A Love-Hate with Cactus! | 25 Days of Me

I actually posted this a few years ago but I thought I would bring it back out because it is certainly something about me that some of you won’t know. I have a love-hate relationship with cactus. The story is a rather embarrassing one but one that my family loves telling over and over again. Way back when I was a senior in high school I broke my ankle. Well, not so much broke it as shattered it and the experience is not one I ever want to have again. Let me set the scene for you!

My father told me to go outside and tell my younger siblings that it was time to come inside the house. He was explicit in that I was to go out there, tell them and then come right back in the house. He told me not to be out there playing around because we needed to get dinner finished before my mother came home. So I went outside and told them. Only they wanted me to throw the football to them and I thought once or twice wouldn’t hurt.

That was my downfall, I’m certain. I didn’t do what my father had told me and God said “Watch this.” I stood on a retaining wall we had under our back porch. There was a steep hill and the wall kept things from washing down.  The problem was that day was the first in two weeks that it didn’t rain and the wall had come loose in all the rain. It was made out of railroad ties (you know those things that go cross ways on the railroad track.)

The top tie came loose and I began to fall. In my zeal to stop my fall and slid down the hill I reached out to grab the closet thing I could. It just happened to be one of the cactus plants that my mother had growing under the porch. They were the only plants that had thrived there and I managed to not only grab one but slide though about twenty of them.

There’s no point in going through the next hour or so because it was miserable and I managed to break my leg in my climb up the hill, lost a shoe because my poor ankle was swelling, and my ankle bone pieces were just under the skin (like I could see them.) I was in pain! We get to the hospital and find out I need surgery and have to stay overnight since it was Sunday.

Have surgery and everything is fine. Get home only to start having pain in my arm and back. At first I assumed it was from the fall. Sort of like when you are in an accident and don’t really feel it until the next day. The pain gets worse and it feels like there is something sticking me all over my side. Well there was! All those cactus plants I slid through? They were the kind that had sharp needles that had managed to implant themselves in my arm, side, back, down one leg and my butt of all places.

Once we discovered them my mother attempted to pull one out but she is like Nurse Ratchet and I wasn’t having it. So my father said not to worry he had it handled. If you don’t already know my father was in the military and during this time we were stationed at a small base. My father’s answer was to have one of the medics who happened to be at the house take them out for me. I was a senior in high school and this super good looking guy spent then next two hours pulling cactus needles out of me. If that wasn’t embarrassing enough, all of this happened on the day that my younger siblings rented The Lion King to watch.

via GIPHY

You know the movie where the hyena called the other “Cactus Butt!” To this day my siblings still call me that and I have never lived it down.  That poor medic did his best to not laugh but it was rather difficult for him on top of the fact that he saw my butt! It took a few years before I could be in the same room with him and not blush. In fact the day I was able to do that was on a day that he got injured severely and I had to stop the bleeding. We still talk and occasionally joke about the fact that he picked needles out of my butt and helped ensure he could have children.