The End

Not only was I feeling good physically, I found a killer market--all manner of protein and produce all available at Thai prices, even for the only farang to come through on a weekday. How cool! Brand-spankin-fresh eggs, 35B for half a grocery bag. Apples 20B/K, rambutans 15, the fish were still flopping around, some of the most beautiful tomatoes I've ever seen, and knowing it's there makes me happy. Almost as much as having health and energy to enjoy it.

Going home, I decided to stop at the hoity grocery store to investigate a rumor of old fashioned oats and pick up more of my amino-laced multivitamins. It was heavy, rush hour traffic, and I lucked into a parking spot someone was just vacating. I even had a hole in the oncoming traffic, and was toward the head of a knot of scooters, so even parking would be easy.

Top of the world, go me! I'm in Thailand, driving a scooter through rush hour with beautiful mushrooms, tomatoes, carrots, kale, and eggs in the basket, about to rub elbows with the upperest class, the parents of my students, before making the drive to the beautiful house in an expensive suburb

and from the knot of scooters comes a Yamaha Mio with a young male driver. He's doing maybe 80, maybe more, hard to tell, but whatever it is will not avoid me and my bike.

It was a perfect T-bone: most of the impact hit the right foot peg.

I went parabolic. It was a long enough fall to contemplate the landing and move on to picture myself shipped home to emergency reconstructive surgery.

There was time to appreciate the irony of a half-written essay on legs and the operational value thereof.

There was asphalt.

Someone standing me up.

My right pant leg shredded.

How am I standing?

Someone walking my bike off the road with a streamer of oil trailing it.

At least I'm not bleeding to death, neglected behind the crowds' backs.

Only one knot of people. Growing in a mass up the steps to the department store.

An ambulance. A raked Toyota pickup with a streamline shell. A streamlined, enclosed songtau. Covered in Cantonese characters.

You thought Thai drivers were bad--here in Thailand, the Chinese operate the volunteer EMS out of one of the temple compounds. Chinese fire drill anyone? Chinese heart attack?

And they made it to the scene before my bike bled out.

One ambulance. One crowd.

"Where's the other guy?"

Suddenly nobody speaks English.

I am sat on the tailgate while one of the EMS guys takes off my shoe and drapes up the shredded pant leg.

It's a bare metal pickup bed with vinyl-wrapped board benches like a songtau, but there's a red plastic stretcher in the middle.

My leg is ugly but superficially: lots and lots of abrasions, but the structure is intact.

How?

Someone's been in my face. The one who peeled off my helmet. He's been yelling and taking photos.

He's saying, "Girlfriend! Girlfriend! You call you girlfriend!"

Good idea--call my boss, bring in a Thai-speaker.

No answer. It's Ultimate night, of course.

No answer elsewhere.

NO GIRLFRIEND. NO BOSS. NO, NO BOYFRIEND. TAKE ME TO THE DOCTOR!

"Okey okey, you sleep here," the medic waves at the stretcher.

Sure, they clean and sterilize it regularly. ... At least I'll get to bleed and drip all over, give them something to do.

We're moving, bouncing, spinning through traffic with the siren blaring.

Send a blanket text message to bosses: enroute to hospital. Again. Sorry.

We stop and the tailgate opens. My stretcher is pulled out and I start yelling. Really yelling. I'm damn well going to make a fucking scene.

We're at the wrong hospital.

It might be bigger, it might be cheaper, but I do not want to wait in the swarm of mosquitos in the open-air breezeways/waiting rooms while people on the concrete moan and secrete the externalities of their problems.

By the time we bounce to the other end of town and the hospital that knows me, I'm sobbing. Quietly but without restraint.

It's not just the immediate pain of the trauma, not by half. I can feel myself draining into shock and endorphins have been buzzing me for a while. It's the way the hard plastic stretcher grinds my bones, the simple fact of being in an ambulance, that the ambulance is in Thailand and some guy is yelling at me over the noise of the siren and enunciating each word carefully as if that would help my vacuous knowledge. It's that I've already blown one teaching gig and expect the other to hit me like a train. It's that I haven't made it a week without a major medical issue--major meaning significant enough for me to take myself in for treatment--and now I'm going back. It's the quiet voice telling me the bike is toast and my commuting days with it, that I'll have to move back to town and explore by foot, songtau, bike taxi and minivan.

It's that I thought I had nothing left to give.

A gaggle of ER nurses goes to work with tonics and gauze. Nobody speaks English.

"Where you girlfriend?" barks the EMS guy.

"NOBODY, NOBODY, JUST ME. ME. HERE ALONE. OKAY? ME."

"Scooter with police."

"What about the other driver?"

Nobody speaks English.

"Half hour you get X-ray hand and see doctor."

Great, a half hour to enjoy the ER and not think about the H1N1 outbreak, not think about what might happen if....

My mouth is at the stage just past cotton. Tap a nurse's arm, "water? Water? Drink?" mime sipping.

"No, no."

"Pain tablet? Drug? Medicine? Jeb, jeb, help?"

"No. Doctor first."

My phone buzzes--it's my supervisor. "You poor, poor guy," she says.

I've made a point of being friendly and keeping away from her, but I wish she were here to hold the other hand and maybe give me a couple minutes to sob into someone's shoulder.

She puts her neighbor on the phone and there's a flurried exchange with the EMS guy.

My phone comes back, "they say your bike's in impound and we should come in half an hour. I'll send my boyfriend so you have someone Thai."

A sturdy porter wheels me to the X-ray room.

I can't sit up without help, and I'm reluctant to roll onto the Xray table.

It crosses my mind that I've been moving my back and neck a lot--what if?

I have to insist they Xray my leg.

"Twenty minutes," the ER nurse says.

"Doctor is having lunch?"

"Yes."

The one doc in the ER being downstairs eating lunch while a crash victim arrives on an ambulance, turns out to be a farang, waits for Xrays, and now waits for the doctor is evidently no cause for rush or second thoughts. What's my hangup? There's one doctor and he's eating.

Meantime, the nurses amuse themselves by swabbing me with alcohol and sniggering at the squirming whimpers.

It's almost as unpleasant a place as the back of the ambulance.

Malpractice must not be big in Thailand.

It takes the doctor two glances before he comes over, squeezes my thumb, (no more screams or whimpers, just cringing away with a silent scream) and says, "no break. Okay go home." And he turns to leave back to his dinner or siesta.

"Wait! Drink! I want a drink of water, and I need something for the pain!"

An exchange like, "Give the poor SOB some water" happens, and a nurse brings two sippy cups with a--A--Tylenol.

And now I am supposed to leave.

A guy in camo shorts, an Iron Maiden tee and dreds comes in. He's the boyfriend. An exchange, and he says, "you just need to sign the insurance slip.

In the waiting room, my supervisor is followed closely by my boss.

Brief explanations. My boss was indeed playing Ultimate, and one of the Thai teachers had stopped to ask if he'd heard about the teacher in a wreck--some parents had called the school with news that a teacher had been hit in front of Carrefour. My boss hadn't heard, and my texts had not yet reached him.

A receptionist calls me to scrawl my name, and the pharmacist gives me two packets--finally, relief! Tylenol and an antibiotic. Now go home.

And that night, it drained out of me. Whatever "it" is, the last drops seeped out as nauseating waves of pain wrung me around. If there were a conceivable future, not just "something will work out," I would've packed to go home in the morning. But here I have a job and income. In America, I would have family and the new depression. A trans-pacific flight wouldn't carry me away from the jutting bones, the painful guts, the battered body, and moving to 6,000 feet might not help things. I might have to move, but there's no more bike to worry about, and living in a converted hotel will remove the mental presences of cleaning up and doing laundry. Here, I have the damnable physicality that will follow me everywhere, I have the promise of a job (even if it promises to flatten me), I have someone to teach me Reiki and the promise of learning Thai massage and reflexology.

It's just a matter of how much more I'll be asked to give and whether my stores run that deep.

In the morning, another ER doc points out the fracture near the base of my thumb. He molds a plaster board to the bottom of my arm and secures the works with gauze and an ace bandage. I should come back on Saturday to see the osteologist.

Oh, and sorry about the medication last night. Here are some pills that should make up for it.

So here we are. Here I am. The end. Nothing left to give, so don't ask. My landlord rented the place already, there is nothing open in town, and I don't care. I just can't. Something will work out. There's a break coming up, a vacation with friends from back home, and the promise of a new job, new place, new start when I return. Here's hoping the promise starts accruing life. God knows there isn't much left to give, except resounding relief at the close of an incredibly challenging chapter of life.