Anti-depressive!

We’ve have been introduced to many new heroes in the past few days, or at least two. Matt McGillivray, the surfer from South Africa who performed so admirably at Pipe, and the Gold Coast woman who risked life and limb attempting to save two beer kegs from an angry ocean.

Champions of The People™.

Today, we meet a new one, Carter Parry, a Hawaii-based surfer and internet technology expert who was stricken with an almost impossible to believe run of bad luck. First, at the start of last year’s holiday season, he was rushed to the hospital in Honolulu feeling very sick. He woke up, two weeks later with his leg amputated below the knee, due methicillin-susceptible staphylococcus aureus (MSSA), or wet-gangrene, and had one of his two lungs removed due a “super infection” in his blood.

He was on his way to getting his second leg chopped off but the doctors saved it as described by Parry himself. “The doctors took a huge stretch [of skin] from my knee to my hip, and the nerve ending from my thigh, and transplanted that to my foot. They rebuilt the whole sole of my foot with my thigh tissue and fat, and that is a surgery that should not have worked but because it did, I am not a double amputee — which, for my lung condition, is huge.”

His medical team knew the foot surgery had been a success when, “All the hairs on the bottom of my foot began to stand up in the cold operating room. So they knew the nerve was connected,” Parry continued, and regarding having having hair on the bottom of his foot said, “I like to think there’s gonna be some type of perk with that — maybe I can [channel] extra static electricity, or get better traction on my surfboard wax. We’ll see.”

He said of his run of luck, “I was dealt this hand and I just wanted to surf again — that’s really all I was thinking about the whole time. My appreciation for life has just altered so much in a positive way. … I think my life’s gonna be better than it was before. I might not even be able to stand on a surfboard anymore, but I’m sure as hell gonna try.”

Talk about making lemonade out of lemons and our World Surf League should immediately contact the effervescent young man for a spot in the booth. I would never complain about the Wall of Positive Noise again.

Very anti-depressive.

Watch him shine here…

VAL on VAL!

The VAL-pocalypse continues, news today revealing mega-producer Brian Grazer almost killed superstar actor, and fellow VAL, Tom Hanks in a collision at Malibu, where both keep houses.

The almost-seventy-year-old Grazer, whose films include Apollo 13, The Da Vinci Code and Parenthood and who is also famous for breeze-flogged hair that looks like it’s on its own recreational high, told In-Depth with Graham Bensinger,

“I see Tom Hanks, like in the impact zone, while I’m taking off on this wave. And I’m thinking like, ‘I can get around him.’ But I’m also thinking, ‘Shit! He’s a movie star. He’s the movie star. Am I going to kill the movie star?”

Grazer’s fin sliced through Hanks’ leg.

“It caused him to get, I think, 35, 36 stitches in his calf,” said Grazer.

On an earlier episode of the show, Hanks said, “I have a vicious scar in my calf from Brian Grazer running over me on his surfboard… His fin sliced me open to the point that I had to go to the clinic in Malibu, and get 37 stitches on the inside and outside.”

The injury, says Hanks, has left him with a permanently disability.

“My calf muscle has always been too short because I made the mistake of going surfing with Brian Grazer.”

Most worrying, I think, is seventy-year-old Grazer’s use of “like” throughout the interview.