sangre

American expats don't tend to be the most nationalistic Americans you'll meet, but our distance from home leads us all to strange bouts of patriotic fervor on two occasions: Independence Day and Thanksgiving. I imagine we get all watery-eyed about these, rather than Christmas or Easter, because even our non-American expat friends can't relate. So we do silly things like launch fireworks until the neighbors fire off warning shots and call the cops (happened), and throw Thanksgiving barbeques where we improvise with local ingredients and drink too much beer.

Anyway, the latter happened the other night, at least for most of my friends. On the way to the party, a coworker crashed her motorcycle and woke up in the hospital in need of a friend. So Levi and I ditched the dinner and drove out to lend some moral support.

I'd only ever been to the private hospital in Surat. By western standards, it's extraordinarily cheap so there was never any reason to go to the public center. But for the typical Thai person, the modern, clean, centrally-located hospital is prohibitively expensive. Our routine visa health checks there cost 500 baht, which is only $15 for us, but for the average working person here living on 10,000 baht a month (a little over a third of what we foreign teachers make), that 500 baht is a healthy chunk of cash. With that money you can fill up your motorbike tank 4 times, or buy 15 meals, or take over 30 rides in a tuk-tuk to anywhere in town.

So when you get hurt and aren't awake to tell the medics where you want to go, they'll take you to Surat Thani Hospital, the publically-funded medical center. It's cheap, I'll give it that.

We arrived at the Motorcycle Accident/ER (yes, it's called that). A waiting room full of cracked plastic chairs was full of typically calm Thai people, sitting around patiently under the flickering florescent lights, watching infomercials and staring at the broken clock on the wall. Through this room a slow but steady stream of motorcycle patients was being wheeled in on rusty stretchers. Many of them were carrying their own IV bags. They were, on average, bloody messes, and they would stay that way for a while in the crowded, understaffed ward.

A receptionist pointed us in the direction of our friend, the only foreigner there. She was banged up and had fractured her collarbone and bumped her head pretty good, but was thankfully alright, awake and not in too much pain. As we waited for the results of her x-rays and then the sling they decided to give her, we watched the arrivals come in, more and more frequently as the night wore on. A doctor came over at one point to grab the oxygen tank stashed under my friend's stretcher; as he carried it off I noticed it was entirely engulfed in rust.

I was struck by the relaxed demeanor of everyone there, doctors, patients, and family. As another friend put it after his own serious motorcycle accident, Thai people have an incredibly casual attitude towards terrible injury. I seemed to be the only person flinching at all the blood and gore around me.

When we finally left, the bill was a little $30, x-rays, sling, and meds included.