Day 11--Snakes in my Mudder Focking closet!!

Bonus points for mixing our temporary Tough Mudder team name (Bad A$$ Mudder Fockers) with Samuel L. Jackson's famous quote from Snakes on a Plane to describe how my day started.

So on the schedule for today was Legs and Back!...wait a minute, more drama to share from yesterday.  Almost forgot to tell my skin-cancer-medicine-freaky-side-effect story. 


My calves, ankles, and feet have been pretty swollen all week, and yesterday, they got really bad.  To the point where I thought slicing them open would give me some relief from the pressure.  Wracked my brain trying to figure out what could be causing it (too much salt?  not enough water?  a few extra diet Sprites--I don't drink soda; only water, and booze--too much good home cooking thanks to Mom and Dad), and it finally hit me that I started using this skin cancer medicine on Monday.  Maybe a side effect?  The only other time anything like this ever happened to me was from drinking blue drinks.  My friend and I got into a bottle of cheap blue margarita wine on one Sunday when we couldn't make real margaritas because down here in Texas, apparently God and the state legislature don't think we should drink on Sundays so the liquor stores are closed, and we both ended up all puffy-legged after a few drinks.  Convinced we were going to have an embolism and die, we called the company, and they refunded our money after we shipped them the remaining blue stuff for testing.  It's never happened since.

Well, when I Googled the side effects from this medicine--holy moly!!  Let me just say, I'd rather deal with the skin cancer.  I called my dermatologist and told his staff I would not be using it anymore--he'll have to cut the cancer off my face.  Give me scars anytime over Parkinson's Disease (yep, one of the reported side effects).  Anyway, by the time I got home last night (and no, I wasn't wearing 6 inch heels yesterday), they were swollen to the maximum swellage point.  It looked like my thighs were attached below my knees, and the only thing recognizable about my feet was the pretty coral toenail polish at the ends of the the puffy sausages that used to be my toes.  It really was painful.  I am not a Willy Wonka fan (shoot me--I know.  I don't like "Say Anything" either), but I remembered that bratty gum-chewing girl from the movie and how she got all blue and puffy and eventually popped, and I wondered if I'd wake up the next morning with popped legs. Not wanting to take any chances, when I got into bed, I propped them up on some big pillows and iced them down with bags of frozen veggies. 

Why is any of that important?  Because I couldn't do YogaX last night, and it wasn't because I fundamentally hate Yoga and was trying to get out of it.  It really felt like my legs could literally pop at any minute.  But the icing and elevation worked, and, thankfully, they were back to normal this morning.

So I got up and did Legs and Back!, which I liked very much, btw.  It's hard for sure, but I've always had strong legs (love, love, love spin class), so I don't mind squats and lunges.  And when I was all done, I walked into my closet, still wearing my shoes, and there was a snake coiled up next to my closet door frame.

It was small (I'm trying to upload the pic), but I thought it was a copperhead because we'll found those in our backyard, so I had to decide whether I wanted to run next door and wake up my neighbor Bill to come kill it and risk it slithering away with my daughter and her friend sleeping in the next room or if I was just going to man up and kill it myself.  All about the strong stuff these days, I fetched a shovel from the garage and cut the little snake's head off, in a few places, just to be safe.  It really is creepy that they keep moving, headless.

My daughter was impressed ("Cool!  Can I keep the head?"), and I have to say I was, too.  That I didn't jump around and scream like the girly-girl I usually am and just got the shovel and took care of business.  "You don't know how strong you are until being strong is the only choice you have."  Is that a sign that maybe I'm actually believing my own hype and I'm getting a little bit strong??   I do have this in the proper perspective...it was a tiny snake that didn't really mean any harm to me or my loved ones.  It wasn't all hissy and scary and about to strike.  So I don't mean to overly-dramatize it.  But the part of the story that makes me feel like I'm making some progress in my quest for emotional and physical Bad A$$ness is that I didn't depend on anyone else and just did what needed to be done.  Go, me.

Since I already got my strong on today, I'm not really working for anything special.  Just going to enjoy the rest of my Friday and the weekend knowing I'm a tiny-dead-snake-bit closer to Bad A$$ness.