Mona is Far Cooler Than I

hey all.

Mona is here. She just brought over all of the pictures from the Great Toe Adventure, so I'm going to put up some of the best.

For those of you who don't like blood, stop here.

Alright, for those of you with a goulish interest in gore, or for those of you with a vested interest in my health, i offer these lovely before-and-after photos. I've become somewhat proud of mywound.

I will accompany them with a brief discussion of the event itself, because as we know nothing that happens here is without cultural benefit. I was playing ping pong in the gym - well, actually I hadn't started playing exactly. But I discovered, to my extreme joy, that there are at least four or five girls around who are very good at ping pong and really enjoy playing. Sorry, "table tennis". (It's actually called table-ball in arabic - كرة الطاولة ) Anyway, this makes me happy. Of course, it'll be a while before I can actually play again. But I will be back to prime fighting form by next week, Inshallah.

Anyway, after smushing my foot like a ripe berry, bleeding profusely (I am extremely thankful I didn't get blood all over my favorite jeans), and having the nurse tell me I needed stitches (I resisted, but common sense eventually took over), I was rushed in a fairly disorganized manner towards the gate. I didn't have ID, I didn't have my abaya, I didn't know if I had insurance or not. For travelers outside of the US - KNOW IF YOU HAVE INSURANCE. Luckily it wasn't a big deal for me, but it was a definite oversight on my part. Anyway, thanks to Mona I acquired both my passport and my abaya, and having contacted via cell phone (thank goodness for cell phones) my parents, I set off with my foot wrapped to King Faisal Hospital, the newest private hospital around and supposedly the best.

You're lucky I haven't got a better photo of my foot. If you can see the little bit of flesh squeezed out of the toenail there... well, I think I need say no more.

Anyway, the King Faisal Hospital was, in fact, very fancy and hi-tech, but apparently they didn't have anybody qualified to stitch up my foot, so we were packed off to Erfan Hospital where they had a foot surgeon in the ER. Meantime the doctors at King Faisal made me angry via treating me like I wasn't there - I HATE when doctors do that - and so I was feeling like a typical pushy American by the time we arrived at Erfan. Luckily the first doctor only wanted an x-ray to make sure I hadn't broken anything - I hadn't - and then the next doctor was everything that a doctor should be. He was entertained by Mona's continuing use of the camera, so he let her take pictures during the procedure (the one above is of right before they started sticking me with needles). He even posed my foot at the end so we could see how much more like a toe it looked.

I guess what entertained me the most about all of this was the bureaucratic efficiency of it all. Sortof like a hospital in the states, in that the individuals get lost in the shuffle, but with its own peculiar Saudi version. I got my temperature and blood pressure taken twice, once at each hospital. At both hospitals they spelled my name wrong (spelled it different wrong ways) and when I corrected them said "oh, it doesn't matter, you just need your number". This makes a good amount of sense for a world where people don't have established last names and generally go by the name of their father and grandfather or tribe, and of course translations of Arabic names all come out looking different in English. But it was strange for me.

The best part of the whole experience was the immense number of fans I discovered. Well, not so much fans as mother hens. My father, because I woke him up at 7:30 am to tell him I was going to the hospital, and because this is the way my father deals with things, called everyone in the universe, who then of course called each other and me again and again to make sure I was really alive and to make sure everything was being done. Everyone I knew in Jeddah appeared in the hospital at some point or another, and I think most were disappointed to discover that the problem was merely a squashed toe. It was fantastic to realize what a large support network I have if I need one - but I didn't need one on this occasion and so it ended up being a bit hysterical by the end. And then the mother hens insisted on my not walking but being wheeled around in a wheelchair, and not going to classes, and all sorts of other silly stuff which I ignored a soon as possible. But it does feel awfully good to be taken care of, and I am continuously grateful for how much the people here are willing to take care of a relative stranger. I feel like in coming to Saudi Arabia I also was adopted into an extended family of Saudi aunties, some of whom are actually American men.

This is one of the fantastic things about being an ex-pat in Saudi Arabia and, I imagine, most other places - the community is very cohesive, and really leaps to offer its help. In this case I have a Western community I'm only starting to explore and a ready-made community of Effat College people, and between the two I have been as well taken cared of as anybody could have hoped. Had I moved in with family I could not have found a warmer welcome.

And I think that's definitely enough about my toe for one day or, perhaps, a lifetime. I'd show another picture of its current status but I feel that when it comes to injuries there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Suffice it to say I feel almost ready to get back to training for the ping pong world championships. And I look forward to it - some exercise would be really good for my laziness right now. Maybe I'd spend less time writing in my blog, and more time out grabbing life by the ears.