It’s not if but when you get a rope burn apparently. I am new to sailing so I have been going carefully. I even bought a pair of gloves but lost one and then the the other one (the left hand!) away.
How I regretted that decision last Saturday when the rope holding the traveller proved much stronger than the grasp of my left hand and the thing whizzed through my fist.
I didn’t want to look at first because I knew it would be bad – the pain was a give-away. Nobody seemed to have noticed – they were all working the winches and busy with the sheets. So I stood there for a while holding my left hand in my right hand wondering how horrible it was going to look when I could pluck up the courage to look at it.
Tony was at the helm so I walked up to him slowly and said quietly – I had a bad rope burn. Then immediately I started feeling sick and went into shock. Someone hunted down a plastic jar of honey which went straight into my mouth without a spoon.
The feeling of being sick and of fainting would no abate so I lay down in a cabin with my feet elevated for the rest of the race. It seems crazy now that I wasn’t planning on going to the hospital at all. I thought it would heal on its own but when I showed it to my sensible friend the next morning so pointed out that things go septic very quickly in the tropics.
So I went to the London Health Clinic. And that’s where I had the best trip of my life – a ketamine induced wonder trip off this planet. When I woke up I couldn’t believe I had not been somewhere and that I had been in that small treatment room all along.
So that was the only upside of getting a rope burn – the ketamine they gave me in order to clean it up. However I wouldn’t say that the ketamine was worth the burn – if you want to try ketamine, you don’t need to injure yourself first!