good start to bangkok holiday…

Flew to Bangkok tonight to meet some friends for a bit of a holiday and was running late as I hurried down the long flat escalator going down from immigration to the lower level for a taxi. I heard a lady yell out “oh no watch out” and I was turning around to the left and to the right to see what was going on. Nothing seemed to be happening when I saw a security guard on the lower level yell at me with a very concerned look on his face. I was about to turn around when I felt the impact of a trolley loaded with suitcases crash into my right foot. I went down like a $2 hooker.

After the shock subsided and I stopped crying, I tentatively got to my feet, knowing my ankle was almost certainly broken. Much to my surprise, and also evidence that I am a bit of a princess when it comes to injuries, I found my ankle was not broken. Thankfully, there was a substantial amount of blood from a large cut, so I didn’t appear to be a total drama-queen. The lady who was responsible for the runaway trolley burst into tears at the blood, almost certainly seeing countless hours of litigation ahead of her.

The new airport in Bangkok is easily one of the hottest airports in the world, but I can testify that their accident control team is retarded. With a young foreigner drifting in and out of conciousness (not from any medical reason - blood just freaks me out), and a screaming hysterical lady yelling for medics, after 20min, a nurse finally arrived with, get this, a bandaid and a hankerchief, assuring us a doctor would be along shortly. Another 15 min later, no doctor had arrived, and the lady who attacked me with her trolley was at wit’s end, and had resorted to calling personal friends at 3am in the morning in an attempt to get a doctor to come look at my foot.

By this stage, much of the blood had dried, and fearful that the crowd would begin to wonder what all the fuss was about, and fearful I would outlast their sympathy, I began the heroic effort of thanking everyone for their concern, assuring the lady I would be fine, and making my own way to hospital, where I hoped I would at least have some stiches to show for my crowd-assembling dramatic injury.

Unfortunately for me, the story gets embarassing at this point, as when I hobble into the emergency room at Bumrungrad, the doctors tell me I don’t need stiches. I ask them if they are sure about that, and the doctor looks at me and tells me he can find a way to put some stiches in if I really want him to, and I tell him, “Yes, that would be nice, thank you.” He then tells me he was just joking and that I don’t need them. Damn it.

On another note, the Bumrungrad Hospital is surreal. The most amazing hospital I have ever seen. I read somewhere the plastic surgeons there do more operations in that single hospital than are done in the whole of Australia every year. All that booby money means the hospital itself is almost unbelievably modern and beautiful. You think you are walking into a hotel when you head to the emergency room. The sight of a drunken tourist being carried in on a stretcher and babbling away in what I suspect was German almost ruined my awesome experience though, especially when he got preferential treatment from the cute nurse, even though I had a sick cut that almost needed stiches.

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2 Responses to “good start to bangkok holiday…”

2 Comments »

1. That hospital is nowhere near the new airport Jonny…some people will go to any lengths to visit the Sukhamvit area:p

   Comment by PaulB — April 19, 2007 @ 10:52 pm

2. Hey Jonny! I hear good things about Thailand hospitals.

   Just make sure you still have all the appendages you walked in with and no addition appendages on your way out!

   Oh, and I hope you’ve had your shots. Some things can be suppressed but they’ll never go away…

   Comment by LeeWah — April 23, 2007 @ 9:04 am

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