Recovery

(Post written mostly on Saturday night)

Tonight as I sit here in the cool pre-winter air (56° F can feel cold when you don't have any heat in your house), listening to the crickets and tokays and the distant Thai music blaring over some loudspeakers in the village--glad that the omnipresent village firecrackers have ceased for the night--I think back to some of the events of the past weeks. Okay, a lot of you already know about my little motorbike accident two weeks ago, and at the time I thought about writing up the whole story but was too busy with other things! 

2005 Honda Wave 125 - my newest vehicle
ever (by 10 years), but only $900! :-P
Gets great gas mileage--110 MPG or 176 KPG.

It was definitely an interesting day…I was riding on the highway near the village, which to Pai is one of the curviest mountain “highways” in Thailand (they sell T-shirts about surviving this road), and hit a patch of gravel/sand on the pavement while going low-speed around a corner…So the bike (which unfortunately did not have good tires for the highway) skidded over and I hit my side/shoulder and dragged on the pavement for a very few feet. It was on a somewhat dangerous blind corner, so I ignored the blood and quickly made sure my limbs were working, and picked the bike up and pushed it off the road. Then I sat there a bit shocked and started using my water bottle to rinse my deeper gashes that ripped through my lightweight pants, and looked at the gravel embedded in my arm wounds and wished I’d had my riding jacket from the U.S (although nobody wears that kind of stuff locally). The blood began clotting quickly even though the muscle was partly exposed, but I wondered how the small first-aid kit in my backpack would fare against these injuries… (Though since the Rawlings’ family were coming just a few kilometers behind me, I wasn’t really worried.) Pretty soon a Buddhist monk drove by and checked on me, and another man drove me and my bike up to a safer area on the road. The monk actually knew a bit of English, and after making sure I had help on the way, he said “no use 4^th gear! Use gear 1, 2, 3 only!” Of course I had to laugh, because I was only creeping in 2^nd gear since my bike wouldn’t make it up the hills otherwise!

Minutes later, as I rode with the Rawlings' to the Mae Taeng hospital’s ER, I was thinking, “Praise God”, as negative as the situation could seem, because I was safe (we passed a much worse motorcycle wreck just down the road). And not only that, this was the first significant bloody injury that I’ve had for many years, and I didn’t get faint or woozy at the sight of my blood like I used to when I was younger! I was kinda excited that I finally would get to experience wound care to an intimate level that I had never fully been exposed to in nursing school or in my short career so far.

Didn't want to gross people out--but this is one
section of one of my wounds to show how
much dirt was still in the wounds the next day...

But living through my 20 minutes in the ER made me think twice about that—it might have been free hospital care (possibly due to my Thai driver’s license), but it was TORTURE sitting through the wound debridement and scrubbing without any anesthetic! And they bandaged me up without finishing the job—there was still lots of dirt in some of my wounds. The next day I was glad for some help from Tesha Bair (an old friend from the states—she and her husband Daniel are working with Jesus For Asia with the Education Opportunity Foundation and All-Asia TV Studio ministry), to get the arm wounds painfully cleaned out and debrided some more--although this time I brought some Lidocaine which helped in some spots!

Painful but beautiful hiking at Pai Canyon
after my ER visit

Although I was able to do some hiking at Pai Canyon with the Rawlings' right after we left the ER (I wasn’t about to let that one-time opportunity pass!), my surface and deep knee and arm wounds were quite painful for about a week or so. The wounds aren’t really painful now, but the tissue still has a long ways to fill in the deep areas, since they are open wounds—they were too wide to suture. (I’m learning a lot about wound care that I never really “got” in nursing school or even much at my recent job.) But also since the accident, my right shoulder’s rotator cuff (a different spot from the area that I injured two years ago) has been hurting again. I know it needs some time to heal without stressing the shoulder, which is hard for a right-handed person, and when your main transportation is riding a motorbike! This week I rode the song-taews in Chiang Mai and visited 6-7 pharmacies I hadn’t been to before, and finally found the more advanced wound care and surgical supplies that I wish I’d found sooner, to help with more efficient wound care.

But enough of all that…recovery takes time and pain for awhile (and I really could use your prayers), but I’m getting a lot of experience in this process, and also having some interesting experiences while working on learning Thai in the meantime. Learning the language basics feels very slow and tedious, especially when I’m trying to learn to read/write the Thai script along with some speaking/listening at the same time (which is the best way to do it, but it’s overwhelming how much there is to learn—reading Thai is much harder than the other languages I’ve dabbled with in the past)! I haven’t gotten a Thai tutor, since I’ve made decent progress with mostly self-study resources and talking with a few locals at the moment, and will be changing locations to start learning Karen language soon (and can’t justify/afford a tutor expense right now).

Rice harvest finale in the village here

With all the town trips (I've been doing my own cooking--pumpkin curry over rice is my new favorite!) and talking to Thai people in the shops around here, I’ve found an invaluable resource that I use more than any other book or piece of software. It's by Paiboon--the “Talking Thai-English-Thai” dictionary app on my iPod—it’s saved me so many times, since it actually pronounces the words correctly which is nearly impossible to do just from reading a printed Thai dictionary. When I was going into shops trying to find where to buy scalpels and surgical scissors, etc, it wasn’t enough to mime cutting my own skin to convince people that I wasn’t just looking for box cutters and school scissors…I just had to find the word in the dictionary and ask for a นีดผ่าตัด “miit paa dtaht” with the correct tonal inflection to get to the place I was looking for. (And FYI, so far I’ve only used a scalpel to cut a bit of eschar out of one of my wounds!)

Visit to a Karen village in the mountains:
cooking sticky rice
inside pieces of bamboo

Peel the charred, hot, bamboo, and enjoy!

With learning to read Thai script, it’s exciting to finally be able to begin to read some basic store signs and a few things on nutritional labels that are all written in Thai! (For instance, น้ำตาล is “nam-dtaan” [sugar]). However, I still have a LONG way to go to be able to read the characters quick enough to read at a normal speed. And my mental database of basic vocabulary leaves much to be desired so far! The other morning when I was walking a shortcut across a rice field, I walked past two workers sitting at a shelter, and when I greeted them the woman said something that sounded like it ended with “gin chaow?” I looked puzzled for a second as I tried to remember some vocabulary, and then she raised up the food in her hands to show me what she was talking about. Remembering that “gin” can mean “eat”, and “kaao chaow” is one of the common words for “breakfast,” I thought that she was perhaps offering me breakfast, or maybe just asking me if I had eaten breakfast yet. Since I was just walking past and couldn’t think of how to clarify what she said, I said the equivalent of ‘no, thank you!” and the man with her just laughed and she looked embarrassed. It was just one moment of many that motivated me to learn some more of the language as much as I can, to increase my conversations beyond a few words and decrease misunderstandings! 

My first experience with Karen hospitality
(and eating with your hands)

This week I hope to possibly start learning some basic Karen words or start working on that (completely different) alphabet also, since I’ll be going to Sunshine Orchard soon and working mostly with Karen people. When I have time, I’ll still try to keep up with Thai since most of the country uses Thai, of course! When I was trying to find a seamstress locally last week, I asked a delivery truck driver if he knew where I could find someone to “yep kohp” my “gaang gehng”, and he rattled off some directions in Thai…but thankfully I recalled the Thai number and measurements basics well enough to recognize that “haa roy meht” meant I should be looking for a shop 500 meters down the road. Even little things like that help a lot!! And the people really appreciate when foreigners make an effort to learn their language.

Visiting in another dear Karen home,
waiting for the rain to pass :)

Anyway, this is getting long and I haven’t talked about the unusually muddy (for the dry season) and interesting day I had with some acquaintances in the nearby mountains in two Karen villages last Sabbath (see some of the photos earlier in this blog). That was my first real taste of some mountain Karen culture, including singing Karen songs in a bamboo temporary church, visiting in several huts and eating rice cooked inside bamboo sticks, along with many other things. The people were all nice and even though I couldn’t speak any Karen language yet, they could understand the few Thai words I was brave enough to say. I can’t wait to be able to start helping in some far more remote mountain villages in perhaps a few months. (For the latest updates on Gayle’s project in the mountains near Omkoi, please check her blog at http://gayle.jesus4asia.org/wp!)

Thank you all for your prayers and--especially my family and the others who have contacted me, it always brightens my day! (Especially now since my housemate moved away and I’m home alone this week.) Although I admit I’m glad I haven’t been too overwhelmed with correspondence, because I don’t like getting behind on responding with everything else going on! But I do miss everyone and you are all in my thoughts and prayers too!