The Day of the Lizard

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MY LATE and favourite grandmother - the wise woman that she was - used to caution me about the perils of befriending or entertaining guests - especially those with forked tongues.

And mind you, she had no qualms about her remarks - referring to both the animal and human species!

However, I must admit though, that tongues do not get any longer - and scarier - than those belonging to monitor lizards.

So you can imagine what an extreme bundle of nerves I was last week, when one of these four-footed, clawed monsters wriggled into my bedroom!

With three dogs - an adult Dobermann, German Shepherd Dog and a Shetland Sheepdog - and I in my wheelchair at one end - and the terrible lizard at the other, it didn't have to take a rocket scientist to conclude that the place just wasn't big enough for all of us.

So what does a handicapped man who can't walk at all do in such a predicament?

Here are some "hands-on notes" which I took as the drama unfolded.

First, who's the victim here? And don't panic.

A Reader's Digest article years ago pointed out to anyone being confronted by a snake to "realise first that it's more scared of you than you are of the creature".

It went on to suggest to "be calm and then walk away from the serpent so that you can allow it to make its escape as well in a non-confrontational way".

Of course, in my case, this wasn't a snake - although it pretty much looked like one to me - with its "sporting legs" and length of almost a metre. 

And I wasn't in the great outdoors somewhere where one would have expected such a rude encounter.

Excuse me, but the dreaded thing was in my room, with the doors all shut except that of the bathroom from where the slithery visitor had emerged.

(I later found out that the monitor lizard had crawled in through my attached bathroom's pipe outlet because of a major drainage construction work that was going on outside my house).

Luckily for me, I decided to stay as calm as possible as I reached out and grabbed an old walking stick next to my bed for some form of protection - in case the lizard decided to lunge forward in my direction.

My next action was to get my dogs quickly and safely into their personal crates to prevent them from getting to the unwelcome 'roommate'.

I know anyone in my situation would have set the dogs on the monitor lizard.

Although my canines were very capable of doing that, and in fact were only waiting for the "go ahead" from me, I instructed them all to get into their separate crates at once.

Despite being petrified of the slimy creature, I couldn't help feeling sorry for it, for I realised that it was just as scared as I was.

And what if it had a family of mum and dad, or brothers and sisters, who were, at that very moment, worried sick that it had not come home?

For all I knew, it was also probably praying to the Giant Lizard Upstairs for a way out of the mess that we were all embroiled in.

Thank God for mobile phones, best friends and reinforcements

I reached out to my cell phone (service providers here, please note how hand phones are our life support as wheelchair users) and had my best pal Andrew Martin on the speed dial within seconds.

Andrew, who was at work, was over in my house within the longest 15 minutes that I had ever experienced in my life.

However, when he saw the monitor lizard, he got all jumpy and nervous too. 

(Psst! Please don't let this part about good ol' Andrew get out, as the last thing I want to do is to embarrass a great friend.)

We decided to call for more help. Andrew left me for a while and went outside to call the workers at the construction site to give us a hand with Mr Lizard.

"But strictly 'no kill', please," we insisted. "And certainly not as a tasty ingredient in someone's soup pot for supper," we added.

When the workers - a couple of young foreign men - saw me in my wheelchair, they offered warm smiles and immediately went down to business with a sense of urgency.

With some knocking on the wall, and the table with long sticks - and my dogs putting up quite a din with their ferocious barking - the monitor lizard finally decided it had had enough of the inhospitable treatment that it had been getting.

What I initially thought was a lazy and sluggish creature suddenly bolted out from under my table, room and house, took off at lightning speed and was never seen again.

No one was hurt. Nothing, broken. And no one was happier than I to know that everything was all right with the world again.

Thanks to best friends, good people that we befriend each new day, who are always willing to lend a hand when you need it the most.

The aNt