rafael pyton

This is not a modern version of the Book of Job. This is not fiction. It is much worse – it is reality. And I don’t play, I AM the main character, a.k.a. the King of Pain.

27.11.2004… another day at the practice track. Crispy cold, a few notches below zero, first day of the winter season. My Hotwheels Honda CR250R feels a little bit stiff and heavy with the studded tires, the cold oil, but that is the price you pay for winter motocross. It starts on the first heavy kick, the white two-stroke smoke filling the air, bike going braaap braaap, slowly clearing its throat. I roll out onto the track, take it gently, warm up the bike, myself, already jumping everything on the second lap. New Trelleborg at the rear, the grip is great, the studs dig in hungrily, but I let the back end slide around a little on the ice, at the same time lifting the front end from corner to corner, just because it feels so damn good. I’ve done this a million times before, and it is all I ever want to do. I am at my happiest right now, at peace, in harmony, not a care in the world, and a big smile inside my helmet. People speak vaguely of freedom, but I can define it down to these simple gasps of adrenalized ecstasy.

I’m putting in the hot laps now, really turning it up, totally carving up a right-hander that leads up to a relatively short tabletop. Landing from that tabletop, what follows is a very short stretch and then a really steep kicker that you are supposed to charge hard and slam on the brakes, just scrub over it as low as you can. The landing from this ramp-like kicker is also quite steep, and the flat ground is several metres below the short stretch before the kicker.

Let’s hold up for a second here. Hell will break loose soon anyway. These are my numbers as of 2006: 14 big scars, 8 operations, 3 months of insane agony, half a year of watching the ceiling from bed, long battles of extreme infection fever, the deep swamp of morphine hell.

I’ll just quote a portion of my rather thick medical file: Fractura complicata comminuta pilon tibiale distalis fibulae sinister, fractura pilon tibiale cruris dexter et fractura calcanei comminute dexter. Reductio operativa, filamentofixatio cum filamenti PLLA ossis tali, laminofixatio malleolis lateralis, cochleo- et filamentofixatio a.m. Kirschner et filamentofixatio cum filamenti PLLA distalis tibia, fixatio externa a.m. Orthofix talocruralis sinister. NGJ62 Lamino- et cochleofixatio, transplantatio ossis libera pilon tibiale dexter. NHJ10, ZZH21 Reductio, subtaloarthrodesis, laminofixatio et cochleofixatio calcanei dexter. NHM99 Fasciotomia pedis dexter, evacutio haematoma. NHU20, QDE35, ZZA00 Revisio et amotio laminae calcanei dexter et fixatio cum filamenti Kirschner, transplantatio cutis libera…

And if you don’t know your Latin, it means I have seen the wrong end of the doc’s scalpel… o so many many times.

Returning to that right-hander… good grip out, I whip it over the short tabletop and land, already focusing on the next corner after the kicker. Smooth. If I could go back! O if I could!!!
Instead: enter worst-case scenario. Imagine crossing lanes on a highway and meeting another car head on. Imagine looking down from a tall mountain bridge, and then jumping off it. Imagine watching the guillotine fall towards your neck. Imagine hitting that kicker with full fucking speed… go on, take a moment and imagine it! The horror… the horror.

I remember it like it was yesterday, in wild and lucid details. I have relived it a million times in my mind… in endless nightmares and flashbacks. But during that early November day it was still no dream, it was just taking place… and when I land from the tabletop, the throttle STICKS wide F open, I’m caught by surprise, pushed back towards the rear fender of the bike, and before having had time to blink I hit that steep kicker with all the speed in the whole wide world.
Everything bad that can happen, happens exactly at the worst time, exactly in the worst place.

PERFECT EVIL.

Me and the bike hit the kicker like a missile, and because I’m pushed so far back on the bike by the unexpected and explosive acceleration, the rear suspension bottoms out on the face of the jump and just launches me up in the air like a supercharged pogostick. Up there in the air somewhere between moon and mother Earth I instinctively step off the bike.
I know this was the right thing to do. Had I tried to land it I am pretty sure I would have broken my back, my neck, my dick and my heart and my brain and everything else too… An eyewitness says it was much more than 10 metres above the ground – all I know is that I was up there for a lo-o-oong time before gravity caught me. A large part of my life flashed before my eyes – believe me when I say that that line is no cliché.

My first line of thoughts:
“This is completely absurd, unthinkable, this is not happening, this is a bad dream, I will never hit the ground, please wake me up soon, come on, the sooner the better, come on”.
The second part of thoughts:
“Aha, I remember this scene vividly from childhood dreams of falling from a great height - nothing will happen. Nothing can happen! I always wake up before I hit the ground!” Rather strange… but when I was a little kid I had those nightmares… and those sprung forcefully into my mind at this dire hour.
The third and final thought:
“Reality strikes”. It was true horror, the kind that stops everything, your sanity, your heart, your mind. I can not explain it – but just try to imagine the worst possible thing that could happen to you – and then you actually live through that situation… I get a fucking heart-attack just writing this!

So, as I closed in on the ground like a cannonball, I was suddenly incredibly sure that this is it, THIS IS REALLY IT FOR ME!

(Wishwishwish that I some day will forget this feeling…)

Sure, so totally sure was I, that it already felt like a fact. I am going to get paralyzed, spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair. Yes, that’s it. Strangely enough, death never quite entered mind, maybe because of the silly reason that the fear of getting paralyzed is more real, my personal holy fear. I don’t know. I just did not think about it. However, I was sure I was on the fast lane to joining the living dead. I was so absolutely convinced of it. Bye bye, spine. I know I’ve been taking you for granted, but… I can’t live without you. Please take this hit and I’ll love you forever. I’ll treat you well. I’ll do anything you say. Please.

I struggled hard to keep my balance in the air, waved my hands in cold-blooded panic, somehow knowing that if I did not land on my feet, that if I landed on my butt, my side, my head, anything else than the feet, existence as I have known it before would probably take on another meaning.
I screamed before I hit the ice-hard frozen ground, don’t know why, I just knew it was going to hurt so damn much that I needed a head start. I did not pass out. I sincerely wish I had. But the amount of adrenaline I was carrying at this moment, after such a trajectory, well……… it could’ve kept an army marching.

My feet come first. The ground is ice, it does not flex at all. I come from the moon. This is the sequence: Kkkrnchhh, loud sound of bones disintegrating, then I collapse hard on the right side, then bust my head on the ground.

I don’t die. Now, I don’t give a shit about the cracked femur, or the busted fingers. That’s peanuts. I’m not even going to talk about it. And my head stays intact… if you have a fivedollar head, buy a fivedollar helmet. Thank You, Shoei, for making the best helmets in the world. Never did spend my millions better than on the Shoei VFX-R - I completely avoid head injury. I think. Haha. (comic relief… I feel uneasy).

Drenched in absolute terror a few seconds, thinking my life is over, I lie there beaten to a bloody pulp, when I suddenly notice I can feel my legs, o MAN, it was like almost drowning and then coming back towards the sun above the surface. It is beautiful up here… for a short second, until the wave of pain cuts through the adrenaline.
In no time I’ve gone from the ultimate worst luck ever, to a little ray of sunshine – I am alive & I am not paralyzed. It could have been worse. (Months later I read in the newspaper about two guys falling from a construction platform 10 metres high… both die… both… and I am alive… why, I guess you can call it luck… but do read all the way to the end before you make up your mind).

I am screaming, people gather around. They bring me blankets, they do not move me, call the ambulance. Motocross people always know what to do, no exception. They keep me sane, talk to me, make me realize I am not alone. Fifteen minutes I lie shaking and screaming on the ice, the worst horror slowly fading while the pain is mounting.
Perspective dawns. I am even fairly calm when they put me on a stretcher and into the ambulance. I wave to the crowd, a small thumbs up. The injuries are so serious they drive straight to Tölö hospital in Helsinki. I get morphine injections, laughably small doses that do nothing for the pain down below. I demand more, force the paramedic to call doctors to see if they can give me more, on two occasions… they give me more and more, nothing helps, I give in to the pain, try to adapt. The paramedic wants to cut away the motocross boots… Screw you, I shout at them! Pull them off! They are Alpinestars Tech 8s, they are expensive! When I finally convince them to try to pull them off, it hurts so in-sa-ne-ly that I fear that my feet will come off the legs, but I bite my teeth and swear myself through the pain, feel huge relief and considerable pride when I manage to do it.
Later, while still in the ambulance, mom calls, I try to sound calm… “yeah, going to the hospital, legs broken, don’t worry, see you later…” I manage to fool her completely.
In the hospital, at least ten to fifteen doctors stand around me, ask me all kinds of questions, want to cut away my pants, my Asterisk knee braces. I soundly refuse, finally they get the stuff off my legs intact. I have injuries all the way up to the knees, but the knees are fine. Pure miracle. I note it almost happily, trying so hard to look for positive things.

They do complete body scans and then x-rays. I don’t have to wait too long to get surgery, but it feels like forever, and the pain is everpresent. Finally they push me into the cold surgery halls, a place I come to know intimately later. I am very nervous, and right before they put me into the deep sleep, I beg them to do everything to save my legs. No, I am not nervous… I am scared like I’ve never been scared before. I don’t know anything at this point – will I come out of this with my legs still there?
At least two or three of my operations are from dawn til dusk, extremely long and strengthsapping. I am not sure I am alive all the time, actually… but I still manage to come back every time.

I wake up the next day from the first operation, feeling weak but not too bad considering the circumstances. I am on heavy drip, and hooked up to the epidural, cranked up full. My legs look like shit - big iron bolts stand out of both the legs, connected to iron braces. The left one is completely fixed in only one (albeit extremely long) operation, and it is my so-called ‘better’ leg, I find out later… (Note: Much much later I realize that joints in this leg are badly damaged, and will cause me pain for the rest of my life)
The outstanding doctors are in the next day to see me, and I shake their hands like they are Messiahs, and carefully ask them if I will make a full recovery. They say that my injuries are very serious, but that they think I will walk in 6-8 months. I see doubt in their faces, but they somehow manage to reassure me.
It takes a long while to understand, for it to sink in… eventually it does. I think… or maybe it hasn’t, not even now. I was always a dreamer, always struggling with the concept of reality.
Well, welcome to life in the hospital. It is something else. I hate the fact that I could not feel my god damn dick, and the nurses were wiping my ass. How you feel humiliated! I have no pride left in me. I am a little man, I am nothing, weaker than a baby, pathetic, useless, completely useless, completely and utterly useless.

Lefty, left foot, and Righty, right foot, are very different from each other. Lefty was openly broken (compound) in multiple places so that bone pipes were sticking out, and I lost a lot of blood. Without doubt, my excellent motocross boots saved this leg, did not let the bone pipes go ballistic. Righty is the bad brother, severly shattered in small pieces in many places, as well as the heel, which went into so many pieces that it is now more heavy metal than bone, at least judging from the horrific x-rays one doctor showed me.
So Lefty is fairly set for a decent partial recovery, but Righty is swelling more and more each day. At its worst it was so ugly that Elephant Man would have won beauty contests over me. The toes were almost twice the size, and the ankle resembled a honey melon, both in size and color… I kept expecting it to explode any day… I worry myself sick… and they would and could not attempt surgery before it settled down a little. Two weeks went before they could cut me up again… I was in acute despair. Little did I know that the pain so far was child’s play compared to the next two weeks…………

Pain. It is the root of our deepest fears. Maybe you are scared of the dark. I’ll tell you what – you think you are scared of the dark, but in reality you are scared of the monsters that hide there - or in other words, you are scared of the pain you will feel when the monsters rip off your head and eat it. Maybe you are scared of heights. Well, it is not the height, but the pain you will feel on the moment of impact. And so on. The fear of pain is completely justified, only irrational in its paths. There are, by the way, two species of pain: physical and mental pain.
I know them BOTH intimately. I know what colour their underwear is. I know where they get their nails done. I also know their secret middle names ( both starts with F…). Mental pain is a subject I do not want to talk about, suffice to say I felt it in ‘99, it is impossible to deal with it, and the invisible but souldeep scars will never heal. No, this letter is about physical pain, how it will beat you down into a little klump of shakin’ yello, and all you can do is remember how to breath, even though you want to forget.

Since Righty never returned to the shape of a foot, the doctors decided to get in there for a little nip and tuck anyway. In two extremely gory episodes they fixed the shattered leg with bones they cut from my hip and lower back. Those hip and ass-scars are pretty sexy… I lay on the operation table from day to night, all the time, and lost track of time and space. I can only open and close my eyes.
One day they tried to unhook me from the epidural pain relief machine. It had kept on bubbling night and day, spreading its poison into my back and into my system. Optimists… some of the docs and nurses had no idea what was going on in my body… most are obviously excellent medical wizards, who managed to piece me together… but there are a few out there that I’d love to rough up a little. When they unhooked me, the pain hit me the following night so badly that I felt like singing, so they hooked me back up, turned it up to the max. Eventually they managed to separate me from the epidural before I turned into a vegetable, but there was a lot of crying involved… instead they increased the number of my pills, wooee. Funny, but you know those small plastic cups they bring pills in… mine was always filled to the brim. I was laughing at the other patients. Is that all you get?! Losers! More than 30 pills a day. 30 pills… I cannot believe all those pills never burned a hole in my stomach… although my liver apparently felt like I was consuming a liter of vodka every day. Gaah. How unfair! Over a year afterwards I still feel the ill effects of all those pills.

After one grueling operation, the doctors were not happy about the position of the ankle, and ordered me a removable cast to force my ankle to bend enough. I am not sure the cast guy knew what he was doing when he bent my ankle into the shape of an L. The paiiiin, the sick amazing paiiiin from having the foot in that cast was barely believable. I ripped it off later that evening and curled up into a little ball, moved my arms around my legs to protect them, tried to cry myself to sleep. I got no sleep that night, I stayed curled up throughout the whole night, it was the only position where the pain was somewhat manageable, no matter what the nurses did. Aye the terror… there is nothing you can do about it, apart from killing yourself. My only friend in the world is the button where you call for the nurses.
For a few days there I entertained hopes of being sent back home for Christmas… it was all I wanted. There was even a remote chance of that happening, since the docs first thought they could not do anything about the heel, other than to let it heal and see how it turns out… hmmm… is this medical science in the 21st century… but I was actually so sick of the operations that I was praying for this damned alternative.
One morning I asked one of my doctors, if I ever was going to be able to ride motocross again. Somehow I expected him to encourage me, to say yes, to keep my hopes up. But he looked tired and sad, shook his head. I could not believe it… for the first time I really realized that my life is going to be different from now on… I cried all day in my bed, and even the other patients tried to console me. For a few hours I truly hoped to die. I felt like I had very little left to live for. Motocross is not a sport for me. I’ve been riding for 20 years. It is the heritage from my dad, which I swore to guard my whole life. It is a religion to me, a spiritual thing, a place where I feel so alive, so immortal. I can not explain. And you will not understand anyway. I am always alone, on all levels. Bust big, bigger than anyone.

It turned from black to shit when they in the end, after countless meetings, decided to have a go at operating… weeell, it was a good decision, but it also brought suffering to a whole other level. Man, I did not know the meaning of suffering yet… Yeah, they cut open my heel and screwed everything together. I was awake during the whole operation. I heard them banging away at my heel with their hammers and chisels so hard that my body was shaking, but I could not feel a thing. I do prefer the deep sleep to the injection in the spinal cord… you know, the nail makes an ugly crunching sound when it goes into the spine… uugh I hate that. They also put in a big metal plate underneath the heelbone. I could see it… hideous. Like a fucking horseshoe… but inside my foot.
It was after this operation that I fell to pieces. Something was veeery wrong in my right foot. What nobody knew then was that blood vessels were slowly exploding in my swollen foot. The agony I started to feel was unreal, about just as much as you can take and still remain conscious. Eyes rolling, body spasms… unholy alliances with Satan or whoever could save me were made at this dark hour. The doctors tried everything to ease my pain, nothing helped. What the hell is going on?! Shoot me! Every fucking nerve in my body is coming at me with drawn daggers… how is it possible to feel this way??? I turn and twist, but I can not get away! I can not hide! I can not strike back!

Finally someone had the wonderful idea to anaesthetize the whole leg by injecting something nice into my ischias nerve that runs down the back of the leg. It is not easy to find this nerve, however, so you need to use some nasty electric device that gives you sharp shocks but locates the nerve, and then stick the needle deep into the leg and hit the nerve, believe me when I say it takes numerous attempts… bzzzt… electrical shocks that would reduce a normal human being to a crying puppy – I was laughing in the face of electricity, it just took my mind of the foot. Boy, was I ready for a little relief. And when they finally nailed that nerve correctly, after numerous needles, the whole leg went numb instantly and I felt world peace no longer was an impossible notion… the anaesthetic doctors were angels! For the first time in a month I felt a tiny ray of hope shining on my poor ass. For a little while there… wow… when you feel nothing after having felt everything, that is when you know what paradise is like.

Unfortunately, the anaesthetic angels are not the people you want to see too often… yes, not too often. Ha. Remember that. Did I mention I have shit luck? If you think that ONCE was bad… I went through the whole ordeal FOUR times. ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR!!! Yes, same thing multiplied by four. I shake my head when I write this, when I remember. And I don’t even remember half of it…….
The first time the leg stayed numb for 10 beautiful hours, but when the insane agony returned, I was ready to stab myself to death. The other patients watched my condition in full horror, probably grateful that someone else was taking all the wrath of some god, or whatever. The fourth and last time the leg stayed numb for a measly 3 hours. There is no question about it. I am truly the king of pain, and there seemed to be no end to this insanity.
I was simply loosing my will to live. Will this never end? The foot was dying, and if nothing’s done, I will lose it. When they finally realized what was going on, I was going 200mph on a stretcher down to the cold halls again… It was time to do fasciotomy, the last chance saloon. Slice it wide open.

When I saw my foot after the fasciotomy, I was shocked & terrified. Four deep open wounds were cut into the foot to release all the pressure, one on the left side, two on top, one on the right side. In my mind there was clearly no way to ever use that foot again, and I wondered why they went to all that trouble, when they could just have decided to chop it off. But right now I am kinda glad they didn’t…

Oh, one more, for the road. I haven’t peaked yet. The fasciotomy did not help release the pain straight away, and after some extre-e-e-eeemely loud complaining from my side, some old guru from the plasticsurgery department came running with a scalpel in his hand and, hell, to my endless amazement started to cut away deep in the wound on the right side, my frazzled nerves going berserk, NUTS… no anaestetics!!!… this is probably the most intense pain I will EVER feel in my life, and altho it did not last for many minutes, they had to hold me down because I was halfway out of bed with the deepest intention of running away on my broken legs never ever to return to this hellhole again.
But lo and behold, later the worst pain disappeared. That old guru knew how to wield a knife, that is all I know about that. All the other patients cringed at the sight of my foot, the flesh was bulging out of some of the wounds…
Ha. While the pain peaked right there and then, it does not mean that it disappeared. I was in constant agony for three months. Hard to fathom, even for me.

A few words about patients at hospitals. These people are to large part either extremely old or extremely weird, completely abandoned by God. I have seen everything now. Of my almost two months at the hospital, I met only two persons that were in my age and normal. With them you could enjoy a fairly decent conversation, the others were busy throwing up or shitting their beds, or so fucking demented that I had to ring the nurses several times a day when they tried to escape or something… obviously, I was the master of the remote control, keeping it warm for the whole time I was hospitalized, the others better shut up and watch what I wanted to watch. In times of generosity, I took requests… can you really believe that many grown Finnish men want to watch The Bold and the Beautiful? They freak me out, 100%! By the way, I was only a remote control dictator in the sense that I felt I earned it. I was ready at all times to
give up the remote to anyone with worse injuries than me… never happened… of course, worse injuries than me… I pity the poor sap in such a condition!

People who visited kept asking me if the days are getting long, but I never had such a problem until much much later… no one could really understand how weak I was in the hospital, all beaten and battered. I just woke up every morning, closed my eyes in the evening, complete survival mode, just happy if I made it to the next day.
Later they moved me to the plastic surgery department. At first I definitely missed all the cute nurses at the ortopedic department, and all the soapy showers…( ah, light relief – there is a screaming need for that in this story…)… man, those cute nurses kept me sane, kept me wanting to return to life – they were the only flowers left, and a true fountain of life for me… I owe them a lot.
Later however, the luxury of my own room became an oasis for me, no longer having to tolerate other fools.

I have not suffered enough, fate must have thought, and threw me the next curveball. The following weeks were spent in fever. 40.8 was the top figure I measured… can you imagine almost two weeks of that? On top of all my injuries? No… strength… left. I was a zombie, dead but breathing. Oh they took a millions tests, but no one could determine the cause. The best guess still remains some sort of an infection, or a bad bag of blood. My spleen was swollen. The liver was fucked up. The CRP of my wounds were going through the roof. Is this a movie, or is it my life? This is cruel. What have I done to deserve this?

Christmas came up, the family gathered around the bed. I was miserable, just crying the whole time. It was the only way to express my feelings. I wanted to eat the Christmas delicacies sooo badly, but could only take a few bites. I probably weighed around 55kg at this time… had lost 20kg… there was no fight left in me. When the fever finally let go of its death grip, it took me many attempts of even just sitting up in bed without fainting, never to mention sliding into the wheelchair…
One particularly fine victory was when they pulled the cathether out of my dick the last time. Uaaah! It is rather nasty. But I rejoiced, and could finally return to peeing like a normal man… however normal peeing in a bottle next to your bed is… I’d much rather stand up and look for a tree… hihi!

Remember that metal plate in my heel? It was causing dead tissue. It had to be removed. Yeej. Another lucky day in the life of Andy. The sound of metal tools scraping against that metal plate when they were cleaning the wounds…. hrgh. Like dragging a fork across a plate. Well, the op went very well, they removed the god damn plate and put in two big Kirschner nails tru the back of the heel, you could see the hooks hanging out of the heel. Then they closed up three of the wounds, skin transplantations and all. The biggest wound was left open… stay tuned on that one.
During this time the tsunami took place. They “transferred me to another hospital” (Ekenäs), but it felt like they threw me out like a dirty rag, to accomodate the tsunami victims. Thanks a lot. I didn’t give a damn about them - they got all the luxury treatment thanks to the media, while I once again got the short stick. You will see a pattern forming…

Anyway, just one open wound left. I could live with that, I thought… but I had no idea it would be another 3 months before I got back to the Tölö hospital… I am not happy about that. In fact, I still hold a grudge. You don’t want to watch your own heelbone (and the adjoining screws) for that long.
The time at the other hospital went by quickly, and spirits were in reasonable shape. I was still on heavy drip, unfortunately, and it was killing me. The superstrong antibiotics that I was on were eating up my veins completely, and fairly soon they had to search new veins almost every day. I have no trouble with needles, but after sticking them in me many times a day, day after day after day after day after never-fucking-ending day, you do get a bit iffy about it. Ha, you know, sometimes when the vein is corroded away, the antibiotics keep on coming in under the skin… if that happens during the night you are going to wake up with a huge bump on your arm… man, that FREAKED me out the first time it occurred. Yaaarghh what is going on! Then frenetically beeping for the nurse… yup, that happened many many times. Not too dangerous. Today I hardly have any veins left on the surface of my arms, it is almost like they have moved closer in to avoid all the needles. I look like a junkie who’s done twenty years of heavy heroin use. But I was turning into a junkie… read on.

In late January I came home, just for a few days they said, before you go back for the final operation. Well, I got screwed… The homevisiting nurses did a stellar job at keeping the open wound free of major infections, so kudos for that. The seventh operation was postponed twice, but… I was too weak to complain. And when you have suffered this much, you won’t last if you do not adopt a very zenlike buddist view of life. So: If it happens, it happens. And: I can not do anything else anyway.

It felt nice to return home after almost two months in the hospital, but the dark cloud was fever. It returned. Hello, haven’t we met before? Yes, down with fever yet again, and it took me two weeks to shake it, and although it never got beyond 39.0, it was on constantly, and slowly tore me down again, and now I started having major difficulty in getting any sleep at all. For a week I slept no more than maybe a few measly hours – that is, just a few hours of sleep the whole WEEK! When you are supposed to be healing up, this is incredibly bad. It is fullblown torture of the most evil kind. I was SURE somebody was testing me…
As 30 pills did not seem enough, I had no choice but to add sleeping pills to the mix. First Tenox… too weak for me. I have obviously developed a fairly high level of drug immunity by now. Then we try Opamox. Opamox kept me cool for a while, it is the drug of oxazepam, commonly used as treatment for depressive patients. Quite frankly, I have soldiered on like a god damn machine until now, but it is taking its toll…deep depressions started to rise to the surface… I could feel the dark hand coming… but I always managed to shake it off. I was a machine. And I beat the fever yet again.

After almost 3 months of constant pain, I thought I felt a breakthrough coming up, and started cutting back on the pain pills - or sweet sister morphine, the liberal doses of Oxycontin and Oxynorm I was taking. Some doctors had warned me about this, and you are definitely supposed to slowly decrease the amounts over a long period of time. I kinda knew it was going to be difficult, but it got to the point that I could not stand seeing those cute little pills, as I was totally convinced they were the reason I still belonged to the living dead, so one cold winter day I just cut off the supply at once. My system did not like that very much, as it had grown much accustomed to sweet sister morphine’s gentle caress. Tja, the body revolted with blazing guns, and I wanted to bite off my tongue… so I settled at only one pill per day. This I did for a week. I was absolutely miserable the whole time. At the slightest sentimental sensations, I would cry. When people were hugging on TV, the tears would just flow like a waterfall and I could cry for half an hour, easily. I became furiously depressed, it was just impossible to keep a lid on all emotion.
Fuck this shit – it is killing me, so this time I stared the artificial morphine right in the yellow eyes, and come the second week I cut off all pipelines. Into the fire we jump, it is all or nothing now… I’m either going down, or coming out on top.
Insane mood swings, depressions doubled, tripled, the legs and arms felt like they were made out of lead, and I just wanted to rip my heart out and throw it on the wall, watch it slowly glide to the floor, leaving a red streak behind… yes, such were the thoughts. Soon I’ll go cuckoo, or swallow a jar of this poison.
Then ONE amazing day after the absolute worst deepest blackness of the dark abyss, where I was just fighting to keep afloat, I suddenly felt fine, completely released… and just like that returning to sanity. I broke the chains. Man, I had not smiled in so long that it hurt my face when I started doing it again, and I had to rub my chins all the time, so they wouldn’t lock up. Later I heard how incredibly strong you have to be to be able to do that by yourself, just like that, from much more than 100mg a day to nothing. I am so proud of myself. I am a badass. I am a BADASS!
And such were the days of 30 pills per day.

Now all I had to do is learn how to walk. This is peanuts compared to what I’ve been through. A little pain here, a little pain there, some areas without feel, dead nerves, shattered and injured nerves giving me constant electrical shocks as they look for new nerve tracks. Bzzt bzzt. I laugh like a madman about tiny shit like that. Huuuhoooaah. 4 weeks later they drilled out the big bolts from my left leg ( aou! no anaesthetics! rock on! yeah, I laugh about tiny shit like that) and at the same time they also pulled out the 2 nails from my heel… followed by 2 beautiful fountains of blood.
Got the green light on Lefty, meaning I could now put my full weight to the floor (all 55 anorexic kilos of it), and Righty was 50%. Bear in mind that the huge wound was still open on the right side of Righty.
First I was not even able to put my feet down, because since I spent the last part of my life on my back, the body had adjusted to that. The feet turned purple the first week, I would just sit and dangle with them on the edge of my bed, before I had to lie down again to ease the pressure. Weeks passed just doing this. Since I was rather used to pain at this stage, I could afford to push myself to extremes. Then, later, I stood up for the first time, clutching the table in front of me until my knuckles turned white and the tears were streaking down my face. It was a huge moment. I felt so tall, woooohooo, almost dizzy from the great height, stretching out all of the 180 centimetres that is me. I was so high up, it felt like I was looking down from Empire State. My friends, that is major VERTIGO.
Encouraged by the success, I stood and held that table for another week, trying so hard to regain balance and bone structure and leg muscles… I really had to grip that table – I had no balance whatsoever… when I let go I would just fall over like a dead tree… I would fall back to my bed positioned behind the table. I kept pushing and pushing, wishing and wishing, hoping and dreaming of a better life to come.

After some serious training, I took the daring leap to crutches. Far more difficult than it sounds - I did not want to fall and bust up Righty, so I had to have someone walk very close to me in order to catch me if I lose my balance… balance does not come back in a day or two. It certainly was a big day, when I after almost half a year managed to go to the toilet by myself for the first time in almost half a year. I am taking back my life, a little by a little. In the toilet, I just sat and wept. Having been humbled for so long, it just felt like it was an important step back to independence. Soon, I could take my meals in the kitchen, read the morning paper sitting on a chair, looking out towards the garden, which was growing greener by the day.
My own personal shower was another moment for me. At home, the shower room is on the second floor – meaning I had washed myself downstairs in bed with a sponge and a bowl of water for months. Obviously I could not yet stand in the shower, but already being able to walk the stairs with the crutches and all the way to the shower, then showering sitting down, coming out smelling like a peach…so nice… life is about the little things…

After 3 months at home, I finally got called back to Tölö hospital for the seventh installment… close up the big wound, get that man ready for life. I thought it was the final operation then, and I was happy as a jojo to get it over with. The op went well, they cut away the muscle from the little toe and dragged it back towards the heel, used it as filling material, nice scar all the way from the little toe to the heel…then they sliced a piece of pie from my thigh to cover it up with. Didn’t have to watch that heelbone anymore… I took no more than 2 or 3 morphine pills after surgery… the pain was ridiculously tiny, and although the nurses kept telling me to take the pain killers, that I don’t have to torture myself, I was so used to the hurt that it was comparable to a mosquito bite. When I told them what I’d gone through, they immediately stopped bringing the pills to me…

I was released back home after a week. Ok, I thought, I can do anything now. There is just no stopping this guy from returning to life. Bring it on. And physiotherapy commenced, I trained like a dog, doing balance exercises, lifting weights and watching my spider legs grow, getting my weight back, my appetite back, my sleep back, my attitude back, yeah my whole damn life back.

Soon I dropkicked the crutches, started using a cane. I could walk around in the garden, feel the sun on my skin. Sure, the feet hurt like crazy, but I was coming back from the dead and I could take it and I also figured it would all get better soon.

But yet again someone thought I had not suffered enough. Yet again someone took a punch at me. How it took me by surprise… I thought it was all over… but it had only just begun. After all I’ve been through… to yet again get crucified like this… why, it almost destroyed me. The little confidence I had slowly and painstakingly built up with tears and blood and sweat was just like this chewed up and spit out.
Orthopedic checkup was coming up, and I trampled in and declared that I don’t need these anymore, thank you very much, and handed over the crutches. The doc looked at me, and then at my robot x-rays, and blinked in amazement. He had rarely seen bones in worse shape that could actually be used, and he thought it was a miracle I could walk. Great, I thought, and explained how fucking hard I had been working. He was happy about that, and I wondered when the pain would go away, because I can not walk a hundred metres without getting that shards-of-glass-inside-the-joints-feeling. Hmmm… I don’t know how much my colleagues told you, he began… but I’ll be totally honest with you – this is as good as it is going to get. I didn’t even think you’d come this far. You’ll have this pain for the rest of your life… he went on and on about the ankle joints being destroyed and how they can not heal, never, about fusing the ankles and blah and blah but I was no longer listening.

“The rest of my life” was playing over and over in my head.

I must be cursed. I left his office trembling, a mere hair away from a complete breakdown. Something died that day… I withdrew into my shell, rock solid from the seemingly neverending suffering bestowed upon me. The next day I took the car (just pressing the clutch down hurt like a motherfucker) and drove away to Nagu, the summerhouse out in the archipelago, my sanctuary and safehouse, just about the only place on earth that could save my ass.

I cried my heart out for days. It was selfpity galore on a massiv scale. I did not know what to do with myself. My whole body ached. My eyes, my mind, my feet. Has it really come to this? I wrote the following text one of those nights while feeling absolutely down and drowning in pity… I mean, so LOWDOWN that I thought I could never ever get up again.

Understand and forgive me for the bitter melodrama.

CONDEMNATION COMPLETE

The other day was all but another day
dragged my empty shell out from the doctor’s office
slumped down in a chair in the waiting room
so, that is that and this is it
irrevocably condemned to live the rest of a life in pain
the life as I once knew it, and how I knew it well!!
over, the end, over the end, game over
I cried for the death of my last glimmer of hope
wish I now could remember the meaning of faith

You do know what happens when hope is gone?
what can and will become of me now?
worse yet, what can’t and won’t become of me now?

The adventure has ended. Gone with the wind is the motocross hero, the conquering traveller, football with friends, going running, snowboarding… all damn sports for that matter. What is a man without a sport? Nothing but a loser. And so much less. And so much more of nothing; no more heavy-duty construction with wood & stones, chop firewood, do a real man’s share. Lord, I even liked gardening and cleaning. Don’t bother asking me out to the dance floor. And I will never again go on long shopping treks, go to music festivals, exhibitions & shows. Never again climb a tree, never again go deep into the forest and step into puddles, pick the wild flowers, blueberries, nothingnothingnothingman. I am nothing. I can not paint the house, I can not tinker with machines. I can not jump, squat, be quick, chase squirrels, twirl around, walk on uneven ground. I can not do anything, and I am nothing. The sum of that is zero.

The saddest loss, still:

My beloved inner child has passed away
the one that kept me young and full of love
I don’t know if I can make it without you
vaya con Dios, my dear little companion
we sure had some wonderful times

I never hurt anybody in my lifetime
I never threw a single punch at anyone, ever
I have fulfilled more than all the requirements of the modern society

Yet first someone took my father away.
then they condemned me to a lesser life
I don’t need to know why
but I beg and plead, let me know who
I swear I won’t rest ’til you are dead too

When love left my building, hate moved right in
while I minus soul search for one to blame, remember this
hate moves mountains at least as big as love ever did…

*

Right now, it is me alone against the rest of the world
just see if you can come and take me
I’m calling you out!!!

*

And when the bad days passed, the sun once again showed itself on the horizon. And once again I decided to not let the fuckers get me down. Just how many times can a man get up? How many lives do I have?
I wrote Condemnation Complete to get it out of my system as a sort of self-therapy, and then I started a training regime that not even Rocky Balboa could have handled… I say training, but it was pure punishment, or self-flagellation. I walked up and down the big raw and tumbling mountain time and time again, in the beginning just barely making it down, not to mention up, but stubbornly going bigger and bigger as the days passed and my anger increased… it hurt so badly that I screamed out in anguish many a time, just going on willpower and nothing else… who is the lunatic up on the mountain?
And I would use the ol’ rickety bicycle that has no gears to pedal around like crazy, and always on the way back really killing it and almost making it all the way up the really steep road to our parking place, pepping myself with big shouts of whooohoooo, watch these feet work! Watch me! So I’m useless, huh?! How you like me now!

In the end, I tortured myself so hard that I learned to tolerate the pain. No miracle, just a man trying to take back what once belonged to him. There was nothing more, nothing else I could do – the ankles are too broken to ever be good again. So I have to be. I am the King of Pain. Every crunching step I take hurts. So fucking what?

I got dreams to dream, love to give, and a life to live.

And that’s just what I’m gonna do.