Monday, October 2, 2006

The End of the Road For Neubz

The following is transcribed from the pen of Neubz...
Hello, all.
As some of you may have heard, Tom and I have hit a little hitch in our travels. Although generally this is not the type of material that I feel is appropriate for casual Internet dissemination, I plan on recounting the story in its entirety here, primarily so that I can let this episode begin to fade into the past and not be forced to reface these memories every few days when I see you all in person.
That being said, the short story is this: I´ve been in a bad motorcycle crash in Bolivia. My left leg is badly broken and I´ve had three surgeries thus far to put it back together. I am laid up in a hospital in the city of Santa Cruz and it looks like I will be stuck here until I can bend my leg in such a way that will allow it to be fit onto a commercial airliner.
For those of you that want the full gory story, read on. But you´ve been warned...
Last week found Tom and I continuing to head east across Bolivia. We were finally descending out of the Andes for good, and the last stretch of mountainous roads were made all the more hazardous by stretches of pavement washed out by mountain rockslides. While I was crossing one such stretch, my bike an extraordinarily large bump in the pavement. Cruising at around 45 mph, suddenly my fuel tank was stuck up in my chest and my seat fell away behind me. I stood up on the foot pegs and let the bike coast to a stop. What happened was that two of the crucial bolts that holds the subframe of the bike together had sheared off from the constant jarring of the heavy load. Tom and I had even anticipated this, and before the trip had replaced the stock bolts with hardened ones. It was clearly not successful.
What followed was actually an amusing story. We spent several hours trying to flag down a truck to transport the bike, and when darkness came we were forced to negotiate lodging in the little indigenous village near our spot. When a powerful thunderstorm hit that night, Tom and I found ourselves both crammed into a three-foot wide couch (no exaggeration) hiding from the waves of rain that were blowing in where there should have been walls. The next day we managed to put the bike together with our spare parts, and upon reaching the city of Santa Cruz, we hired some machinists to drill out the existing 8mm holes and thread them for some hefty 10mm bolts. And onward we went.
We soon found ourselves in the Bolivian boondocks, heading east to Brazila along some semi-paved and then eventually dirt roads. The weather was hot again now that we were out of the mountains and into the thick, and the bugs were out in force. There was plenty of dirt in the air, and this day I was riding behind Tom, and my face showed it.
After crossing through the town of San Ignacio, we headed out into what seemed to be a particularly remote stretch. There were few cars anywhere. At one point we saw and SUV heading toward us in the oncoming lane, kicking up clouds of red dust. We both moved to the right side of the lane and Tom roared past. I followed about 100 yards or so behind going around 40-45. As I was passing SUV #1, I looked up ahead through the dust and saw not more than 20 feet ahead of me another SUV heading towards me in my lane. My only thought: Oh, no.
Suddenly I had the sensation of flying through the air: feet above head, head above feet, and then repeats itself all over again. I finally fell to the Earth on my left side, my helmet and Kevlar armored jacket easily took the brunt of the fall. I wiggled my head, my hands, and my feet. Thank God they all responded. I rolled myself over with my left arm. Although sore, it was working with me. My left leg, well that´s another story.
I saw the wheels of Tom´s bike roll past my view. He got off, shouted a few choice words at the other driver, and came over to check me out. I told him I thought my left leg was broken, and that he was going to have to cut my motorcycle pants off to examine the situation. Motorcycle pants are not made to cut easily but when he finally knifed his way through them, Tom informed me that I had a compound fracture in my lower leg - the broken bone was protruding through the skin. I asked him to clean the wound, and as he went to work with the iodine I was rewarded with the most intense shot of pain I have ever experienced.
About 1/2 hour after the crash, a medic arrived from a neighboring town. He found me laying with a sun cap over my face trying to hide from both the sun and the merciless swarms of bugs. He tourniquetted the leg with a rubber cord and gave me a much appreciated jab of morphine. An ambulance arrived from San Ignacio about 1 1/2 hours after the accident. I had to drag my broken leg onto their stretcher, and enjoyed an hour-long tour of every pothole on the way to the hospital.
The hospital at San Ignacio is not exactly an ¨ER¨-style emergency treatment facility. As I was wheeled in I was sweating profusely and gasping for breath. Someone finally stuck an oxygen source in my nose. The wound continued to bleed. They wanted to take extensive X-rays, so they wheeled me to appropraite room. I had to climb from the gurney to the table, a horribly painful experience when dragging a shattered leg behind you. Once on the table, I looked down at the floor and saw a pool of my own blood. The gurney had the same decoration. The downfall of the X-ray machine was that it did not move. They wanted to take head to toe X-rays, and for each one I had to slide myself down the table. This was made easier by the pool of blead and sweat that was beginning to collect on the table. Just when I thought I was done, the X-ray tech would wrench my leg into a previously untried angle, and the pain would set new records.
I was wheeled back into a different room. My hands were ghostly white and wrinkled from all the sweat. They took my blood pressure - 80 over 60. ¨I think I need blood.¨ ¨There is no blood.¨ My God, am I going to bleed to death here? Finally they tell me that they have to operate, that I have a severed artery in my leg. They wheel me to the OR and have me climb onto the table. There is no general anesthesia. ¨Here, sit up.¨ I feel a needle begin to probe for my spinal cord, but all the remaining blood rushes out of my head and I pass out...
I feel a slap and come to a few seconds later. Where am I? Who are all these people in masks? Then it comes rushing back to me: Ah, I´m back in this hell. They tell me to lay down. I do as instructed and pass out again.
I come to and my leg is wrapped in a soft cast. Surgery #1 stopped much of the bleeding. However, I am informed that it could get worse at any time. Tom drives to the dirt airfield to find a plane. It´s either an 10-hour drive or a one-hour flight to Santa Cruz. Tom finds what he later tells me is a 1978 Beachcraft Bonanza with a bearded pilot named Juan Pablo. Tom, a young doctor, and I pile into the rickety craft along with the pilot. Even fitting the four of us is a stretch. Soon I am being wheeled into a big hospital in Santa Cruz. For the past day I´d been wondering why my rear has been hurting so much. I guess that it is because I have been strapped to a wooden board for much of the past couple days. However, after consulting with the surgeon he found, Tom comes in to deliver the good news. In addition to the three breaks in my lower leg, my hip is severely broken as well. We schedule two surgeries over the next two days: #2 will repair the lower leg and #3 the hip. My leg will be a hodgepodge of pins, plates, and screws.
It is now two days since the surgeries have been completed. I haven´t moved from the bed, nor am I planning on it anytime soon. The surgeon characterized the damage to my hip as ¨massive trauma¨. My parents and I are looking at ways to get me home and have my leg looked at by a specialist in the US. This may involve trying to get a first-class seat or something where I don´t have to completely bend my leg. We´re not sure and that´s at least a couple of weeks off. Aside from that, I have international travel insurance which will pick up the medical costs, and Tom and I have been the recipient of numerous visits from a Colonel in the U.S. Special Forces who has assured our safety if the Bolivian political situation continues to deteriorate towards civil war.
As for me, I am in good spirits, although bored and anxious to get home and learn to walk again. It is easy to reach me by phone in the hospital, so if anyone wants to call I would greatly appreciate hearing a voice or two from home. A great thanks to those of you that have called already. It has meant a lot to me.
Tom has the number here and has said that he will list it. Just ask for the gringo in room 212. They know. This will be the last update from me, so don´t take any further silence from me as an indication that I have died. I also do not have Internet access from my bed, so the only way to reach me is by phone or through Tom. Also, my parents´ E-mail address is jpneubs@gmail.com. Thanks to those who have followed along and I´ll see you soon.
- Nate
Note from the scribe...
Hello, readers. Alas, we have come to an unfortunate end here in South America. We made it over 11,000 miles over roads of continually deteriorating quality. In all of our preparations, we never concocted a contingency plan for a short guy with a mustache that thought it would be a good idea to pass another truck on a narrow, dusty dirt road when he couldn´t see well enough to do so. It has been a hellish week, and there was a point at which I thought I might lose the Neubz...the point at which there was an impossible amount of blood in X-ray rooms, ambulance floors, my hands and clothes, and the only the blood available in a jungle town to replace it and lift his sagging blood pressure was my own slow-roasted Polish blend. But the Neubz is a truly tough and resillient cat. I don´t think that I can think of anyone that would have faced a terrible situation like this as calmly as he did, and I respect him greatly for it. Even with a bone jutting through his flesh as he lay on a dusty road with no one else in sight, he was cool-headed, logical, and resourceful.
I don´t think that I´ll ever forget the sound that he made when I cleaned his wound with iodine, but if he could somehow recreate it in a recording studio, I think that the makers of A-1 Bold BBQ sauce would be very interested in it for a commercial of some kind. It went a little something like this: ¨Hoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!! Don´t do THAT again!¨
Many of you have asked if there is something you can do to help. I don´t think anyone will be hopping on a plane to deliver a singing telegram, but I do have a few suggestions:
1.) Give him a call. He lays in a room coffin-style watching Telemundo and the Spanish version of ¨Mortal Kombat¨ most of the time. Any words of encouragement would be helpful. The telephone number (assuming that you are calling from the US) is 001-591-3-336-2211, 591 being the country code for Bolivia and 3 being the area code for Santa Cruz. The person that answers will speak Spanish, but all you have to do is keep saying Neuberger and gringo. They´ll figure it out. And he is in room 212, or dos see-yen-to dough-say.
It may well be expensive to call normally from the US. I recommend pooling together with other people for a calling card. Nobel.com is the website I have always used for calling other countries. You´ll get the access number and code via E-mail so you can share with others. For 20 bucks you get over 4 hours to Bolivia. They also have one for 10 and possibly for five. Let me know if you have questions.
2.) Send him a piece of mail...even a poster of Siegfried and Roy for his blank walls. His address is:
Centro Medico Foianini
Señor Nathan Neuberger
Cuarto 212
Calle Chuquisaca 737
Santa Cruz, Bolivia 5872
3.) I will be printing out posts on the Steerage Class Forum section of the www.themanifestdestiny.org website, so you can put your well wishes there and I will deliver them to the hospital.
As for me, I am staying at a hotel about three blocks from the hospital and playing food delivery man. I´ll be here until Neubz is safe and on a plane, and then will be continuing solo towards the southern tip of the continent on the one remaining motorcycle, Aqua Sips. I will not be going to Brazil or Paraguay so as to avoid some of the dirt roads. Updates will resume in my saddened Neubz-less adventure at that time.
Thank you all for any moral support you can lend to my gimpy comrade while he is down and out.
- Tom

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