I’m going on my 12th night in the hospital.
I got the call on a Tuesday afternoon. There had been a motorbike accident involving two of my squad mates in a city 4 hours away. I had limited information about their situation and had specific instructions to get to them as soon as I could by any means possible.
I ran home, grabbed a few things, and began frantically looking for a mode of transportation. Taxi. Bus. Tuk-Tuk. Anything with four wheels.
2 hours of chaotic phone calls later, the two girls and their team leaders were in an ambulance heading to a hospital in Phnom Penh near where I was staying. My adrenaline filled veins could hardly sit through dinner as I waited to head to the ER to meet them when they arrived.
Everyone was shaken up and injuries ranged from scrapes and bruises to a very traumatic foot injury requiring immediate attention in the operating room. The hospital they were rushed to in Kep, the province where the injury occurred, had done a pretty poor job of taking care of the wound. So we were grateful that these doctors seemed to know what they were doing.
Katie C. was able to go home that night with one of our teams. She had some pretty nasty scrapes and bruises, but thankfully did not need to be admitted to the hospital.
After Katie L.’s procedure, the staff brought her up to her room where Kristin, Abby, and I sat anxiously waiting. The next couple of days were slow as we all just sat with Katie in her hospital room, trying our best to entertain her and each other.
But things changed quickly.
After changing her bandages, the Dr. said the skin on her ankle was necrotic and they needed to take her into surgery that night to remove it. They also said she would need a skin graft to cover the wound. We wrapped our heads around that news as best we could and a few hours later, Katie was back in the OR.
And yet again, things began to escalate.
After her procedure, the Dr. came into her room and sat on the couch next to me. He took out his iPhone and began showing me pictures of the open wound on her ankle as he said he wanted to send her to a hospital in Bangkok, Thailand (did I mention we were in Cambodia..). He said they would have more experience with this type of injury and there wasn’t anything else he knew to do to help.
That’s when panic set in.
I’ve taken people to hospitals in third world countries before, but never have I ever had to have someone medically evacuated… was this in the manual?
Several phone calls and a lot of paperwork later, we had everything lined up. An air ambulance would pick us up the next morning (which was really just a few hours after everything was finalized…it was a long night) to take Katie and myself to a hospital in Thailand.
