Disclaimer: I appologize to the older generation of readers for my language in the following documentation, but there is simply no way of expresing this story without the affiliated obsenities. I have not imbellished this story at all for theatrical effect. Everything written here is my story to the best that I can remember it, with some gaps of the incedent itself filled in with the help of those who witnessed the accident happen.
And now, by popular demand, here is my story of A holiday season I'll never forget:
I remember quite vividly the moment i rolled out from under the truck, confused as hell, and still trying to get a grip on what had just happened. The brief moment of silence was quickly replaced by the sounds of my friend Gayna screaming "oh my god oh my god oh my god!", the swarms of people flooding to my side asking "are you ok, are you ok?", and my indistructable sarcastic voice uttering the word "ow" over and over again. I remember taking one look at my left knee and thinking "fucking hell, my trip is done!"
The event that had just occurred had spawned a number of "firsts" in my lifetime, many of which, i'd prefer never to experience again. It was my fist time dislocating a knee. It was my first time getting stitches. It was also my first time in shock. It was the first time I'd ever been rushed to an emergency room, as was it my first time on a stretcher and my first experience with a needle in the ass. I got to spend my first night in a hospital bed, and i'm currently in the process of dealing with life on crutches for the first time. All of these, of course comming as the result of my first time being run over by a truck. Some of you may recall the funny story of how i ran into a parked truck riding my bike a couple years ago, but this one was a lot more serious and I've been a bit slower to find the humour in this situation.
Karma somehow always has a way of comming back to bite you in the ass. I assume that somewhere along the line in the past 3 months I managed to do enough bragging and gloating about how much fun I was having in "paradise" to warrant someone smacking some sense into me. I fully expected this to happen of course, but what i did not expect was that it would come from a pshyco Thai taxi driver driving a pickup truck.
I get the feeling that I'm going to be telling this story an aweful lot in the months and years to come, so i might as well save myself some effort and get all the details out of the way. If you're the type of person who just skims through long mass emails and doesn't have the patience to read them line for line (hey, i'm guilty of that sometimes too), then no worries, i'm sure you'll get the gist. It'll prolly get long and boring in parts, but i figure while i'm at it, i'm just gonna spill out every detail so I have a written record of the scariest moment of my entire life. It'll make a good bedtime story to read to my grandchildren some day. If you do enjoy reading my long emails and really want to know what happened to me, then I suggest you print this out, sit yourself down with a cup of tea by a warm fire, and enjoy the tale of my brush with death.
To understand the full complexity of the issue and the hell i went through in the days following my accident, i have to begin a few days prior to the event. I was chilling on Ko Tao, a wee little island off the east coast of Southern Thailand. It was december 23rd, and I was toiling with the idea of spending christmas on the peaceful island, or heading up to Bangkok to spend it in Urban Chaos. I ran in to a few guys from vancouver and a girl from england (Paul, Alex, And Gayna) while checking my email later that day, and after a good night of drinking, i decided to take them up on their offer to tag along with them to Ko phangan, the meca of giant beach parties and home to the infamous "full moon parties". There was a full moon party on the 26th, and in addition we figured that christmas would be pretty kick ass there as well. So, christmas eve we hopped on a boat to Ko phangan where we found a nice little bungalow, and went for dinner.
After dinner we ended up meeting a huge group of fellow drunkerds, and next thing ya know it was 6am christmas morning and i was on a beach, with a beer in hand, watching the sun rise up over the ocean. I was on cloud nine at this point (still plastered out of my tree) and this was shaping up to be one of the best holiday seasons yet. After finally making it back to bed at 10am, I spent most of christmas day sleeping till 6pm. We dicided to call it an off night and lay off the booze, so I had a nice relaxing christmas dinner of chicken curry, rice, and a banana milk shake.
By the time i awoke on boxing day, the historic event that rocked asia had allready occured, but because i was on the east coast, it didn't affect me at all (keep in mind as you read this that i am 15 hours ahead of vancouver time). I wandered down to the nearest little town around noon to call my folks and wish them a merry christmas, had a nice little chat, and everything was all good. The catastrophic event was not even brought up because none of us knew about it at the time. I said my goodbyes, and it was off to the other end of the island for the full moon party later that night. This was also when i checked my email to find a message from darcy, and as it turns out we were both on the same island but i had no idea how to find him and he had no idea I was here. I just figured I'd run into him at the full moon party. If not, it was no big deal.
So my friends and I decided that there was no point trying to find a bungalow for the night because we didn't plan on sleeping and they were leaving the next day at noon anyway. I was just going to find one myself the next day if i didn't run into darcy at the party. Alex and Paul had met a friend named keith a few weeks back, and he had a place for us to store our bags for the night, so thats where we spent most of the day boxing day and where i first saw the events on the news about the earthquake. I figured I should send out an email to everyone letting them know i was unaffected by the tsunami, but i was nowhere near internet and it could wait untill the next day. We chilled out at Keiths bungalow for a bit, met a bunch of people and then left to go to the party beach for a bit and said we'd come back later. We began our drinking got intoduced to a bunch more friends of friends, and the night was beginning to get good.
Around 9 or so we headed back to Keiths place to meet back up with them and this is where it all went downhill. We rounded up the clan and walked out to the road to flag down a taxi (just so you all know, taxis here are pickup trucks that have two long benches in the back and canopy over the top). One stopped for us and we all piled in. There wasn't enough room inside for all of us to sit, so I, along with many others, was standing on the back. I wanted to hop on the roof indonesia style but the driver wouldn't allow it (go figure, i would have been safe up there).
So off we went. About 100 meters later, going up a super steep hill the driver stalled. Vancouver people think boundary rd and hastings style, edmonton people think.....well....you don't have hills that steep. Just imagine maybe driving up rabit Hill. I remember the first time i saw that lousy excuse for a ski hill I laughed so hard I......Ok, back to the story.
So, being so piled full of people, the driver wanted the people on the back to hop off and help push while he tried to get going again. I did so, and I was standing at the back right corner of the truck. As he tried to start, the truck began to roll back, so i moved slightly out of the way to the side of the truck where i stood with my body facing it (also keep in mind that thais drive on the opposite side of the road so this put me out around the center of the road) The next thing i knew i felt a huge blow to my left side and i was on the ground looking up at the sky through about a 1 foot gap between two taxis.
What happened was that another taxi speeding up the hill did not want to stop on the hill behind out taxi, so he gunned it and sped around on the right, leaving no room to spare for me. He took me out with the front of his truck, and was more concerned with making it up the hill than with the fact that he had a human being lying under his truck. Rather than slamming on the breaks after he hit me, he proceeded to gun it, and run over my left knee and right ankle. Everything happend so fast that all i remember is falling to the ground, having no idea what was going on, and trying to protect myself as i was being slammed back and forth in the small gap between the two trucks. I remember falling to the ground, feeling a lot of pain, and seeing the taxi jolt as though it had run over a speed bump (but no, it was just me!). It crushed my foot so bad that It tore my sandal right off my foot - and i'm not talking about a flip-flop type sandle. This was one of those really good, strap on type that I had had for 7 years without the slightest sign of any wear and tear. Both straps were riped apart, and the heal support was ripped right in two where there wasn't even the weakness of a seam. Right through the thick supportive material! The metal pieces in the straps were what gouged my foot up and caused me to need stitches. Most horrific of all, I remember the image of a tire rolling within inches of my head as I lay helplessly on my back on the concrete.
I do not know for sure the exact details of how i got run over. I don't think i was under the actual taxi itself, but fell on the road in between the two taxis because i remember being hit and then squished between stuff. I also vaugely recall rolling out from under the back of the speeding taxi, but i don't think that would be possible for me to be completely under the truck itself, given their low ground clearance. At the time i thought it was just my right foot that got run over, and my knee dislocated from the initial collision, but the gentleman in the hostpital bed next to me the following day was observant enough to point out the undisputable tire treads through the road rash (or tire rash) on my left knee.
Like i said, everything happend so fast that I have no positive idea what exactly happend. all i know is that i got hit, knocked down, and my legs run over by a truck going anywhere from 20-60 kms an hour. I wont try and guess on the speed cause i don't have the slightest clue. All i know is it happend in a flash, hurt like a son of a bitch, and shook me up pretty good. It was by far, the scariest split second of my entire life.
People always talk about your life flashing before your eyes in a situation like this but that never happened. I think that happened to me once when I was a child, falling off a swing set and doing a header into the gravel, but not this time. I have no way to put into words the thought process that went through my mind in that split second, but it was scary as hell, I can tell you that much. Imagine a lot of fear, a feeling of "oh, what the fuck...?", pain, confusion, and the thought that this was not gonna turn out good. Throw into the mix some concrete, a half ton of steel, some rubber, and crash test dummy rolling around on the ground and you get the gist. I wonder about how they say humans only use like 10 percent of their brain power, and I can see that being true when you consider how many thoughts went through my mind in such a short time. Why is it that we can only tap into that other 90% when we are about to die or lying helplessly under a truck? just a thought.
So anyway, back to the story. As I was lying in the middle of the road after the accident, I figured my trip was done. anyone who's ever dislocated a knee cap may know that without the kneecap in its proper position, the whole leg looks incredibly fucked up. I thought i had blown my leg apart, and still cannot believe that nothing got broken (as far as i know). So I'm lying on the road, still trying to figure out what do do, when the next truck coming up the hill starts to honk his horn at me to get out of the way!!! I'm sitting there with a leg that looks like it is made of rubber, and an ankly bleeding all to hell after just getting run over, and the idiot has the nerve to honk! So after a minute everyone decided that I did have to get off the road (hey, people had a full moon party to get to, how dare I hold them up!). A taxi comming the other way said that he would take me to the hospital so my friends carried me into it where I laid down on the bench and met my Guardian angel.
I don't know who she was, but she held my head in her lap and talked me through my stage of shock that was beginning to set in. I never saw her face because of the darkness but I will remember that voice for the rest of my life. Perhaps it was the 6 beer I had previously drank, or the shock setting in, but I remember finding the humour in the situation to start going off about how she was my guardian angel sent to watch over me. That humourous situation soon passed as we wend over a bump sending the most excruciating pain through my dislocated knee. Alex asked me if i wanted him to try and pop it back in, but the flashbacks of Mike Hadican "knowing" how to pop my dislocated shoulder back in place years ago were all too frightening. This was also around the time I took a look at my ankle and noticed that it was problably worse off than my knee. There was blood oozing from it everywhere and there were two huge bumps forming. It looked like something from the movies. It was a bad idea looking at it though cause thats when I started to feel pain from there aswell.
A half hour later (maybe it was less, but it sure felt like that) we arrived at the hospital and the circus ensued. With no doctor on duty and 3 nurses who must have just passed their written examination to be qualified, Alex and paul did most of the work. They asked for a stretcher and the nurses just stood there clueless. trying to tell me to come into the hospital . Alex dragged one over and showed her my knee and kindly pointed out to her the fact that "he cant walk!" It was here that the nurses had the genius idea to put me in a weelchair, to which alex once again pointed to my knee and told them how it might be a bit difficult for me to crawl out of the truck and into the weelchair. So Alex and paul went and found a stretcher, and did all the work getting me into the hospital where i went for exrays. Thai nurses don't have much sympathy or compasion for bunged up extremidies as they twist and turn them trying to get the right position for the exrays. Luckily enough for me my knee popped back into place during this process, cause the nurses trying to do it would not have been fun.
Then it was off to the emergency room where they started to stitch up my foot without any freezing or painkillers at all. Me, alex and Paul started screaming at them to give me something, which eventually caused one nurse to come back and give me a shot of something in the ass. Whatever it was, it helped a bit, but the cleaning of my bunged up foot was not fun at all. Eventually, after about a half hour of hell in the emargency room (If you want to call it an emergency room), they shipped me off to my bed where i got a total of about, um, no sleep that night. Alex and Paul stayed and chatted with me for a bit, and I gave them Darcys email address so they could send him and email and let him know i was on the island and in the hospital. I then told them to get their asses to the full moon party and give'r for me. There was no point in them hanging around and I couldn't thank them enough for their help that night.
The next morning, the doctor came in (nice of him to show up for work) and looked at my x-rays. In thailand, looking at a blurry exray with no visible breaks means "you're ok, good to go!" Legament damage, whats that? "Not boken, you ok" is the phrase I heard over and over as i tried to ask them if it was possible that there might be more care needed for a dislocated knee and a swolen up, bleeding, colors of the rainbow ankle. The doctor grabbed me knee, poked around a bit, and said "not broken, you ok".
I wanted to just park myself in the hospital bed but the nurses were telling me that I was ok and had to go. It was so frustrating when they kept asking me when my friends were coming to pick me up. what friends!?!? They just would not get it. With the english/thai language barrier, trying to explain to them that "The friends that were with me the night of the accident are not the friends that I can't get ahold of, they are just the people i was travelling with and they are leaving for Laos today but i need to get ahold of my other friends who are here on this island but I don't know where they are because i havent met up with them since i left them a month ago in indonesia and I don't have a place to go because I don't know where they are staying or have anyway of getting ahold of them and I don't have my own bungalow cause those other guys i was with and I got rid of ours because we didn't plan on sleeping the night of the full moon party and I was just going to find one the next day but I kinda can't now because I CAN"T WALK!!!!!" They would just stare at me with this look of confusion and smile. "its ok, not broken", says the nurse.
They were expecting me to walk out of there and I was trying to explain to them that it Kinda hurt to walk! So then, the nurse comes back with the genius idea of crutches! While they might be a great invention when you have one bunged up leg, using your dislocated knee as the good leg for support doesn't work so well. Regardless, i had no choice and was discharged from the hospital with no place to go. The only place i had was to go back to keiths where my bag was storred and try and figure out what to do from there. I took a taxi there and this is where i almost lost my grip on reality.
The only way to get to the hotel was to walk down a long, steep path from the road to the beach, where you had to walk along the beach, through water in parts, and many trails that were not designed with handicap accessability in mind. On two good legs the previous day, it took about ten minutes, but this day it took 45. I was in excruciating pain, and had a nice experience learning how to use crutches for the first time. I had sweat just gushing down my face and i was in so much pain from having to use both my legs to navigate through that I just started screaming "Fuck" at the top of my lungs quite frequently. Eventually I made it to keiths bungalow where alex and paul where just grabbing their bags to head for the bus. They were in complete awe that I had made it and wondered what the hell i was doing out of the hospital. I told them about how they discharged me and they could understand since they witnessed the mentality and chaos of the hospital the previous night. They offered to leave the next day and switch their tickets but i told them that wasn't necessary and they had done more than enough to help me, considering I had just met them a couple days ago. So we said godbye and they set off for Laos.
So now i was just making myself at home at Keiths bungalow, even though i wasn't a guest there and i'd really only hung out with this keith guy the previous day for a total of about an hour. I had nowhere else to go, and I was terrified of having to go back up that path. Keith was super understanding and helpfull, and one of his friends offered to let me stay in his room, so i took him up on the offer and decided to put off actually deciding what to do untill the next day. For now, it was just banana juice and BBC as I watched the information trickle in about the tsunami. I figured i should probably send out an email to everyone and let them know i was ok, but that was low on my priority list for i didn't feel like going anywhere.
The next day I had to do something. My legs were killing me, and the blood had soaked through the bandages on my foot so i had to go back to the hospital to get it cleaned up. I waited about an hour for a taxi boat to go by, cause there was no way in hell i was going to go back up that path. I took the boat a short distance to a spot where the road was in easy hobbling distance, and there i waited, standing in pain as about ten taxis just drove right by me. Once again, I let that good old "F" word and other explicits fly out of my mouth. Finally, one stopped and demanded an unreasonable amount of money to go to the hospital but I was so frustrated I just agreed and off I went. After getting to the hospital and getting cleaned up, I realized that the only way I was going to get ahold of Darcy was to email Him and let him know i was just gonna stay put at the hospital and hopefully he'd come meet me there and pick up my bag from keiths along the way. This was the only way I'd have a place to go, cause the entire island was pretty much booked up, and I was in no condition to wander around from bungalow to bungalow trying to find a room. So I once again paid an enormous sum to go in a taxi to an internet cafe and send Darcy an email.
This is when i found my inbox full of emails from everyone wanting to know if I was ok after the Tsunami. Go figure, everyone is scared for my safety because of what they see on the news, and little do they know that i'm lying in a hospital bed after being run over by a truck. Then there are the series of emails from my parents, worried sick and mad at me because i haven't sent them an email letting them know i'm ok. They figure I'm lying on a beach somewhere and just don't have the curtousy to email them and ease their worries. The way I saw it, I had allready spoken to them after the tsunami had taken place boxing day and told them i was on the eastern coast of thailand, so they would know i was ok. there was no need to phone them about my accident and get them all worked up until I knew exactly the full extent of how bunged up I was. Regardless, I bought a phone card to use back at the hospital, and back I went to spend the next three days in a nice clean prison.
Then of course, the phone card didn't work at the hospital, so I borrowed an english guys cell phone and left a message on my parents answering machine with the number of the hospital and told them to call there. There are no such things as collect or reverse-charge calls here in asia. they don't exist. If I was dead and lying in their hospital, they would not let anyone phone canada and tell my parents. I don't understand things here sometimes. Anyway, Darcy showed up that night which was really good to see a familiar face. I was going to go with him but I decided to stay at the hospital in case my parents phoned. They did, 3 times, but of corse, I didn't find out untill the following morning when the nurse told me so. I asked her why she did not tell me and she replied with "We though you go home".
So this was great, now my parents think I'm not only to lazy to call them, but i'm not where I say I'm going to be. At this point, my mom is freeking out back home cause she has heard from darcys mom (they talk through email) that something happened to me involving a truck and she knows i'm in the hospital. Unfortunatly, she'd have to wait a few more days cause i was stuck in a hospital bed and going nowhere.
Ok, I'm gonna start to shorten this thing up a bit cause its getting rediculously long and I'm getting tired of writing it. So Yada yada yada, I ended up getting out of the hospital, calling my parents and straightening everything out, meeting up with darcy and gavin, and taking over their bungalow now that they have left for burma. I have everything i need within a two minute crutches walk from my bungalow: Restaurants, 7-11, a heath clinic, and the beach. I spend the days sleeping, eating, writing this bloody email in sections (I've been writing it a little bit each day for about about 4 days now) and watching movies. My ability to navigate around on crutches is getting better by the day, and I'm becoming really good friends with the owners of my bungalow and the nurse at the clinic. The ankle and knee are healing slowly, and i'm just gonna take my time chilling out here until I am able to walk myself off this Island. Then I'm gonna head up to bangkok and get a second opinion on my injuries from a doctor i trust more.
Its ironic that my plan before all this happend was to kick off the new year in a ten day buddhist retreat where i was going to sleep on concrete, meditate, fast, and not talk to anyone. This is kinda the same thing in a way. I spend a lot of time alone in isolation, I might as well be sleeping on concrete the way i have to lie uncomfortably with my leg propped up as i sleep on my back, and instead of meditating, I focus all my thoughts on thinking about what i would do if I could come face to face with that taxi driver (who, by the way, fled the scene). I don't fast though, I just sit on my ass most of the day and feast like a king.
I won't try and act all macho and pretend like this hasn't shaken me up at all. After the accident, I was really having a tough time with it. Its not easy to deal with something like this and that damn cliche about whatever doesn't kill you only makes you stronger is a load of crap. What doesn't kill you is just seriously annoying, frustrating and makes you want to snap on everyone and everything! I try to look at the positives and tell myself over and over again that this could have been a lot worse. A week prior to the accident i was lying on a beach in Phuket, diving in the nearby waters, and sleeping in a muslum fishing villiage built entirely on stilts in the ocean which i imagine no longer exists. In addition, the fact that If my head had landed 6 inches to the side on the concrete it would have been it that got run over instead of my foot and knee. So I am fully aware that it could have been a lot worse.
Understandably, many friends and family members think I should come home and get my injuries checked out by western doctors. Unfortunatly, I worked way too hard and waited too long to get here and there's no way thats going to happen. I'm sticking it out here, and Unless things don't heal and get really bad, I wont even consider it. Today marks the exact half way point of my trip, so perhaps its fitting that things get a bit of a change-up and a new beginning.
I've become a bit of legend here on hat rin beach. I keep running into people that saw the event happen or were in either the taxi I was in first or the taxi on the way to the hospital. They come up to me, amazed that i'm standing, and ask me how i'm doing. They then turn to their freinds and say "this is that guy I was telling you about that got run over". Their faces light up in amazement and they shake my hand, also suprized after the story they have been told. It seems that my tale has been told to many people and I am now that guy in Hat Rin that got run over.
I said to many people before I left that I was prepared to face some sort of adversity during my trip. I knew it wasn't going to be complete smooth sailing, and while I figured the adversity would come more in the form of things getting stolen or lost, this is just something that I will have to deal with. When you think about it, it is quite remarkable that I got full-on run over by a truck and walked away with the relatively small injuries that I did. I'm a fucking Iron Man, and in the words of Freddy Mercury, "The show must go on".
.....and thats the short verson!
