Motorbike Crash in Cambodia – Part 2, the island recovery

Read part one here:

To recap: I was in Cambodia. I couldn’t walk. And the damage was seeming pretty serious. I was also alone, except for a guy who was, for now, hanging around to help me out. In my dorm room was a woman who got me stoned and flashed me, two tattooed Icelandic boys who didn’t talk, and a blur of various others who looked at me in horror as a warning tale.

I was due to arrive on Koh Rong Samloem, an island off the coast of Cambodia that I didn’t know much about. I delayed my trip there by a couple of days, until I could at least hop if I was holding onto someone’s arm. My friend decided to come with me, to keep me company, carry my bag, and be said arm. Also who can resist an island with nothing on it except a hostel? No internet, no wifi, no civilisation…

Have you spotted the catch yet? I was very injured with deep wounds. This might not have been my smartest idea.

Before we left, we went to the hospital to get my bandages changed. With us we took the newest member of our dorm-room of misfits, the man we dubbed Desperate Dan, who had been having a bit of a rough time. On this particular occasion he’d come to get his stomach checked out, which had started causing huge problems. A week ago he’d had a heart attack, after his drink had been spiked with meth, ket and MDMA by the Cambodian woman he’d had a week long romance with. He was also onto his third phone, after being scammed, losing, and breaking his previous ones. The tales were endless.

Once at the hospital he disappeared off and I was left in the waiting room in my wheelchair. A man on the other side with a tiny tiny baby noticed me staring, and beckoned me over. My friend wheeled me across and the man handed me his baby, who must have been barely a week old. I awkwardly held it as it snuffled to itself. I couldn’t quite believe how trusting this man was, that he would hand his baby to a stranger.

As I got my bandages changed, I thought it was probably wise to check that I was okay to disappear off to a tropical island. “Is there a hospital there?” I asked.

Beautiful Koh Rong, taken by Rene.

“There’s definitely a hospital on Koh Rong,” the baby-faced doctor confidently replied. Koh Rong was the next island across, and so I was reassured. Meanwhile, my friend was off getting his rabies shot. A dog had, unprovoked, nipped him on the ankle when he was at Angkor Wat, and now he was suffering a huge amount of expense and tedium trying to find rabies vaccinations everywhere he went so that he could complete his five week post-bite course. When done, we waited for Desperate Dan, who was in a mood. They had found a stomach parasite.

We reached the island without too much mishap, although swinging on and off a boat with only one leg was interesting. With impeccable timing, my friend decided to pass the hour on the boat by showing me the pictures he’d taken with my camera of when he went back up the mountain to see the parts we didn’t reach. This included a picture of my blood on the road… still there two days later. I went silent for a while.

Ew. Ew. Ew. Ew. This was after two days!!!

By this time I was on some intense pain medication, and everything was dreamlike and surreal. One long boat ride, followed by a shorter one to transfer to Samloem, and we’d made it onto the island. In typical twist of fate style, the cabin we were given was the one furthest away from the main area where the food and the people were.

I spent my days by beating everyone else at scrabble (and being very modest about it). My concentration was too poor for most other things, but apparently my word skills were still working. After a couple of days the blood had soaked through the bandages and gone crusty, causing me a lot of pain. It was definitely time to get them changed, and so we started trying to make arrangements.

“Is there a hospital or clinic here?” we asked. We were told no.

“Can we go to Koh Rong? Is there one there?” They looked at us, and me, and shook their heads.

“I have to get to the hospital though,” I said, indicating my extremely dirty bandages.

He made a phone call, and told me that a boat would be leaving early in the morning and we could get to Koh Rong on that – the same boat we had come on, just going in the other direction. How we could get back remained a mystery. Likewise, whether there was a hospital also remained a mystery. They seemed to think there possibly, probably, maybe was one.

The next morning we set off bright and early, ready to go. The hostel boat took us round to the pier on the other side of the island and left us there for a while, where we were scammed into buying tickets from some guy in the restaurant who didn’t seem to be sympathetic to me needing to get medical help. When the boat arrived, the German woman covered in tattoos who was also crewing the way over looked me up and down with a ‘you again’ expression. She offered me a hand and I swung myself on.

Once we arrived on Koh Rong my friend headed off to find how we should get back. It was already 10am, and we were told that the last boat for Samloem was leaving at 12. This was much sooner than we had expected, as we knew the boat going back from the pier to the hostel wasn’t until 3. Unperturbed we made our way onto the island to find out about a hospital. While I waited, my friend went to ask and came back with the news: “he said there’s no hospital here, people always say there’s a hospital here, but there isn’t and I don’t know why they keep saying that. If we go to the bar down there, then there’s a barman called Dennis who’s a doctor.”

Pharmacy fun

Dennis was a shirtless and tanned English guy who took one look at my bandages and roughly told me to go up the road to the pharmacy, where they would charge me much less and do just as good a job. To get into the pharmacy we had to step over multiple small children who were rolling around in the doorway, where a blonde girl introduced herself and told me the pharmacist was in a meeting and we would have to wait. “As long as we catch our boat,” I said. “And why are there so many children here?”

“Oh, it’s also the daycare and English centre,” she said, watching as children wandered around the floor, inches away from prescription medicine.

The pharmacist, when she arrived, was an Australian girl in her mid-twenties who ushered me into the back room and onto a grubby bench. The wooden walls smelled of damp, and old English textbooks lay spread open in the dust on the floor. The metal plate with the medical tools on it was anything but clean, I think there was even a dead spider sitting next to a scalpel.

“So were you a doctor back in Australia?” I asked, as she peeled off my bandages.

“Oh no, I came to Cambodia a few years ago and fell in love with it. Two years ago I came back and started volunteering here, and at one point I did a first aid weekend. But after two years of dealing with motorbike accidents, you get all the experience you need.” I wasn’t overly reassured, and I was very thankful that nothing more serious had happened to my wound since I had arrived on the island.

The super sanitary room

As I grit my teeth and tried not to scream as the iodine was dripped onto the open wound, a cat wandered by on the wall above me.

The boat was, in fact, not a direct boat but rather a scuba diving boat for Chinese tourists. As we lounged around in our shorts and t-shirts, they tightened their life-jackets and clung to every piece of boat they could reach. Young Chinese women took turns holding each others hair back as seasickness got the better of them. When the boat stopped in the middle of the sea, we retreated to the upper deck for some sunbathing while the tourists leapt off the side of the boat and bobbed around, still in their life jackets, hunting for fish.

Relaxing on the top deck

Hours later, and a a little sunburned, we were deposited on the pier where eventually the hostel boat picked us up. The newbies who were arriving looked panicked at the sight of me, exhausted and bandaged. The hostel staff welcomed me back and asked if I’d managed to get my bandages changed, and I just looked at them.

“Next time someone asks if there’s a clinic on Koh Rong, please, please, tell them no.”

A Chinese tourist in a life jacket, bobbing along.

To be continued… as I find myself alone in Siem Reap, and with a website that’s been revenge hacked.

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Motorbike crash in Cambodia – Part 1, the crash – Plant-Powered Nomad

*Warning, featuring graphic pictures of blood and gore, but also some more amusing moments.*

On a beautiful November day in Kampot, Cambodia, I was driving down a mountain when I got a corner wrong and the next thing I knew I was on the ground trapped under my bike. Maybe it was the PMS clouding my head, maybe I was tired, maybe it was the crappy handling on the dodgy rental scooter, maybe I was just daydreaming too much about the guy I was with and not paying attention.* Or maybe my luck that seems to charm me when I travel ran out. Whatever happened, I was relieved that I seemed okay, except for my leg being trapped. Cambodians appeared from out of the hillside and stood around staring and talking Khmer, my friend appeared too, and an American driving past saw what happened and stopped his bike to help. The two guys lifted the bike off me and that’s when I saw my knee, and the bone sticking out of my knee.

Motorbike accident in Cambodia

Boker mountain, the last photo before I crashed.

“She’s going into shock,” I heard the new guy say. “We need to get her to the hospital. Come on sweetheart, can you get up?” They pulled me to my feet, taking my bag from me. I got on my friend’s bike behind him, noticing the taste of blood in my mouth from a split lip and, worried, checking my teeth. All still there, but one banged. I could feel blood running down my arm from a scratch on my elbow. I felt shaky. My knee, which I was trying not to look at, was numb. I thought dimly that my leg the bike had crushed would hurt in the morning.

We were driving for barely 5 minutes when I felt something was wrong. Richard, behind us, shouted something and we pulled over. “You’ve got a flat!” he said, pointing at our back tire. The air in it was totally gone. The situation was so ridiculous that I had to laugh. Richard’s bike was a bigger bike, and not a scooter, but it was still a squeeze for the three of us to pile on, me in the middle. My 6′ friend had to hold his feet up the whole time to stop them dragging on the ground. I lost track of time, but about thirty minutes later we arrived at Sonya Kill hospital, a small and unfortunately named hospital at the bottom of Kampot mountain, where they took me into a room and lay me down.

Motorbike crash in Cambodia

There’s bone under the dirt.

“How much your weight?” asked the pretty Cambodia nurse who was going to get me some morphine before cleaning me up. I shook my head. I hadn’t weighed myself in about six months.

“58 kilograms?” I guessed, and she repeated it to the male nurse in Khmer. He turned around and looked me up and down critically, one eyebrow raised. Then he gave me a disbelieving look and shook his head. He spoke to the female nurse.

“Okay, you have to go other room,” she made a weighing movement. I looked at my leg, then back at her, then back at my leg, then back at her. She got the point. “Okay, I bring here.”

I turned out to be 60 kilograms. The male nurse looked vindicated and wrote it down on the sheet. “Calling me fat, way to kick me when I’m down,” I muttered to my friend. I was looking forwards to the morphine though. The pain was becoming a little too much to handle. They injected me, and cleaned me up. The pain was horrendous. If I never feel someone picking rocks out of the bone in my knee again, it will be too soon. After what seemed to be forever they bandaged me up and sent me to be x-rayed to check if anything was broken. Richard was waiting outside, talking to a friendly nurse.

Motorbike crash in Cambodia

My elbow healed fast, my ankle not so much.

“How are you doing?” he asked. I was hopping along and giggling, doing little salsa dancing turns on one leg as I held my friend’s hand for balance. “She’s had a lot of morphine,” my friend explained. I was taken into the x-ray room, and had my leg positioned in various ways. Then I sat outside in the sun and waited. Ten minutes later the doctor came out and gave me a dramatic thumbs up.

“All okay!” he told me. Nothing broken. We were all relieved, and a little surprised; it definitely hadn’t looked unbroken.

They gave me the bill: 4 hours of medical care, morphine, painkillers, antibiotics, and x-rays cost me $58. Crashing in the middle of nowhere definitely had its perks.

Motorbike crash in Cambodia

My nurse and, left to right, my nurse, Richard, my friend, me on morphine, and my doctor. Yes, that’s my doctor.

That night I had night-terrors and more than once I woke up in a cold sweat and panicked. The next day everything had swollen and the pain was in its full force. I couldn’t put any weight on my leg, and even hopping with someone to hold onto was slow and painful because of the movement. I started to realise that what I’d optimistically brushed off as something I could recover from in a week or two was going to take much longer.

The next day was bad. My friend went up the mountain with the hostel to reclaim the motorbikes, while I stayed in the room with the overweight middle-aged American woman who’d been chasing the much younger hostel manager in an attempt to bed him. In an attempt to distract myself from the pain I sat with her and listened to her tales of all the Adonis-like young men who had been pursuing her. It didn’t seem polite to question the veracity of her stories.

Motorbike crash in Cambodia

Bandaged up, before and after.

“I’ve never been slim, but then I got this belly,” she grabbed her stomach with both her hands. “And this is just how I am, it’s never going away. But my boobs were just too big, so I got them reduced on health insurance. The surgeon was good, but the stitches on my nipples are now coming out, look,” she put one hand down her top and scooped out a tit. Sure enough the stitches around the nipple were coming out. “You okay there honey?” My eyes had glazed over from pain and I was leaning a little. “You’re in a lot of pain, aren’t you?” She glanced surreptitiously around the room, and then asked me, “do you smoke? My cousin in DC has a farm that I work on every summer for as much high grade stuff as I want. It will take the pain right away.” I was a little desperate.

When my friend came back, he looked at me, confused. “What happened to you?” he asked.

“She showed me her boob and told me sex stories and then got me stoned,” I replied. “Please don’t leave me with her again.”

To be continued…

Motorbike crash in Cambodia

Bokor Mountain

*I’m referring to the guy here as ‘my friend’ throughout this to keep some sense of having a private life. Read into that what you will, but yes I quite liked him.

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MOTORBIKE CRASH IN CAMBODIA-2

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