If you thought the last post was long....

I am not sure if I have mentioned how amazing Maya is. If I have, bare with me, I am going to do it again. Maya is amazing.

She has recently landed a job with an organization called the IRC (International Rescue Committee). She is spending her time, and getting paid, working with Burmese refugees in the hopes of getting those that qualify resettled to the United States. How cool is that? Not only that, but they pay her well and her benefits are fantastic (i.e. they pay our rent). The only drawback is that she has to travel. A lot.

For three weeks out of every month she will be somewhere else. Somewhere else referring to many of the places that she will be that I won’t be. These past two weeks she has been in the very west of Thailand in a small city called Sangklaburi, in the province of Kanchanaburi, on the Burmese border. She comes back this weekend. On Friday night we are going to a Halloween party. I am not sure what we are doing on Saturday or Sunday, but then, bright and early, Monday morning she gets on a plane to Kuala Lumpur for three more weeks.

I, on the other hand, am unemployed.

Just before she left for Sanklaburi, Maya and I went to a hospital and got eighteen of the twenty-three stitches removed from my foot. It was a glorious day. I was walking normally. Maya and I were in good spirits. We came home. We went to bed. Maya got up in the morning and left. I woke up later (unemployed). I made some coffee, checked my e-mail, made a mental list of things that I needed to do on Monday that was something like:

• Work on project
• Laundry
• Find a job
• Find a job
• Work on project
• Eat something
• Find a job
• Find a job
• Work on project
• Eat something
• Grocery shopping
• Work on project
• laundry

Not a bad list for a Monday morning. If you are wondering, I have recently bought an external hard drive and am in the process of putting all of the music I have with me onto the drive so I no longer have to pack around 45kg of music or pay the excess baggage charges related to such a fine collection.

So I began. I started burning some CD’s, got some laundry going, sent out a few replies to people who seemed to be interested in interviewing me, played some free cell (not on the list), ate something, arranged some interviews for later in the week over the phone, hung the laundry out to dry and started another load, more work on the project, ate something again, and then more work on the project. Man, this is lame.

At about six o’clock I got a call from one of Maya and my trainers from the TEFL course. Her name is Sangeeta and she is a very, very interesting woman. She was in Bangkok that evening and we decided to meet for some drinks. We met at about ten and had a few drinks. She suggested that I apply for a job teaching with TEFL International and offered to put in a good word, then we discussed my dislike of the process of eating and she suggested that I suffered from some kind of rare psychological disease, and we bore witness to some very strange behavior from some very drunk people. In the process of watching the drunken people we started a conversation with the people next to us who were also commenting on the decidedly indiscrete actions of some of our fellow foreigners. Sangeeta decided to call it a night around mid-night and I decided that I wasn’t ready to drive back home yet, so I stayed at the restaurant and drank water and talked with the couple for the next couple of hours.

At about two o’clock I decided that it was time for me to get home. I said my goodbyes, put on my helmet, and began the 7km drive back to my apartment. To be honest, 60km/h is not a terribly fast speed to be riding a scooter. I have pushed the little bastard up to about 110 (although it doesn’t like it at all). That said, I was driving home at about 60km/h on a fairly deserted road. A much slower van pulls into my lane off of one of the side streets. I turn on my blinker and start to change lanes.

That is when I heard an explosion. I am not really sure why or what happened. I can only imagine that I ran over something sharp or that I possibly hit one of the lane reflectors at a bad angle. Regardless of the cause, I no longer had an inflated back tire. 60km/h suddenly seemed very, very fast and the wobble that I had developed didn’t seem to be wanting to come back under control. In an instant the rubber on the back tire pinched up and the bike and I went down on to our respective left sides and we slid all the way across the street and into a curb.

The entire incident took maybe a total of five seconds. It was, however, on of the longest and most terrifying five seconds of my life.

Thankfully, I was wearing jeans, a long-sleeved shirt, and a helmet. Unthankfully, the sleeves of the shirt were rolled up half-way, my helmet didn’t have a chin-guard, and I was wearing sandals.

As soon as I stopped moving, I jumped up and moved the bike out of the lane of traffic. Then I stood there, a bit dazed, trying to take a personal inventory. I looked at my helmet to make sure I hadn’t hit my head very hard; there were only a few scratches from the slide. I started moving down the left side of my body. I lost some skin on my chin. Oh, and there on my forearm. This is all still by Braille, I am a little scared to actually look at the wounds and I am beginning to become aware of the faint smell of mid-rare steak. My fingers were sensitive. There was skin missing on my back, on my hip, just below my knee (damn, tore a good pair of jeans), and then, holy shit, I didn’t really have the top of a foot any more.

About the time that all of this was registering and the pain was starting to allow itself to be felt, a very kind man on a motorcycle pulled up to check and see if I was ok. I would really like to tell you what he said to me, but I can’t. He was speaking in Thai, I in English, and we found some common ground in hand gestures. From what I gathered he was about three blocks behind me when my tire blew out and he saw the whole thing. He put me on my bike (now with no back tire) and, slowly, we hobbled down the road about a kilometer to, amazingly, an all night motorcycle repair shop.

The boys at the shop started working on my back tire. The man who brought me there disappeared and then reappeared about three minutes later with beer. I politely declined. To which he responded with the only English I heard from him all night, he said “medicine”. I still declined and tried to fight off the overwhelming urge I had to collapse.

It took about fifteen minutes to get the scooter back to functional order. I paid the mechanics and told my Good Samaritan friend that I was going home (which happens to be one of the few Thai phrases I can muster). He insisted on following me, so I let him. I got home and said goodnight, at which point he offered me some more beer which I again declined.

I got inside, turned on the lights, and started to undress.

There is a certain amount of sickening, disgusted, revolted, disbelieving, nauseating, make you want to cry, feelings that go along with actually seeing wounds on your body for the first time in good light. It’s not that I was bleeding because I wasn’t. The slide seemed to have taken care of any chance of that by cauterizing the wounds pretty thoroughly. After looking at each an every wound I decided it would be best to take a shower and try to clean everything out the best that I could.

I got in the shower and started dabbing at things with soap, wincing, dabbing some more wincing, etc., all the while forgetting that I live in Thailand and the last place for me to be with fresh burns from a motorcycle accident is standing underneath the untreated water that comes out of my shower head (not to mention that the first place I should have been was at the hospital, but alas, my voice of reason was in Sanklaburi).

After my shower, I dried myself off and started looking for the medical supplies. You may or may not know that Maya and I recently moved apartments and, as a result, I had no idea where anything was. I tore the kitchen apart in that near panic of the wounded. I couldn’t find anything. It was probably about four in the morning by this time.

I broke down. I called Maya. I woke her up. I am sure that I sounded all kinds of weird. “Maya, Maya, where did we put all the first aid stuff? I can’t find it anywhere. Do you know where it is?” To which she calmly responds, “Brett, are you ok? What’s happening?” At this time I believe I gave her a rather brief rundown of what I have just told all of you. Did she panic? No. Did she get angry? No. Did she seem unduly concerned? No. Did she tell me where the first aid box was? Yes. Did she suggest that I should go to a hospital? Yes. Did I go? No…not right away.

Maya is amazing.

I doused my wounds in betadine and hydrogen peroxide, and, when I was finished chewing on my tongue, I slathered the whole mess with anti-biotic ointment and went to bed.

I got up in the morning, took another shower, cleaned my wounds again and continued working on my project and finding a job. By late afternoon it was starting to become apparent to me that I was losing ground with my injuries. They were all weeping horribly, and the ooze was forming weird crystals on the undamaged parts of my skin. I had never seen anything like it before and, I must admit, it was really gross. By Tuesday evening I had decided that I should see somebody that was more qualified to deal with my injuries than me.

I went to Siriraj hospital. As I walked in, the nurse smiled. “Motosai?” she questioned. I nodded yes. We started the new game of charades and by the time I got all the proper forms filled out and filled out the necessary details of the accident it was time to get ‘cleaned’. And now I will digress.

The last time I had to have wounds ‘cleaned’, I was seventeen years old. I ran the Hood to Coast that year and, in the middle of my second leg, I rolled my ankle. In order to complete my final leg I taped my ankle in to a solid and barely moveable unit. I ran the 10k leg (five up and five down) in a good split and then passed out in the back of the van. Four hours later I woke up in Seaside at the house we were staying at and started to remove the tape from my ankle. As I came around the heel, a huge chunk of flesh came off with the tape. That didn’t feel good, but again, I took a shower, cleaned it out and went on with my life. My parents were staying in Seaside for about a week, but I had to get back to Salem for the beginning of cross-country practice.

I would run on the foot with the missing piece of heal everyday and the first mile was always excruciating. Eventually, the wound would start oozing and everything would loosen up and it would be no problem to run. I kept this up for about a week. When my mother got home from her vacation I was walking around the house in shorts and a tee-shirt and she noticed all these little black dots that were forming up the back of my left calf. She immediately threw me into the car and took me to the doctor.

Turns out I had a staph infection that was dangerously close to both going necrotic and entering into my lymph system which would then stand a very good chance of killing me. All of this because of some tape. Anyway, the doctor laid me on my belly on his table, put a bit in my mouth, and asked my mother to leave the room. She refused and, to this day, I think she regrets it. I remember a scalpel and a wire a brush and a lot of pain.

Now I return to the ‘cleaning’ I had a week ago. They didn’t pull out a scalpel, but they did pull out the wire brush, and this time with no bit. I persevered. The nurses looked at me with a mixture of sympathy, pity, you idiot why didn’t you come in yesterday, and an expression which I read as ‘foreigners make funny faces to try and hide the fact that all they really want to do is scream’.

Forty-five minutes later I was bandaged up, prescribed anti-biotics, and sent out the door. The whole process cost me about ten dollars (without insurance), which is another reason why the U.S. is so completely f@#ked right now. I took a taxi home and slept until the following afternoon.

Maya, upon hearing of all of this, got concerned that I wouldn’t be able to make it out to Sanklaburi for the weekend as we had planned. I assured her that I would be there and that it would take more than crashing a scooter at 60km/h to keep me away from her. She laughed at my idiocy. I bought my bus ticket to Sanklaburi. I left on Friday at 12:30.

I arrived in Sanklaburi on Friday at 19:30. Seven hours on a bus with no leg room is a very good place to be if you really want to focus in on and get to know all there is to know about the intricacies of each and every one of your throbbing wounds.

I arrived in Sanklaburi just in time for Maya and her new work-mates to pull up to the station, gather me up and take me off to dinner. We had a lovely meal that evening. Sitting on a terrace overlooking the lake that contained the old Sanklaburi (there was a damn built at some point which flooded the old city) and at the H’mong temple on the other side of the lake, we had some good food and some lovely conversation. Then we rented motorbikes. I laughed to myself.

In the morning we woke up and went down to the market for breakfast. We ate. I went to the pharmacy and got some supplies to re-bandage myself. Maya and I doctored my wounds and then we, along with her co-workers Nazaar, Matthew, and Sara, took off on the motorbikes in search of adventure.

We first followed some signs to a waterfall. We got off the bikes, onto the trail, and about a kilometer into the hike we came to a very full stream. After debating for a while we decided not to try to cross it. We hiked back out, got back on the bikes, and headed for Three Pagodas Pass.

Three Pagodas Pass is a really amazing place. If you ever find yourself in Sanklaburi, in the province of Kanchanaburi, in Thailand, GO THERE!

While we were at the pass we decided that we still wanted to see a waterfall, so we got back on the bikes and headed back the way we came and then about another 30km through the hills to a local national park. Again, we started hiking through the jungle, forged some small streams, hopped on rocks, ducked under logs, and finally, arrived at a small waterfall. We ‘ooh-ed’ and ‘awe-ed’. We took pictures. A few of the more adventurous of us climbed around the side of the waterfall and went exploring. Nazaar, taking pity on me and not wanting to leave me behind, sat down with me to have a cigarette and eat some granola bars.

It started raining. The adventurers came back. We got ready to go. We noticed the leeches.

Matthew pulled about four out of his shoe. Sarah had one that had already bitten in, she plucked it off, Nazaar had few in his shoe, Maya and I were clear. We started back through the jungle. Nazaar saw a leech jump. I was wondering if the leeches could smell all of the open wounds that I had. By the time we got back to the bikes we had all discovered a few more leeches. Sarah was bleeding out of her leech bite hole. Those people who told us things like leeches have this anti-coagulant in their saliva really weren’t kidding. Such a very little hole, such a whole lotta blood.

We rode the bikes back to the hotel. Upon removing my shoes I found an exploded leech the seemed to have bitten in to my ankle and then gotten pinched between my ankle and my shoe and somehow, maybe unable to control the flow of my blood into its slimy little body, exploded. My leech bite hole bled a whole lot, too.

That evening Maya and I found the Sanklaburi hospital and got my bandages changed and my wounds cleaned again. It turns out that walking around all day makes open sores more sensitive. I winced and gritted my teeth as they applied the betadine and bandages. As we were sitting at the hospital Maya mentioned that it was funny how many hospitals we had been to in our seven months in Thailand. I pulled out my wallet and started going through the cards that I had:

• a hospital near our old apartment (for the herpes)
• BNH hospital (for the stitches)
• Paolo hospital (for the removal of the stitches)
• Phayathai hospital (this was for Maya’s vaccinations)
• Siriraj hospital (for the initial cleaning of my wounds)
• Sanklaburi hospital (for clean dressings after the jungle hike).

Quite a collection for seven months in if you ask me.

On Sunday we went to the H’mong side of Sanklaburi. Sanklaburi is divided in to two sides, divided by the lake. We checked out a large wooden bridge. We walked up a hill to have coffee. We went to the big H’mong temple. We looked at some Buddhas. I decided I was tired. We got some lunch, went back to the hospital for some new dressings and then went back to the hotel so I could take a nap.

Maya watched a movie. I slept.

I woke up for dinner. We ate. We watched Dave Gilliam’s (sp?) ‘Google-whacked’. We went to bed. Maya got up and went to work. I spent the day chilling in Sanklaburi. I got clean bandages. I checked my email. I drank a soda. Maya and her crew came back from work. We ate more food at this cool little vegetarian shop/bakery/restaurant that supported a local orphanage. Maya bought a lot of stuff. The vegetarian pizza was good.

On Tuesday morning I woke up with everyone else and went into town to catch my bus back to Bangkok. Seven hours later and with an even deeper understanding of the personalities of my wounds, I arrived home. I went to bed last night at about ten thirty and slept until this afternoon. All told it was about sixteen hours. My theory is that I wore myself out this weekend

Through all of this all I have really learned is that Maya probably should not leave me alone for weeks at a time without expecting me to fill in the void with injuries...