Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Black dog, no lights, motorbike, bad combination

I had a story that I wanted to write about the whole time I was in Thailand but I knew my mother would be a little stressed, so I have waited until now to write about it.

One evening Sandy and I were riding down the road at a reasonable speed on my motorbike. There was a section of the road with no street lights. Then, Sandy yells, "DOG!". A black dog ran in front of us. I swerved to miss the dog (breaking the cardinal rule, "don't swerve, hit the animals"). We took a spill onto the pavement. Luckily for Sandy, she had me to break her fall. I had the handle bars.

I was smarting a bit and decided to lay on the pavement. Soon, there was a big crowd around me. Because my ribs were hurting quite a bit, we made the second big mistake; we called an ambulance. We later found that the ambulance drivers are at home, so we had to wait for them to drive to the hospital and then the 1/2 mile to pick me up. This took about 20 minutes. To make up for the slow pick up, they sped around the corners on the way to the hospital which caused me to turn on the gurney (ouch!).

We made it to the hospital in the ambulance (which was a full size van with a little gear in it) they pull the gurney out and, in principal, the legs of the gurney were supposed to pop out. They violated this principal and I fell on the gurney about 3 feet to the ground. I am not much for cursing, but it seemed to appropriate at that point to growl, "you have f#!king got to be kidding me". I felt a hand on my shoulder and it was my friend Dr. Kitima, possible the sweetest, goofiest doctor in all the world. Dr Kitima said, "I am so sorry". I quickly gathered my composure and we went on our merry way.

It turned out to be bruised ribs...took 2 months to feel normal again. Every time I saw Dr. Kitima, she would just start laughing like a school girl.

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