Everything Is Illuminated

Now THAT'S toughness

When youth worker Cherie Beekman took a group of children for a trip to a bowling alley she got little too attached to the game. When the 33-year-old went to return the green ball she had been using she found she couldn’t. It was stuck on her right thumb and nothing would shift it.

This is the start to any groundbreaking news piece. Well, it would be if the bowling ball was kryptonite and she was bowling with aliens on the planet Krypton, but it wasn’t. This story is the antithesis of that.

She was driven from the alley in Didsbury, Manchester, to a nearby fire station where it took a team of firefighters two-and-a-half hours to cut the ball away using an electric saw, a hacksaw and a chisel.

I don’t know what’s less interesting. The sentences in red above, or Ke$ha.

‘A colleague drove me to the fire station. No one knew what the ball was made of so they were on Google and had the manufacturer on the phone trying to help us. ‘I’m not big on knives so I got pretty teary when they brought the saws out, especially as I didn’t know which way my thumb was stuck inside the ball.’

How many different ways can a thumb be stuck in a bowling ball hole. I mean, it’s not like it is an asshole, riggggggght? LOL!

She said: ‘The firemen were absolutely amazing. They kept me calm and brought me endless cups of coffee. I even had to have oxygen at one point. The thumb is just very swollen and achy.’

You needed oxygen? Wow, what a trooper. I’m guessing that your tombstone is going to read: “Cherie Beekman: One of the last bastions of toughness. More interesting than Ke$ha.”