I never wrote about the motorcycle accident, when I was just starting at the intersection, and my front tire went over a plastic bottle, and the bike slipped out from under me, and fell over, and while I was falling, the bottle of beer fell from my bag and broke, and I landed on it, and it cut my arm, though I only realized that my arm was cut about 100 yards later after I hastily picked up my motorcycle and departed from the intersection, surprised by the cascade of blood down my forearm. It was a big skin-splitting gash, resulting in one of my most cherished Indonesian souvenirs, from the four stitches I had to get that evening when I reluctantly went to the hospital emergency room at the insistence of Ibu Maria. After about a five minute wait in a large room with several suffering people on stretchers (emergency room suffering, like a sudden spike in blood sugar or a dangerous car accident – I was not suffering, I should emphasize), I got ushered to a private room and was taken care of quickly and efficiently, for a fee of about 6 dollars. I think they moved me faster because I was a bule. All of Ibu Maria’s family came to visit in that 10 minutes, shaking my hand and worrying over me.
I never wrote about the time my right foot starting going numb, which I noticed first when my ankle started turning while I walked, for no apparent reason. Soon the whole foot was numb, and I walked with a sort of limp, and in my mind I imagined the emergency flight to Singapore where I would have my foot cut off in a clean hospital. I really didn’t know what to do, aside from the google search which gave me about 45 possibilities and no clear direction – in the United States I would have driven 2 minutes to my doctor. One day I was at a student fair on campus, and a man in medical attire asked me if I wanted to have a budget acupuncture session. “Will it make my foot feel better?” I asked, and he said yes, and soon I was sitting on a hospital stretcher in the middle of the student fair getting clean (recently unpackaged) needles stuck in my foot and calf by a doctor trained in medical acupuncture at the University of Indonesia. He seemed like a credible guy, and I was truly desperate at this point, my foot numb for about 3 weeks by then. He said it wouldn’t work right away, that I’d need a few more treatments, but when he was done, it actually felt better. It cost about $4.
Since this doctor’s office was too far away, in another city, I found a Chinese doctor in town, recommended by Ibu Maria (again), who did acupuncture. He was a short enthusiastic man with a shock of pointy black hair who spoke no English, but was very excited, and he showed me charts and pictures of feet, and then stuck bunches of needles in my foot and calf. People always say that acupuncture doesn’t hurt but they are lying – after the needle goes in, itself relatively painless, the doctor has to find the nerve, which he does by gently wiggling the needle until it hits the nerve. He knows that it hits the nerve because my leg twitches crazily and I groan, and he is happy. Each time I visited him (about 3 times) he stuck about 12 needles in me, and then he hooked them all up to an electric generator that sent low shocks through the needles into my nerves for about five minutes, a wholly unpleasant sensation, but one you get sort of used to. After three sessions my foot was better. That whole thing cost me about $20.
I learned the Indonesian word for “bloodcurdling” from him (mengerikan) because I was reading a book about the events in 1965, which eventually led to the massacre of ½ million to 1 million people in Indonesia. He was visibly shaken as we spoke about it – things were nasty in Central Java, and around the area where we live. I really liked that doctor.
When you see me (on the ground in Bozeman in about 6 weeks), remember to ask about some of the things we couldn’t write about in the blog, for various reasons. Or if you see Michael, ask him about one of them (keyword: “street cred”). He’ll fill you in.
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