Near Death Experience

I was swimming yesterday--that's how ALL of these stories start out--did you see me out there? I was the one in the red hat. I was going really fast and keeping up with Mr. Ironman in his powder blue hat when all of a sudden I started doing some splashy synchronized swimming. Or maybe to you I just looked like I was about to drown. Actually all that arm flailing and scissor kicking and erratic backstroking were just evasive maneuvers.

Swimming in the ocean always makes me a little nervous. I've got these little plastic cups on my eyes that only allow me to see well under water and only things that are directly in front of my eyeballs. The water is sometimes murky and I'm swimming over and through seagrass with god-knows-what in it. To add to all that I'm putting my hands in places that I can't see--in front of me. It's the perfect storm of spook-inducing situations. Sometimes, I swim through little clumps of sargassum or floating sea grass and I'm convinced that they're jellyfish. I have to pull my head out to check. Sometimes, I get knocked on the foot from a passing swimmer and I'm sure it's a ray/shark/giant sturgeon out to chomp on me. I have to pull my head out and check. All this stopping to make sure I'm not in life-threatening-danger really slows me down, so I try to quell the nervous voice in my head and keep swimming. So when I started feeling something weird on my leg yesterday I told myself, "Self, don't be weird that's just the bubbles from your powerful stroke tickling your leg." or "Self, that's just a little piece of sea grass you swam over, don't be a baby" And so on for about 10 minutes. Finally I looked down to see this monster trying desperately to attach himself, via a modified dorsal fin-sucker apparatus, to my body:


Ahhh!! Remora!!!


Now, I knew exactly what the fish was, and I knew logically that it posed no threat to me. It was just something about the way it was sinisterly swimming next to my thigh when I dropped my head down to look that really got me panicky. I began kicking furiously and even turned over on my back and pulled out my best backstroke. After a few seconds of this I decided to calm down and start swimming like a normal person again. Stroke...stroke. nibble..nibble.

Ahhh! Remora!!! It was there again.

This time I pulled out every spastic stop and began really flailing about in the water. Splashing, kicking my legs in directions they don't normally go. After I lost the remora, finally, I was breathing a bit hard so I swam into shore and walked for a bit. Then I realized that Mr. Ironman had already reached the turn around point and I was way behind everyone else. I got back in the water and started swimming again. Every clump of sea grass that tickled my shoulders or knees was terrifying.

I got into the clot of other swimmers waiting in the shallow water for everyone to come in before we started back. I said "I was viciously mauled by a remora!" Their response: "Oh, how lucky! I love it when that happens", "Isn't that neat?" or "Now you have a facebook story" No one was concerned that I was suffering from post-remora traumatic stress disorder or PRTSD. It's a real thing guys, look it up.

I swam back really fast.