Play it like you’re paralysed! Limp wrists and loose licks with the Worst Band in Joburg

Also, there would be an epic story attached. Here is mine…

Neuropraxia is basically a paralysed hand, which you can get from sleeping on your arm for several hours – as one may or may not do after a spell of serious drinking. Another medial term for it is posture-induced radial neuropathy.

I may sound like an expert now, but a couple of years ago, I was not. I was blissfully unaware of neuropraxia. A virgin to the condition. Today the word ‘neuropraxia’ slips from my tongue; typing it flows from my fingertips like waters of a mountain stream across the smooth cobbles of a riverbed in Turingia. Neuropraxia… Metallica… Dysphasia…

Sorry, where was I?

Oh, right, I’ll tell you where I was. I was at the prestigious Oppikoppi Music Festival in Limpopo, where I performed with my band, The Near Misses, Worst Band In Joburg^TM.

As our name and tagline imply, we were not a band that traded off our technical ability. It was more about ridiculous rock songs, people removing their clothing, chaos and japery. Our singer finished so many songs wearing just his underpants that I came to know his jocks quite well.

“Are you wearing the grey ones or the purple ones tonight? As long as it’s not the dark-blue pair. Those things have got holes.”

So we were not a technically skilled band, and playing Oppikoppi would be our greatest achievement. Our iconic moment. We had rehearsed twice a week for months, honed our songs, as well as our stage antics, and we proceeded to play the greatest show of our lives!

Epicness aplenty.

Some of us then set out to celebrate the cracker show with a few drinks.

In the ignoble tradition of “a few drinks” initiatives worldwide, the few drinks became several. The bender segued seamlessly into a trip to Northam to watch a Lions rugby final, then into an abortive braaivleis attempt back at the Koppi, and, finally, me passing out in my tent.

I woke up with a paralysed hand.

I later worked out that I had gone to sleep face-down, with my left hand beneath my body on an air-mattress that had deflated beneath my weight – trapping my hand between my body and the hard-baked Limpopo earth.

When I eventually awoke, that hand came out as dead as a rat that you find behind the washing machine when the smell gets too much. Stiff by floppy, useless and kinda disgusting. My hand was paralysed!

It’s not unheard of to wake up with a numb hand, so I hoped it would gradually regain blood flow and sensation, but no. I drove back to Joburg with one hand, having to reach across and change gears with my right. At a refuelling stop, I tried to eat an orange with one hand, and the true gravity of my predicament hit home. If this paralysis thing dragged on, things could get messy.

They did.

After three days, with a deadline looming, I developed a typing method involving one hand typing and the other hanging limp, then being sporadically plunged vertically downwards like an industrial press.

By week two, I texted my bandmates to let them know that their guitarist was out of action for the foreseeable future.

These were scary times, because neither chiropractors nor physios had any idea what I was talking about when I showed them my floppy hand.

Eventually, it fell to Dr Du Plessis, my GP, to pronounce. “Neuropraxia!” he gushed, in the same tone he’d used when I presented with a tender scrotum from not wearing underpants. “They also call it the Saturday-night palsy.”

Apparently, the condition – also called wrist drop or sleep paralysis – is found among, ahem, drunkards. The condition can be induced by sleeping with the arm hanging over the armrest of a chair, or with the arm under the pillow.

A couple of weeks of acupuncture and some exercises, and I was coming back. Typing, peeling oranges and jamming guitar with the Worst Band In Joburg^TM.

Getting so drunk you wake up paralysed is clearly some kind of admonishment from the universe, so I swiftly embarked on one of my trademark “stopping dopping” periods. But stopping drinking is easy! If I had a beer for every time I stopped drinking, I’d be an alcoholic.

Our next gig had been difficult to reschedule, so I played the show with full radial neuropathy, limply steering my chord fingers up the guitar neck like someone sweeping a corridor with fistful of earthworms.

No one noticed a bloody thing. I took this as welcome confirmation that we were in fact the Worst Band in Joburg^TM. We were quite something, you should have come to see us.

We were a sight for the blind, making music for the deaf, and we played like we were paralysed. In our underpants!   

The Near Misses. Picture: hagenshouse.com

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