How Kickball Changed My Life

     Or, “Gee – you (used to) walk funny!”

“I’m not clumsy. It’s just that the floor hates me, the tables
and chairs are bullies, and the walls get in the way.”

 Unknown
 

     I was born with mild cerebral palsy (CP), most likely caused because my brain was deprived of oxygen during birth. I say “most likely” because when I was born CP wasn’t well understood. Most people believed that all people with CP also had significantly lower intelligence than average. Since my CP was mild, my parents decided to keep it a secret. They explained all the oddities away – the walking on my toes, the inability to run fast and keep up with my playmates, not riding a bike until I was eight. They didn’t tell the schools. They didn’t tell my doctors. They didn’t tell me –- not ever. I found out when I went to a neurologist for something else –- when I was 30. No kidding. When I called my Mom, she denied it, even then. 

     Luckily, my CP is atypical as well as mild. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with either of my arms. I played the piano well, and at one time typed at about 100 words per minute. However, the CP affects both my legs, the right one more than my left. There’s a lot I can’t do. My legs are simply not as well coordinated as other people’s legs, and they don’t have as much strength, and have little flexibility. They throw me off- balance easily. If I over-use them, the next day they are so stiff I can barely walk, and I’m at great risk of a fall. This is the reason I retired to Florida, to get away from ice and snow. I had to minimize the risk of a bad fall.

     My parents worked relentlessly at keeping my CP a secret. In our small New Jersey town, there were two pediatricians. Mother took me to one of them for my Kindergarten physical, which I remember because I recall him saying something, and then my mother shouting, “She is NOT retarded! She can READ!” I don’t remember what the doctor said, but it was something about my legs and nothing about being “retarded.” Still, she stormed out and took me to the other pediatrician in town.  I’m sure the first doctor called Dr. Pfister and said, “Look, it’s not severe or anything, and here’s how Mom reacted …” because Dr. Pfister never mentioned it that I know of. 

     Although PE classes were always a nightmare for me, trapped in this (slightly) damaged body was the heart of an athlete. My first attempt was ballet. It was a disaster. I tried to put my foot on the barre … and fell down.

     I couldn’t get my feet in all five positions. When I tried to put my feet in fifth position (feet right next to each other but heel-to-toe), I looked like Quasimodo. Then I fell down.

     That’s really not an exaggeration. Ballet class always started with exercises – put your foot up on the barre and stretch (I fell down), plies’ – supposedly beautiful knee squats. I had to “gracefully” bend down (straight back, please! – oh wait, can’t do that), and in fifth position – you guessed it, I fell down. 

     After three months, the ballet teacher saw my mother and me on the street. She said to her, “There’s something wrong with Susan’s legs. There’s no way she can learn ballet!” I don’t remember what Mom said, but it wasn’t polite … and it wasn’t the truth, either. People learned not to mention the obvious to my mother. 

     Physical Education classes were a nightmare, with one remarkable exception. In fourth grade, our town hired a real PE teacher for the first time. He was fresh out of college and I remember that at age 10 I thought him quite good looking. One day he asked me to stay after school.

     He said, “We’re going to play kickball.” I showed him how standing on my left leg and kicking with my right was best for me. I staggered a little when I kicked sometimes, but I never fell down. He gave me some tips, taught me a little more about the game … and then we played a lot of kickball for the rest of the year. I wish I could find that man and thank him today, because he opened my eyes to the concept of compensation. He changed my life.

     At the end of fourth grade we moved to Florida, and I had opportunities to swim to my heart’s content. The pool was next door, and the ocean a block away. I lived in a world of water that summer, and with my legs floating, I was physically liberated! My arms and back could do the work. My inner athlete exploded, and I started swimming laps. One day my dad took me to the pool, measured it, and I swam laps with him as my lifeguard. Hours later he insisted we stop. He said I had swum seven miles.

     So, thinking I was good at swimming, in junior high school I went out for the swim team. They accepted everyone and kicked no one off. For the first few sessions, the coach was just looking at form doing the Australian crawl. My dad had taught me that well, and I had good form, except, the coach said, I needed to kick harder. So I spent a lot of time with a kickboard, but my kick never got stronger. The basics of CP can sometimes be compensated for, but they can’t be fixed. 

     Then the coach started teaching us other strokes. When we got to the butterfly, my inner Quasimodo emerged again. The frog kick wasn’t any better. He let me stay on the swim team, but I was the slowest on the team because I just couldn’t kick hard, and there were strokes I simply could not do. I dropped out.

     So I tried out for cheerleading, and made it to the finals! But that coach had spotted something, and moved me to the opposite end of the line. “Oh,” I said. “I have to be on this end. I can’t do those moves with my right leg.” She moved me anyway. I fell down.

     Meanwhile, after having walked on my toes for 12 years, I got tired of being teased about it. Remembering my kickball lesson, I went into my bedroom, which had a full-length mirror, and figured out how to walk flat-footed. Four hours later I had figured out how to walk normally. If you saw me walking today, unless I were very tired and you were very observant, you would never spot a hint of an odd gait. 

     This was a “Eureka!’ moment for me. At age 12 I realized that although my legs couldn’t do everything, with practice they could do some things I wanted them to do, often by using my arms to help. I learned to do a lot of things in alternate ways, capitalizing on what my left leg could do while figuring out what to do with the right one. Since that day I have gone through life “alternatively coordinated,” but people rarely guess.

     Then one day as a young adult, I saw Edward M. Kennedy, Jr. on TV, skiing downhill. He looked so free! The leg movements didn’t look all that hard. He had had a partial leg amputation due to bone cancer when he was 12, and I figured that if he could learn to ski, then maybe I could also. So when I was 29, I went to Aspen, where they did teach me to ski. I always used shorter skis, and I didn’t become an expert, but I had fun and in fact met my second husband, the father of my children, through skiing. There was finally a sport I could do -- not competitively, of course, but I was happy just to be able to ski. Using my body “alternatively,” I also took up spelunking, rock climbing and even rappelling. 

     Meanwhile, in Florida I had seen my first marina and was fascinated by sailboats. I saw how physical sailing was – just what I wanted! And it looked as if I could probably do it. In fact, in my first, brief marriage, my husband knew how to sail, and we bought a little 14’ sloop-rigged dinghy, sailing it on a tiny lake. We also sailed little Abaco sailing dinghies on our honeymoon in the Bahamas.

     Then I moved to St. Louis, where there really isn’t much sailing. However, sailing always sat in the back of my mind. When I retired to Florida, the call of the sails got more insistent. I would go to the St. Petersburg Pier, buy some lunch and watch the sailboats, thinking, “If only …”

     Finally I one day I had my chance. Some friends invited me join them at “Fun Day” at Boca Ciega Yacht Club (BCYC). A short ride on someone’s sailboat was included, and I signed up for that. Then I found out that BCYC had a sail school, and that after sail school you could sail the club’s little 16.5’ Catalinas! Well, that was enough for me. I joined, and I took sail school.

     Didn’t work out so well (you should know what’s coming by now). Those boats have low benches, and it takes both leg strength and leg coordination to move from one side to the other at the right time. You have to do that to sail them (unless you just kneel in the middle and lean from side to side, but I hadn’t figured that out yet). The little Catalinas weren’t the boat for me: I tried to change sides while tacking, and (wait for it!) – I fell. Right in the middle of the boat. On my ass. Of course. 

     However, I also sailed on other people’s boats, and discovered something wonderfully freeing for me: all those upper body muscles I had built up while compensating for my weak legs were tremendously helpful on a slightly larger sailboat. All I needed was higher benches and I didn’t fall! Not ever. I can easily and confidently compensate for slightly funky legs on a decent-sized sailboat. The rock-climbing skills turned out to be crucial for me when sailing. It’s how I move around a boat safely when the water is rough: three points secure; one point moving.

      My inner athlete is finally completely free, using all four limbs. I move around my boat safely and with ease. I’ve figured out how to do it, just as I figured out how to walk normally when I was 12. I’m not completely reckless, though. My lifelines are completely netted, and if I have to go forward in rough water, I crawl. It works. It thrills me so much that I lived on my sailboat for 3 ½ years, enjoying what it took to move around the boat. My legs are stronger than they were 20 years ago.

     Some people will think my parents were terribly wrong not to tell me, or others, about the CP, not to get me physical therapy, not to “deal” with it proactively, but I’m not so sure they got this one wrong. I can’t imagine that a physical therapist of the 1950’s would have said, “Let’s figure out how you can go hurtling downhill at 20 mph, on a slippery surface, and trees to miss, with a couple of boards strapped to your unstable legs! It’ll be fun! Then you can jump off a cliff with a rope around your waist. You can climb right back up that cliff and hope your legs don’t give out before you get to the top! You can crawl into a cave, and maybe you’ll even be able to get out! Think of the possibilities!” 

     No. I think from an early age I would have gotten a lot of subtle or not-so-subtle messages about what I “could” and “could not” do. Given the beliefs of the time, probably there would have been some suspicions that I wasn’t really very bright, too. And, I would have listened. I listen. 

     Frankly, I’ve never seen another person with CP who walks as normally as I do (of course, maybe I just don’t know). Figuring out how to compensate on my own has been powerful and transformative, and helped create the person I am now. Because I worked through CP “the hard way,” and learned to compensate in so many ways, I learned the value of tenacity at an early age. Not knowing I wasn’t supposed be able to do some things, I worked out creative solutions that have accumulated over the years, resulting in my ability to do this wonderful, freeing, athletic thing, this sailing. I knew when I started sailing that I would find solutions to any temporary obstacles I faced, because I’d done it many times before. As I sat on my behind in the little Catalina I laughed, because I knew what the problem was, and I knew there was a solution if I hunted for it.

     In spite of all my efforts, there are a few limitations. In addition to avoiding low benches, I don’t sail on boats that have skinny or absent “cat walks” – the flat ledge of the deck along the side of a boat you that you can walk on to move up to the bow. And, I don’t race. In racing, everything has to be done fast. If you’re sitting on the rail to help heel the boat, you have to be able to get up quickly, but for me it’s a rock-climbing task. You might have to get up to the bow quickly, and in the thrill of the moment, I might get careless. With my center of gravity above the lifelines I could easily topple into the water. I always wear shoes (no padding on the bottom of my feet; walking barefoot is painful for me). 

     I always move in a planned way, and often not the way others move on a boat. That’s scary to some people. I often use those rock-climbing skills to get around the boat. No, it doesn’t always look graceful, and it’s not fast enough for racing, but it’s extremely safe. I have alternative approaches just for getting on and off a boat, and I need for people to accept that, and not try to help, because I know how my body works. None of this is a big deal, though. After six years of intensive sailing, it’s second nature to me unless I have to explain it to someone else. 

     Stephen Hawking once said, “However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.” If you have some physical limitation but want to be active, look at what your body can do, and try to imagine what those moves can do for you. Work with an occupational therapist (therapy is much more empowering now than it was when I was a child). Research online and see if there are programs for what you want to do. We’ve seen double-amputee champion runners, and wheelchair basketball is a lively game full of all the drama present in any other game of basketball. Find your passion, and then search for a path to it. You may surprise yourself.

Update on Replacing Navionics on my Phone

I went to the T-Mobile store online and found at least eight different programs supported by my phone that will give latitude and longitude. That's pretty much all the one I chose does, but it does so at the touch of one icon.

Then I went to Wal-Mart for something else in the electronics section, and found a plug-in power supply for my phone. The package says it will last "up to two hours." That would probably not be more than 30 minutes if running Navionics on it, but if one was smart in an emergency, and only used it for short phone calls and a quick lat and long check (skipping Navionics entirely), and turning the phone off in between, it might last much longer.

It does use a special dedicated battery, so after what I went through in the hospital with a dead phone and (stupidly) no paper list of important phone numbers, I got two spare batteries.

This gadget and its batteries will be dedicated to the boat. If I decide I need one for everyday life, I will get a second one to put in my purse or car (car batteries can cut out on you). It will also go with me any time I sail on someone else's boat.

I'm sure they make such apps for IPhone, and I'm certain they have a supplemental battery pack for IPhones as well.

The Half a Fish That Got Away

Or, Actually I've Seen This Before ...

My friend Samantha Ring, whom I sailed with last Saturday, loves to fish. I think she may love to fish more than she loves to sail. The Sea Scout with us also loves to fish. So as soon as we were out in the Gulf of Mexico, Sam put a line over the transom. She rigged a reel to the frame of the Bimini.

I saw the hook. It was huge, and it had no bait. No bait? "It's OK. We have a spoon on it," said the Sea Scout.

Huh? Fish prefer to eat with spoons? Who knew?

I was lying down in the cockpit by the time they got their first hit. The fish got away. The second one did also.

Not the third, however. I was, frankly, too sick to lift my head and look by then, but I heard them whoopin' and hollerin' as they pulled that fish in. "Look at the size! He's HUGE! YAHOOOO!" they yelled.

Just as they were pulling the fish up to the boat, something -- either a small shark or a big barracuda, they're not sure -- jumped up, cut off the bottom two thirds of the fish, and swam away with it. Here's what was left.

As you can see, that was a fairly good-sized fish. The theory among some is that this fish was stolen by a shark because barracuda cuts aren't so jagged. I seem to remember a pretty clean cut when a barracuda stole my fish ...

I was ten. We had just moved to Fort Lauderdale, and my parents, inveterate fishers, were making yet another desperate attempt to turn me, my sister and my brother into fishers also (it never worked). This particular beautiful night, we were on a commercial boat with about 30 people, "drift fishing." They took us out to the Gulf Stream and drifted in it while the kingfish were running. All around me people were pulling fish in just about as fast as the crew could help them. I really didn't care that I hadn't caught any fish. I wasn't wild about kingfish. I was satisfied to be on a boat, so quiet with the engine off, drifting along under that stupendous starlit sky.

The captain, however, was determined that I should catch a fish. He even kept the boat out an extra half an hour hoping I would at least catch one. Just as we were about to give up, I got a strong hit! The crew all ran to me, coached, me, and helped me pull this huge kingfish up to the boat. They got out their gaffe and hooked it (something I thought was absolutely barbaric). Just as they pulled it up, a huge barracuda jumped out of nowhere and sliced that fish off just below the gaffe. The crew sadly pulled the head and gills in, and said, "Well, at least you caught something."

I could have gone the rest of my life without seeing them drive that huge hook into a living animal so casually. I haven't fished since and I frankly cheered for the barracuda, who put the poor beast out of his misery quickly while cleverly getting an easy meal for himself as well.

So I didn't have to look at the fish stolen from Samantha. I'd seen this marine stunt before.

Samantha and the Sea Scout continued the weekend sail after I was taken off the boat, and Sunday night they cooked what was left of their fish on a grill. Everyone there says it was quite delicious, but I'm still rooting for the clever fellow who got the rest of it.

Charts vs. Chart Plotters -- Yet Again

If you read my entry "Seasickness," you know that my last sail had its ups and downs. That's putting it midly. I became extremely sick. The Coast Guard rescued me from the boat I was on, and raced to me to shore to a waiting ambulance. I spent about 48 hours in the hospital, and my doctor and nurse practitioner are still following me closely for lingering effects.

The whole experience -- when I wasn't hanging my head over the side of the boat, that is -- was an interesting display regarding the debate between chart plotters and older methods of navigation.

The skipper of the boat I was on, Samantha Ring, is an unapologetic geek when it comes to navigation skills. We recently found out that our late friend Al Davis often used her as an example of one of the best students of celestial navigation he had ever had. Now, Samantha is young in years compared to me. She hasn't yet had the opportunity to do more than weekend hops on her boat. She teaches during the year, and anyone who has taught knows that this does not necessarily mean that your weekends are free. During the summer where she lives, while it is technically possible to sail, the winds are so light that it can be hard to travel any distance. In addition, the risk of afternoon storms combined with the dangers of coastal sailing in a storm off west Florida (lots of shallow water) mean that you go out early and come in early. That also limits the distance you can cover.

So the only reason Samantha had to learn celestial navigation was curiosity. This is a trait she holds in abundance, however. She has also learned extensively about coastal navigation.

In spite of this, I have been urging her to embrace the idea of adding a chart plotter to her set of tools and skills. She has actually been one of the people who believes that the cognitive skills of navigation are superior to electronic support, and after my most recent day on the water it would be hard to disagree with her.

Nevertheless, I talked her into having a chart plotter cable installed on her boat so she could do a test trial with my chart plotter and see if she might find it a useful addition. She was skeptical, but also is making a big leap shortly in the distance she's sailing, so she went along with it.

Unfortunately the installer connected it to dead wires and did not have time to correct this mistake before we left. But my goal was to show her that the two skill sets -- coastal navigation and using a chart plotter -- could work together, so I did the best I could with Navionics on my cell phone (it may be great on an IPAD or computer, but I have used it twice now on my phone and don't recommend it when used that way. IMO it's too clumsy for the small gain in information, but YMMV.)

Rather than try to snake her way through the many islands south of St. Petersburg without the rapid information a chart plotter provides, Samantha chose to go out to sea a bit and then angle in to our goal, Longboat Channel into Longboat Key. It was an ambitious plan for three reasons:

1) We had a much later start than anticipated

2) We had unexpected mechanical problems with the mainsail

3) The fuel gauge (which proved to be markedly inaccurate, as I understand it a fairly common occurrence on sailboats) led us to believe that we were much lower on fuel than we actually were. (I hope I remember to suggest to her to see if she could simply use a dipstick approach to her fuel tank. I can't on my boat, but she might be able to. I was too sick to go into the cabin, so I'm not really quite sure if her new fuel tank configuration would allow that.)

In the meantime, I was getting more and more sick. As skipper, it was Samantha's job to figure out the best way to get me to help, and trusting her to do this, I did not override her judgments. That turned out be very smart on my part.

I should state now that I also did not at any time look over her shoulder to check her calculations. Any movement made me more sick, and she was using my chart book, which suits a small cockpit better than larger charts. I was interested in protecting my chart book from my current medical state.

Samantha went below, knew immediately where her navigation aids were, and returned with dividers, hand bearing compass, parallel rulers, protractor, and two rotating wheels which she described as a "sailing slide rule." That last one is not something I'm familiar with but very curious about now. Some time when it is less likely that I would soil it rather badly, I want to get a look at it and what it can do. It wasn't covered in the coastal navigation class I took, which unfortunately emphasized ... chart plotters.
 
Using these tools while the 15 year old Sea Scout who was with us quite competently handled the boat by herself (in spite of never having single-handed before -- more about her later), Samantha was able to locate our position with remarkable precision. We know this because my phone had just enough battery left to confirm our location.

I have two observations about all of this, done when it really mattered (thanks, Samantha! You saved me from being a lot more sick than I already was.)

First, Samantha did a truly excellent job of navigating when it really counted.

Second, neither Boat US nor the Coast Guard were at first confident that she actually knew where we were. Why? Because we didn't have a chart plotter. THEY seemed to be so reliant on electronic aids that they did not believe Samantha when she reported our position using things like dividers and paper charts. They may well have had good reason for this. It is my suspicion that an awful lot of people don't know how to do it. I don't believe I could have done it as well as Samantha did (assuming I hadn't been sick).

I believe that part of what convinced the Coast Guard that they should come and get us was that over a half hour they got three reports from Samantha of our location, and that the three points reported made sense. By the way, Samantha was loathe to draw lines on charts that weren't hers, adding a new layer of complications that did not prevent her from doing the job well.

The Coast Guard found us efficiently, and something that has to be kept in mind in all of this is the nature of the typical coastal Coast Guard vessel. They are not really equipped for medical rescue. There was no stretcher or back board and it would have been a very bad idea anyway. There was no room in their little cabin for such apparatus. In the back of the boat, lying down simply was not an option. I needed all the physical strength I could manage to muster to be able to sit and hang on to that gun turret or whatever it was (it might have just been an incredibly stout stanchion for lines with a big hole drilled in the top for some other reason than a gun mount). If Samantha had delayed calling, I'm not sure I would have had that strength. I did crash somewhat later in the hospital, but that's a far better location than on a sailbot some miles off shore -- or even on the Coast Guard boat. She got me rescued in a timely way.

We knew the chart plotter wasn't going to work as we left the dock, but they can and do sometimes malfunction some distance into a trip, suddenly and unexpectedly. If I had been on a boat where no one had good coastal navigation skills, I could have ended up much more sick. No solution is perfect. Often it will be the skipper who has these skills, but what if it's the skipper who is sick? We could have just as easily gone on my boat, and I would have had no guarantee that my crew had these skills.

If that's your situation, get a backup chart plotter. I really dislike the handheld chart plotters, but they will give you latitude and longitude, which is all that's needed to get emergency help to your boat. I really do not recommend counting on your phone. You may be too far off the coast to get a signal, but in addition, the lack of sub-menus makes it much more difficult to find something as basic as latitude and longitude.

In fact, the difficulty of finding latitude and longitude in the Navionics program points to something else about the philosophical approach to the design of electronics navigation. Navionics, for instance,  focuses far more on establishing a route and using it as a track (something a modern chart plotter does fairly easily) than in just telling you where you are. I'm going to look for an app that just gives lat and long, because that's really all we needed. With rapid access to latitude and longitude, we could have confidently snaked ourselves through Mullet Key, Egmont Key, etc. At the push of a button we could have told the Coast Guard where we were.

Finally, Navionics depletes the phone battery quite rapidly. We did not have a DC charger with us (it's an easy thing to forget), and when it was dead, it was done. Using Navionics in the open Gulf we could turn it off, but near the shore you would want to leave it on.

I have seen people use Navionics on their phone quite effectively, but it has a steep learning curve, it doesn't do it nearly as well as a chart plotter, it is hard to see to program it in sunlight, and it uses a lot of battery up pretty quickly. Except in an emergency it gets a thumbs down from me.

I'll look and report on what I find regarding lat/long apps, but since I use an Android and most people seem to have Apples for smart phones, people should look on their own as well. T-Mobile, for instance (my provider), recommends that I use only T-Mobile tested apps, and my experience has suggested that this is true. While an I-Phone supposedly gives lat and long, it is also buried in the phone. The Coast Guard tried to lead Samantha through her phone to find it on her phone, apparently not trusting her navigation skills, but in Samantha's view it's the phone that failed. She never did find it and -- smartly -- asserted her status as skipper and insisted that they use the position she had plotted the old-fashioned way.

The weekend's experiences enhanced my opinion that both chart plotters and skilled use of paper charts are crucial, and not just for "serious" sailors. Going out on the water is a little dangerous, and it isn't right to abuse the system by forcing the Coast Guard to do a costly and time-consuming grid search because you didn't know how to figure out where you were.

Seasickness

Or, I Didn't Know it Could Happen to Me!

Somewhere in this blog I said once that seasickness can turn into a true medical emergency. I wish I could figure out where I said that so I could quote it now.

Last week my sailing club, BCYC, went on a three day sailing trip, Saturday through Monday. We planned to sail to Moore's Crab House on Longboat Key on Saturday, and then on Sunday go on to either Sarasota or Twin Dolphin Marina.

Meanwhile, age had started to catch up with me. I had an extremely sore knee, which my doctor's office determined to be caused by arthritis. Because I don't tolerate NSAIDS (as in, they could kill me), they put me on Prednisone. I was prescribed the standard blister pack, with a big dose the first day and then tapering off over the next five days. The Nurse Practitioner was sure my knee would be better in a few days with this.

That was Wednesday. Wednesday night and Thursday I took the big dose, and by Friday I had started tapering off. Unfortunately the blister pack fell out of my purse Friday night at the grocery store, so I missed a dose, but the pamphlet explained how to handle that, and the grocery store returned my pills to me Saturday morning, so I left on the weekend trip as a guest on someone else's boat. I was looking forward to it. She has a Catalina 27' and they can be a lot of fun to sail.

Unfortunately, the boat didn't have a chart plotter, and as three boats including my boat and her Catalina were planning on a 10-day trip in a few weeks, I convinced my friend to try my chart plotter. Another friend put in the cable at the last moment, but unfortunately soldered it to dead wires. He didn't have time to re-wire it before we left. So we had no chart plotter.

Samantha Ring, the skipper, is a good navigator, but we had gotten a late start and we wanted to get in before dark. "No worries," I said. "I have Navionics on my cell phone. I'll use that, and it will take us right to the entrance of Longboat Key Channel." It's a tricky entrance, and Samantha was glad to be able to be very precise about where it was.

So as we went out the Pass-A-Grille Channel, I huddled in the cockpit, with head down and hat shielding the sun so I could see the screen. This version of Navionics has few menus, probably to save on space, so it was a job to figure out how to do it, but after about 20 minutes I finally got a route in and it started tracking our boat.

Unfortunately, the channel had been quite rough, and I started to feel pretty sick. Next thing I knew, I was hanging my head over the leeward side calling -- several times -- for Ralph. It was fortunate, I thought, that I had eaten breakfast so early. My stomach was empty. I figured that was the end of that.

Well, it wasn't. Turns out that Prednisone has a tendency to trigger nausea. I got sicker, and sicker, and sicker. It didn't go away. Eventually I had dry heaves. I couldn't say two words without calling for Ralph in between them. Samantha was beginning to worry. We had had some mechanical problems with the boat that had delayed us. While the boat was now sailing very well, we didn't really know why the mechanical problem had happened, and we were afraid it might happen again. The fuel gauge said she was low on fuel.

I wasn't in a state of medical emergency yet, but it was close to 5PM, I was still retching, and it would be several hours before we got to shore. We both thought I might be in pretty rough shape by then.

Samantha triangulated a precise location for us and called the Coast Guard.  The Coasties initially weren't certain they needed to come, but after some debate (their flight surgeon finally said "Go get her!"), they came out and got me.

While I am extremely grateful to them, it was a terrifying ride. Their boat was moving at at least 50 mph forward (and about 80 mph up and down!) I had declined riding in the cabin because I saw nowhere I could call for Ralph without making a mess in there. I said I would ride in the back, and one of the Coasties rode with me, holding on to my life jacket. I was glad -- we were bouncing all over the place. I nearly landed on the floor a couple of times, and there was an open space in the gunnels I would have fit through! I looked inside the cabin. Those chairs had huge shock absorbers, and the three crew in the cockpit gently bobbed up and down. Meanwhile I was in the back, bouncing hard -- BANG! BANG! BANG!  I clung to what I think was a gun turret, very glad the gun wasn't there as it would have gotten in my way. I was soaked from ocean spray.

Somehow I made it in to the Cortez Bridge Coast Guard Station without soiling their boat. An ambulance was waiting to take me to a nearby hospital. I was glad to be on land!

We did not call for help too soon. While I seemed to finally be done bellowing for Ralph, I hadn't had any food since 6:30 AM, and had only had about 6 oz. of diet soda to drink since the boat had left the dook about noon. My blood chemistry was a little off, and the ER doctor invited me for an overnight stay. I really had no choice. I was in south Bradenton; I had no wearable clothes (never mind why); my car was up in Gulfport; and all my friends were 15 miles south of me. They had no cars either, but it didn't matter, because the battery on my phone was dead (Navionics uses up a lot of battery power) and I couldn't call anyone to bring me clothes and give me a ride home.

It was a good thing I stayed in the hospital. In the middle of the night they drew blood again, and I got the news Saturday morning: my blood chemistry had continued to go sour overnight, and I was now very sick. They were very glad I had opted for admission.

It was 3PM on Monday afternoon before I was released.

It turns out that Prednisone's tendency to trigger nausea is multiplied if you don't finish the blister pack. Oops.

Here's my point: even if your doctor tells you lots of information about what you're taking, even if the pharmacist buries you with details, you still don't know everything about that medication under all possible conditions. Or you might not be on any medications at all, but also not realize that you are about to come down with strep throat or a bladder infection, both of which can make you nauseous. At any time, there could be events sneaking up on you that could turn a minor bout of seasickness into a serious medical problem.

My seasickness did not become life threatening only because I got to the hospital when I did, but ... even though I was very sick on the sailboat, I did not have the classic symptoms of someone about to crash from dehydration. Only a blood chemistry analysis let the doctor know that I was actually headed for a medical cliff, and because I was already in the hospital, that was prevented. If we had waited for the classic symptoms of serious dehydration, I would have been in a whole lot of trouble by the time I got to the hospital. The flight surgeon knew something we did not: moving from "Oh spit I really don't feel good" to "How do you call 911 from a sailboat?" can happen very, very rapidly.

Talk to your doctor about how to manage seasickness. Experiment and find out how you react to Bonine, to Dramamine, to the little wrist bands (they don't work for me but some people swear by them), etc. Know yourself. If you're going on any kind of extended trip, have your crew try these things ahead of time as well.

Then talk to your doctor about the realities of sailing (in particular, being some hours from medical help) and ask what you can stock on your boat. I know they make rectal suppositories that can turn off nausea when someone can't keep anything in their stomach long enough to help. If we had had those suppositories on the boat, it might have saved me 2 days in the hospital, with, I think, a $125 deductible for each day for me to pay, plus $250 for my share of the ambulance. If I could have gotten the nausea under control, I could have drunk Gator-Ade, which includes the potassium I needed so desperately. It all might have been a non-event.

This, by the way, answers, forever for me, the question of whether I should *ever* use Navionics on my phone. Never. Again. Ever. Never. Using the chart plotter, you can still see the horizon. If you can see the horizon, you're less likely to get seasick.

I might have gotten sick anyway. I am now on a new blister pack of Prednisone ("You are NOT going sailing while you're on this, right?" the NP asked.) No ma'am. I've learned my lesson! Maybe because I have just been through so much, this round of Prednisone has made me a little nauseous. I've taken Prednisone before without any nausea, but not this time.

Seasickness really can turn into a medical emergency. I never thought it would happen to me, but it did. It is something to be prepared for.

...

Oh yeah -- one more piece of advice, probably something everyone on the planet with a cell phone except me knew: keep a list of emergency numbers with you. If I had done that, I still could have called a friend from the hospital phone. It wouldn't have changed my medical condition, but would have relieved me of the vision of me walking out of the hospital bare-assed!

Teaching Friends to Sail

I've been doing this, and I discovered something.

As we learn to sail, our instructors tend to focus on language. In fact, some of them delight in burying us in new vocabulary. Port and starboard aren't so bad, although only rarely is the reason for not using "left" and "right" explained. That makes all of it look rather arbitrary to some people.

Then we continue to explain, and explain, and explain.

Well, I had three newer sailors on my boat yesterday, two of them children aged 11 and 13. And I discovered something that I instinctively knew but hadn't put into words: learning to sail is largely physical. My friends were lucky. The wind was up, which made it very easy to tell where it was coming from. So with just a few words, they got the physical sensation of feeling the wind on their faces. All three of them actually had no trouble telling where the wind was coming from. Well, that counts. If I tell them to "point the boat into the wind" and I'm on the bow, they need to be able to tell where the wind is.

We only focused on a few things. I want them all, but especially the mother, to be able to handle the helm. I may have to count on the mother to do this while I'm undoing some fairly serious problem. What I noticed was that I was encouraging them to learn through their muscles, but that the mother kept using words to guide her children. I hope I was polite as I intervened and encouraged her to just let them *feel* how it feels to steer the boat. I have a very responsive wheel, and you don't have to move the wheel much at all to turn the boat. All three got that very quickly, and I made an active decision to explain as little as possible and let them experience as much as possible.

The children spent a lot of time crawling around on their hands and knees. Since I have netting around my boat, I explained to them that if the boat did something unexpected while they were forward, they were to immediately drop to their hands and knees. They actually had a lot of fun doing this, as well as walking around the boat.

By using just a few words and not overloading them with instructions, They very quickly got the idea that they must always be holding on to something, and not the lifelines (which pull them to the edge of the boat, but I didn't say that. I will, but I didn't want to scare them the first day out!)

As you may have guessed, we are planning a trip together.

I think that sometimes we bury newer sailors with too much language. They need to know where the luff and the clew are. Both are important to observe as we sail. I particularly want beginners to get familiar with the location of the clew. That will help them backwind the headsail during a tack in light wind, and controlling it will keep the headsail from wrapping around the forestay while jybing.

But they really don't need to know the name of all corners and sides of the sail their first trip out. They really only need to know luff and clew.

They can also learn to help you watch telltails on the headsail and mainsail. We do *not* have to give them chapter and verse of all the information those telltails can give you, or how it may relate to the position of the headsail car on the track (more vocabulary), etc. on the first time out, but if they can look at the telltales when you can't see them, that can be a lot of help.

My opinion? Pick a few things at a time to teach beginners. Don't try to cram in every little nook and cranny of every fact. Don't bury them in details when they're still working on port and starboard. I recently raced with someone who used "left" and "right" because there were beginners on the crew, and they had been so buried in new vocabulary that they couldn't retain any of it.

That was partly why I took this approach. But I also did because with an 11 and a 13 year old on board and actively learning, I knew that if you bury them in too many 'facts' for which they don't see the point, you'll lose their attention. I NEED them to be able to move around the boat safely. I NEED them to remain interested -- they could be tremendous help, say, tailing for an adult on a winch. But most of all, I need them to have a good time, so they don't beg their mom to turn around and go home!

Do you want to sail with these newer sailors? Are they important to you? Then don't use a chance to teach as a chance to show off. Be gentle. It's a lot to learn, and you may have forgotten just how overwhelming it can be. But the beginners on your boat are easily overwhelmed. With a little thought, you can still teach them a lot and have them step off the boat thinking 'Wow -- I learned a lot!" instead of "I'm not sure I'll ever get this."

You're the teacher, so the conclusions they draw about sailing are in your hands.

Colonoscopy vs. Live-Aboard?

Fugeddaboudit!

Find yourself a NICE hotel/motel room for three days, one with a refrigerator. Two days for prep, one day for the actual test and recovery.

Get a room in a place with very good cable and internet services.

Line up friends to make and bring jell-o in flavors you can have, and stock the refrigerator with drinks your doctor approves.

Colonoscopies and living aboard -- completely incompatible.


'Nuff said!