Sometimes on The Race you get a chance to tie your shirt around a man severed blood-pooled calf muscle
So I was in Costa Rica, up on the balcony of our hostel, minding my own business. I was flipping over my clothes that were out drying on the balcony(I had finally decided to wash them all due to an ant infestation earlier in the year).
I saw an employee of the hostel walk out to the road with a large trash bag in hand, preparing to throw it in the dumpster. I picked up a shirt I’d gotten as a present from a man in Panama. It said “Disfruta la vida con Cristo”(Enjoy life in Christ) in Coca-Cola italics.
Suddenly I heard loud moaning/grunting coming from the road side. I looked up and saw the employee grabbing his leg. I started running down the stairs with the shirt in hand.
As I got to the man there was blood running freely down his leg onto the stones he was standing on. I told him to slow down his breathing and not to look at his leg. Both of his hands were holding together a 15cm horizontal wound encompassing his entire calf muscle.
As I got to him, one of his hands holding the wound slipped. The bottom half of the wound fell open and sagged revealing the inside of his muscle. I quickly told him to hold the wound together tightly and just in time the owner of the hostel came over with a large bunch of napkins. I took the napkins places them on the wound and tied my shirt as tight as I could around this mans calf.
As the man didn’t speak English I tried my best to calm him down in Spanish as he continued to moan. The owner called a cab to the nearest clinic 30 minutes away(The closest hospital was 6 hours away). I was afraid he was going to go into shock so I sat him down in a chair and got him some water. The taxi then arrived quickly and we sent him off to the clinic.
What actually happened?
The night prior I remember hearing someone downstairs had broken some sort of large glass object and it had gotten thrown in the garbage.
This man was the one who took the garbage out the next morning. A large sharp piece of the broken glass was apparently sticking out of the garbage bag. When the bag was swung by the employees’ leg into the dumpster it had slit open his calf muscle, thus causing the wound.
Disfruta la vida con Cristo
8 hours later he arrived back to the hostel, he had severed the 2 back calf muscles and had to get 27 stiches.
I asked him how he was doing and he thanked me profusely for my help. Then he handed me the shirt I had used to tie around his bloody leg, he had washed it.
Needless to say, I threw the shirt in the garbage.. but I couldn’t help thinking the healing name of Christ had been wrapped around this mans wound the whole time. 🙂
