didn’t feel excruciating and just wrong as the probing fingers, little fleshy worms burrowing into my skin. It must have been less than fifteen minutes, but it felt like hours, each exploration a new level of pain.
Finally, they found it.
“I think that’s the culprit,” Menzie said, extracting a thin, needlelike spine from my knee.
“Thank Christ,” I said, sweat streaming down my face.
“You want to keep it? A souvenir?” he asked.
“The scar will be a good enough reminder,” I said.
“Up to you,” he said, dropping it in a tray. It made a brittle clinking sound. “Do you have any preferences on the stitches?”
“Just that they be close together and functional, I suppose. How many you think you’re going to put in?”
“Maybe a dozen or so? Should be a good story for your wife.”
“She loves a good story,” I said.
After the final stitch went in, Menzie started putting things back in his bag and found something he wasn’t expecting.
“Well, how about that,” he said. “It looks like I do have some Demerol. Think you’d want that now?”
They say better late than never, but I wish he’d never have told me that a more thorough inspection of his bag could have saved me a lot of pain on the table.
“No, thanks,” I said. “Once the last stitch is in, I like to stop using the painkillers.”
“Understandable. Well, we can still use them later.”
“For what?” I asked. “Did you find more than one spine up in there?”
“No, I just mean when we take the stitches out. If you want.”
“Please, doc. I’ll take the stitches out myself. Won’t be the first time. Write me a prescription for a beer, and I’m all set.”
For stitches, you wanted a steady hand on them putting them in, but anybody could take them out. Just needed to make sure you got them all. Making a separate trip to the doctor just to get rid of some stitches is like going to the doctor to have a Band-Aid removed.
“How much do I owe you?” I asked.
Menzie removed his gloves, looked up at the ceiling while he figured. “Couple of pills, couple of stitches, call it an hour of time . . . how about fifty dollars?”
That’s just how medicine worked on the island. No one had insurance. You didn’t get referred to ten different specialists. You didn’t have to submit a hundred different forms. You saw the doc, he did what he needed to do, he gave you a bill, you paid it. All in all, pretty simple.
“Okay if I drop it off to you on Monday?” I asked.
“When is that?” he asked.
“Day after tomorrow,” Nancy said.
“Oh, certainly, that will be fine.”
He and Nancy helped put a wrap on my knee over the stitches, and I was good to go.
The next day was Sunday.