Getting Back to the Mainland to Recover

We did two more nights of shooting after that, and I survived the process, working twenty hour days, with lots of medication.  The last day we were on the island, the SEALs took the crew out to their shooting range, and we got to fire their weapons.  I got to shoot a good sized handheld machine gun, and am told I actually hit more with it than most of the other crew members did.  I then got to shoot a silenced M4, which I liked much better.  The silencer was so heavy that I could barely hold the barrel up, but the lack of painful noise when firing it was much appreciated.  I didn’t get to shoot the sniper rifle because we ran out of ammo for it, but I did get to look though the scope, and see what they had been shooting at a mile away.  My boss was pretty excited to have actually hit something with it at that range.

 

The next morning we headed back on the airstrip, ready to fly home.  The directors and producers had flown home the night before, to prep for the next location.  As I was watching our SEALs drive forklifts around the airstrip, getting the cargo ready to load on the plane, it occurred to me that this might make good footage about the real guys in the movie.  But requesting a camera from our packed gear would not have made me any friends in the camera department, and that relationship was already strained, since my job involved pointing out things they had done wrong when I reviewed the footage every day.  So I kept my mouth shut, and passed up the opportunity, but that probably would have been a useful thing to do.

 

We were taking a C-130 military cargo plane back the mainland, which seemed like it would be an interesting uniquely Bandito adventure.  I found out much later that while waiting on the landing strip, my boss had been filming interviews with the SEALs and crew, and for some reason the topic of my interest in our upcoming C-130 ride came up repeatedly, and eventually made it into the behind the cast and crew video.  The flight was not nearly as exciting as I had hoped.  It was just a really uncomfortable ride, smashed tightly into a really loud cargo hold, between two oversized guys from the electrical department.  Thank God it was only a 35 minute flight; I can’t imagine flying halfway around the world like that.

 

As soon as I got back to LA, I got an appointment with a doctor, and headed to the hospital.  They did a few tests, and told me I had MRSA, which basically means medicine resistant staph infection.  It wasn’t getting any worse, so they told me to finish out the antibiotics I was on and gave me some different ones to try after that.  At my boss’s insistence, I took a few days to recover from the shoot before going back in to the office.

 

None of those drugs seemed to solve the problem, or make it go away, but they did keep it from getting much worse.  I ended up in the emergency room a week later, when the infections caused some other separate issues as well, but those were resolved in a few days.  But not much else happened while I was on the antibiotics.  I emailed the doctor the day the prescription ran out, to tell him the infections hadn’t gone away, and he said to wait and see what happened.