(B) ROCK FALL
I got to Thailand in January to start a year of exploration in Asia. I knew absolutely nothing about Asia and didn't open my guidebook until I heard the pilot announcing we were about to land in Bangkok.
The sun was just setting at the time of my accident. I'd just finished climbing a 20-foot vertical rock face when my climbing partner let the belay rope holding me slip from his grasp, and suddenly I fell to the ground below. On landing, I broke my back. In excruciating pain, I discovered the hard way that there is no emergency rescue service in the area.
I found out later that the local hospital was more like a do-it-yourself outfit than a real emergency ward anyway. My climbing partner and I were the only two people left at the cliff, but after my fall people came running up the trail to help, having heard the huge crashing sound of my body falling from the cliff. Imagine finding yourself lying on the ground in the dark with a pain a thousand times worse than anything you've ever felt, burning inside your back. You hear your climbing buddies arguing about what to do with you and how to get you out. "This is not a joke," you want to shout, "this is ***** serious! Where the hell is the ambulance and helicopter?"
I soon found out that when travelling in foreign countries, you cannot expect the best and must be prepared to take care of yourself. Therefore, my most important advice to you is simple: be prepared to get yourself out of scrapes without outside help. I was incredibly lucky to have stumbled across a wonderful insurance company which had me transferred to a better hospital in nearby Phuket and paid for all successive medical and travel costs.
I went through a four-hour wait at the base of the climb. It was a wobbly carry down an extremely steep trail and a 20-minute boat ride to get to the nearest road. I was loaded into the back of an open pick-up truck and we flew down the bumpy streets at top speed while my climbing partner held onto me and the truck for fear of my flying out the back because the tailgate wouldn't close.
I was roughly pulled out of the pick-up truck and dumped onto a stretcher. They wheeled me down the hallways of a dirty, partly open-air hospital, passing patients lying on metal benches pushed against the walls of the narrow corridors with IV-drips hanging above their heads.
In our meagre Thai we told them that I had fallen 20 feet and my back hurt a lot - obvious signs of a potential spinal injury. However, they wheeled me to the x-ray table and told me to get out of my stretcher and lie down on it.
Absolutely stunned, we simply refused and persuaded them to get six nurses to lift me from the backboard to the x-ray table. (Several days later in a better hospital I had a CAT scan and was told that a broken piece of vertebra was protruding into the spinal canal and it was extremely important I not move at all until they performed an operation to stabilize the situation. Without a doubt, they confirmed, had I listened to the first hospital and stood up or been loosely carried, I would be paralyzed now).
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