Experiment with post-modern reinterpretation of vital organ placement.
It’s actually very alarming how little of the accident I remember. I think I know where I had parked the scooter but beyond that there’s absolutely nothing in my recollection. From what I have figured out afterwards from doctors and so on, the accident was severe and I came off pretty hard, pulverizing quite a lot of my important bits. The main thing I know about the accident is that I was broken enough that I had to be evacuated to a nearby hospital using a spatula.
I wasn’t taken directly to Ko Lanta hospital but instead to Krabi town. The hospital itself wasn’t ideally suited for this type of accident, and it took them a little while to get around to sorting out my various injuries. In their defence though, I think the initial decision when I was delivered to them was whether to classify me as road-kill or not.
Step one in the recovery process was un-bursting my lung. They attached a drain to syphon off the spare couple of litres of blood that had taken up residence in there. After a while, they were able to coax the lung back into full-size.
Eventually I was transferred in a big fancy airplane to a hospital in Bangkok. The fact that I had planned to visit Bangkok but never got around to it makes the whole ordeal that little sweeter. I did get some cool scars out of it though, as they replaced my left collar bone.
Generally lots things have been gradual improvements. But it really bloody hurts when I sneeze. When my nose feels a little ticklish, there is a non-zero part of me that currently expects me to sneeze and basically burst, something I’m sure we’d all agree would be quite messy.
When you end up in a situation like this, it’s astonishing just how important the little victories are, and how easy they are to forget how easy they were. Due to my prolonged bed-ridden state as well as bits of shattered bones everywhere, it was an astonishing amount of effort just to do something as simple as sit up on the bed without resting my back on it, and even more effort to perch at the edge. I required several days of help from physical therapists just to be able to sit up straight or even stand up without severe dizziness - a by-product of broken inner ear bones and some funky contusions. It may sound small but walking to the bathroom and washing my hands by my self was a very important achievement for me at this time.
Time for some cheery thoughts looking to the future. I am, through all this, very lucky to have had excellent care and excellent facilities available, and the excellent support they gave when piecing me together. My mother was also integral in recovery - she had flown out from back home in the UK when she found out about the accident and stayed by my side for weeks, even during the less lucid moments. Just a note to that one doctor who kept mentioning I was "lucky to be alive": I’m not sure that really helped.
I’m in constant fear that when I sneeze, my lungs will burst out of my ribcage like something out of Alien. One last complaint: I had some surgery done on the left side of my head, and before hand I asked if they could get that damn song out. Turns out they couldn’t, an earworm is for life.
Anyway if any of you want to go travelling in Thailand, I can suggest not driving on a scooter then getting hit on the head by the road.
