Roasted Elbows .... by Adam (2003)

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A rite of passage for anyone living in Thailand is participation in a motorcycle accident. Here, it’s everyday stuff, like eating breakfast or having a wart removed. The Thai New Year water festival kills 800 motorists every year. And each rainy season, I see a few skinny university girls wipe-out and decorate their uniform whites with gravel and blood.

My friend Chris recently had a scuffle with the pavement too. On the way to meeting his girlfriend Elin and I for lunch, his scooter tipped over in traffic and he scratched his elbow.

Chris arrived at the restaurant with a speck of blood on his arm, but soon followed with 20 minutes of heroic bluster and near-death navel-gazing. Everything was fine – except the conversation – until suddenly his eyes fluttered, the blood drained from his skin and he slumped in his chair. Worried that he was seconds away from a coma, Elin and I fanned him, poked at his pupils and slapped his graying cheeks

Remembering my Boy Scout days, I tried all the First Aid techniques I could muster. I couldn’t remember whether to inhale or exhale, so my mouth-to-mouth had little effect. The Heimlich Manoeuvre was a bit more successful, keeping him awake, although caking his chin with half-digested rice. Just as I was applying a tourniquet to his leg, the restaurant owner loaded him into a pickup truck bound for the hospital.

Elin and I stretched out in the back of the truck enjoying the breeze and watching to make sure Chris was still fairly conscious in the cab. We discussed the unfairness of the incident, given Chris’ voracious respect for safety measures (this is a guy who wears a helmet to remove bread from the refrigerator). We careened through the back streets and I wondered if Elin was hoping I would come on to her, as I’ve heard women often do during times of crisis.

At the hospital, the nurse weighed him, took off his pants and pronounced him healthy and ready to go home. Unconvinced, Chris spent the next 90 minutes slumping in his wheelchair, calculating the merits of a Cat-Scan. While Chris was dreaming up new symptoms, I ran to the store to buy him some reading material. I rushed back, hoping not to find him shaving his own head for brain surgery or resisting nurses’ pleas to climb out of the iron lung. We relaxed in the waiting area. Hospital staff glared at us as if our outstretched legs were tripping freshly arriving heart attack victims. When I suggested to the nurse that Chris might need a catheter, she urged us to leave the emergency area and return home. 

Luckily Chris didn’t die in his sleep that night or anything. He still boasts of his heroic near-death experience. I recommended him to describe it as a “minor head injury” – a noble and very adult wound. But Chris prefers “shock”, which I see as more of a character flaw than an injury.

I didn’t actually witness his tumble, and there are no visible scars, but I don’t want to make light of his experience. There is nothing shameful in being weak. I don’t look down on poor fashion sense or public nudity, and neither do I mock delicateness of constitution. It’s useful for his friends to learn that diarrhea or a poke in the ribs might send Chris into shock. Now, if he gets food stuck between his teeth or we catch him picking his nose, we just lie him down with his feet elevated and pray for the best.

I am also a motorcycle accident survivor. Last year two friends and I were rattling home at 6AM after a night out, when the driver tried to unite us with an abandoned bike parked at the roadside.  Our motorcycle soared into the air and the three of us sailed head-first into lamp-posts and barbwire. Although I was in the middle, the low body fat of my Thai companions failed to provide cushioning. I sliced open my knee (nearly severing my lower body) roasted my right arm on the pavement and soiled some of my favourite evening garments. I still bear a scar on my right knee. But the real scars lie in my mind when I recall the surgical insertion of four limb-saving stitches into my leg.

Chris didn’t even get stitches.