Pixie in Paradise

This one could have so many titles, I can’t just pick one: 

1. Crisis Spanish vs. Conversational Spanish
2. The Ultimate Multi-task
3. Baywatch and Black Beach Bikini Bottoms
4. Always Pack Electrolytes

and my favorite:

5. Call The Fucking Ambulance Because It Will Look Bad for Your Resort if a Tourist Dies on Your Beach

Before 7am on Sunday I took a walk on the beach, saw a sloth in a tree on the way to the magnificent black sand beach and made the best cup of Costa Rican coffee to go with my new food obsession: chia seed pudding. Yeh, that’s a lot, and there’s more, because before noon I took a second walk on the beach, got some sun on my buns and went into first responder mode for the first time in a long time – while still in a bikini! 

Settling into a new living space and location means trying to figure out its rhythm, the noises, and new sleep routine. Those things are different in each place. I’ve noticed that so far I got up earliest in Caye Caulker. Consistently I was awake between 5 and 5:30am and it felt pretty good. In my place last week it was a miracle if I could get up at 7am, many times sleeping later. That’s unheard of for me and I don’t know why it was happening. So far in the three mornings I’ve been in this new space, two miles from the last week’s, I’m able to wake up between 6 and 7am, two of which were closer to 6. My goal is 5/5:30am every day, beach time in the morning and evening before dark, a little yoga and a LOT of writing. A girl can dream.

So today when I ventured out to see how that would start to look and feel, I managed the morning solitude along that beautiful black sand beach then came back home for coffee – and chia seed pudding. The hammock seduced me so I ended up reading in it with my Kindle e-reader and favorite coral pink airplane blanket (courtesy of Fiji Airways from 2014). Almost two hours later I needed to either fall asleep and make it official, or get out of that thing and enjoy some sun and that powerful, grounding black sand that was waiting for me at Playa Negra.

The beach won. Bikini on, I carried a small blue waterproof backpack over one shoulder containing a towel, sunglasses, fanny pack and Yoga Paws™ (I always have Yoga Paws in whatever bag I’m carrying – portable yoga mat for your hands and feet!). If you’re one of those people that pays really close attention to detail, you will notice a vital item missing from that backpack…water. I know. Ridiculous. How long have I been living in the tropics on the ocean now?! Or back in the US for ten years in the Sonoran desert?! So stupid. I knew I’d only be gone a couple of hours and to be fair, the Costa Rican sun just isn’t as hot as Belizean sun right now – and especially not the desert sun. However, in full transparency, it isn’t out of character for me to be really prepared with a backpack full…of everything but water. I just don’t get thirsty that often! Right now there is a very sweet, good looking human reading this paragraph, rolling his eyes because he’s also the same human that shared his water and one sock with me when I didn’t prepare properly for a hike in the Arizona desert. You read that correctly: one sock. Just be okay with that incomplete piece of information.

I don’t realize I’m missing drinking water until after walking down the beach and settling in a spot to absorb some sunshine. I still feel fine and am only a few hundred feet from the resort where I am able to get a massage on the beach, order food, drinks and even do some grocery shopping since that resort also owns the little gourmet market near my house. Between weekly trips to town for the fresh produce and a proper shopping excursion, I’m determined to get my sundries and food from this cute little designer market. Prices aren’t much higher if at all there than at the markets in Puerto Viejo, there’s just less selection. I’m fine with that.

Luckily or unluckily for me and the old man in the sea yesterday, I had only been sitting in the sand for about fifteen minutes. This means I was facing the water. After I get too hot, I tend to flip onto my stomach, bury my head in my hands, and let the sun kiss my backside for a while. That lucky, lucky planet.

I wasn’t focused on anything in particular at this point other than listening to the deafening sound of the waves and the rip tide. This beach reminds me of Cabo San Lucas which is gorgeous, but mostly unswimmable due to crazy rip tides. Here, they post signs and put up red flags on the beach and in the water, warning of the powerful current BUT you know, humans…

At some point soon after I have sat down, I look out and see what I think is a head in the water, not one of their bobbing warning floaters. Some time passes and I look in that direction again and four people are walking toward a man in the water who is close to shore. Two of these men grab the wrists of the man in the water and start pulling him further out of the water. He is limp from the neck down, essentially, but he’s holding his head up so I think that’s a good sign and he’ll probably stand up once his helpers let go of him. The men try to let go of the man but he isn’t moving so they realize he has to be moved further up the beach to avoid laying in water face down, and they pull him further onto the sand. The tide is aggressive here and keeps coming further and further towards the people enjoying the beach, destroying sand castles in its wake. When they pull the man up to the drier sand and let go of him, he still doesn’t move. That’s when I get up, grab my blue backpack of essentials and walk towards them. 

I have never stopped to think about how other people react in this kind of situation, never once. I became a respiratory therapist at age 19 and for the 15 years that followed, that’s what I did, helped people keep breathing. It was who I was. When I walked away I was done, so ready to be done. Completely burned out on the medical field both the administration and the job itself. Administration wanted us to treat patients based on quantity not quality, and patients wanted 5-star care but still be able to verbally and physically abuse us and throw their poop our way as if they were bald, confused monkeys. I don’t regret the time spent in that profession because I acquired some badass clinical skills, allowing me to be part of teams that saved hundreds if not thousands of lives during that time. Since that time those skills have come in handy with random occurrences out in public and at home, when I still had a houseful of dogs that loved to test my anxiety level.

One thing we were taught as health care practitioners was to be careful who we helped medically off the clock and outside of the hospital. The reason being, we live in a litigious society and the hospital covered us with liability insurance inside its doors, but not out. Those were the exact words we were taught and I myself had to impart on students in the medical law and ethics course I was privileged to teach for a few semesters. 

As I walked towards them and the sun, my gaze stayed focused on the man’s head, whose body is still lying pretty lifeless on the beach. Everything and nothing is going through my head, because as much as my brain is trying to get into fight or flight mode to help with this potential crisis, my body is being infiltrated by the sights and sounds of one of the most calming places I’ve ever been. The loud crashing waves, gentle breeze, deep and dark colored sand, bright green growth on the ground and rows of almond trees and sea grape shrubs are telling me to stay relaxed.

It’s just muscle memory and instinct to help for me at this point, because let’s face it, my CPR and various medical licenses and certifications are wildly out of date by now. I purposely let them lapse, not wanting to return to acute patient care and didn’t renew any of them, forcing me to find a new career path. I did and never regretted it, but I will never stand by in a situation like this and not try to help, unless my own safety is at stake. I do not care if the old man who tried to die yesterday wants to try to sue me for trying to help him. I will stand in a Costa Rican courtroom, handcuffed to a hot Rastafarian sheriff’s deputy and defend…wait, that’s another story I tell myself – and it certainly isn’t where I was going at this moment! Moving way on…

I will always try to help within the knowledge base and physicality I’ve been blessed with. I knew I wasn’t going to carry this guy to a clinic but I could do a very rudimentary physical assessment. Yup, in a bikini. I mean, what else? Also, which language is this going to happen in? Um.

I walk up to the man on the beach, asking if anyone can speak English, and only one of four people can and it’s the man who needs medical attention. He is exhausted from being caught in that rip current but he is trying to tell me he needs water. Sir, slow down and pump the brakes. I’m not entirely sure he needs more water, considering he probably got a salt water douche in every open orifice in his body. I ask the woman standing over him a few questions, apparently his wife, but she has very limited English fluency. I take the man’s pulse while I ask him a couple quick questions which don’t produce concrete answers. I take his pulse twice, it’s over 100 but not in a super scary zone yet. He looked in decent shape for his age which in all honesty isn’t that old. He’s probably early 60’s and is still rocking a small Speedo swim brief so that tells me he’s European. Let’s face it, you’ll never see a North American in a swim brief unless they’re competing in the Olympics.

I do my very best to explain to the man’s wife that he needs to be moved out of the sun and into the shade immediately, and that he has heat stroke on top of whatever happened in the water. I do not know the Spanish word for heat stroke (la insolación/el golpe de calor) and clearly she doesn’t either, but I do know the word for shade. I have a friend who is a very accomplished capoeira instructor – un mestre – and they call him Sombra, or shade. That is the only incidence of me learning Spanish for the last 30 years where that word exists in my Spanish vocabulary. I’m using some English, mostly Spanish and a woman presumably with their group looks at me and asks if I speak French. This feels like some sort of international conference and I can’t even focus on the one and a half languages I need to use right now.

They all seem to understand what I’m getting at and I take off for water at the bar because as we learned prior, I forgot mine. I turn and burn, running barefoot down a hot black sand beach, blue backpack over one shoulder, little titties bouncing. Who are we kidding, those aren’t going to gain enough momentum to get near enough to give me a black eye, but I was indeed praying fervently that I wouldn’t jostle the bikini bottoms loose bouncing through the sand. Women’s swimsuits are a lot of fashion and sometimes their true function escapes designers. Those of us who have done watersports can truly testify – ladies, SCUBA with a bikini under a wetsuit? Yikes. I make it to the end of the beach where there’s a long, slatted, colorful walkway to the resort’s dining area. I have to make it to the end and that’s where the waiters are attending to guests, but this walkway always seems a little slippery so I just engage the core muscles and run on the balls of my feet, as if I were in heels. Triangle bikini, with blonde hair flying, tiny titties bouncing, bikini bottoms doing God’s work, blue backpack flailing behind my right arm, I arrive at the bar, out of breath. Launching into a short speech about needing water, and help but not getting a fast enough response, I switch and ask if anyone understands English. One guy does and I tell him to give me the biggest water bottle he has, a man is having heat stroke on the beach and that I will come back later and pay for the water.

Handing me the water I turned around and, well, the return trip looked just like the arrival: triangle, flying, titties, bottoms, praying. By the time I got there, more people had stopped what they were doing to see if the man was alright. When I got there he had been given some water but it wasn’t cold like what I had just brought. Moments after I showed up a woman came up to us with a full bottle of grape electrolyte water for children. This was a huge relief as electrolytes are so much better in dehydration/overheating situations than plain water. She spoke in Spanish and then switched to English, probably when she realized Spanish was not at all my first language. She gave the man a few sips of the grape liquid and I told her I’d checked his pulse. She seemed to know how to help and mentioned she was with two doctors, but without equipment none of us were going to be of any help to this guy. We talked amongst ourselves as the waiter who gave me the water came over. We told him an ambulance needed to be called because the man was not recovering at all yet. And furthermore, if he gets worse, we have no way of helping him except with chest compressions. The woman with the grape drink and I discussed this man’s need for oxygen, the ambulance was called and they waited. And waited. 

I went back to sunning myself and even took a short walk, came back and they were still there and the old man who had fought the sea and lost, was in the same exact position and condition I had left him in. One of the men who pulled him out of the water, and his wife, were still sitting with him. I asked why was he still there? The wife, not knowing at all what I was asking, looked at the other man – he only speaks Spanish. I had him repeat the words three times and what he was saying was that the ambulance had been called two times but no one had shown up yet. I mimed that I was going to go speak with the staff of the resort one more time because this man needed to be seen by a professional, not some random American doing her best Baywatch impression.

One more conversation was had, a little more waiting around and then we saw an ambulance pull away from the beach. Relieved, I stepped into the little grocery store across from the resort and walked out, my blue backpack now carrying two pieces of fish and a bottle of white wine.