A Tour of the Hospitals of Goa

Welp. While scooting along on scooters shortly after sunset yesterday, we encountered a particularly bumpy set of speed bumps. There are two different types of speedbumps in Goa: one large one, that occasionally catches you off guard and you get a bit of air and otherwise you just slow down, or a series of small thin lines – sometimes, they are just painted on! But these ones, they were pretty bumpy, and Aahlad was thinking that they were painted on, so he was going a bit too fast, and he started loosing control. To accelerate on a scooter, or at least the ones that we were using, one simply grabs the right handlebar and rotates it towards you. To one relatively inexperienced in the art of scootering, perhaps more familiar with biking, the instinct when you are loosing control is not to release the handlebars but to double down and tighten your grip, perhaps pulling yourself towards the handlebars. This, one might be able to note, is not a good thing. When Aahlad started wobbling a bit, he leaned forward, gripping tightly on, and in fact accelerating. He slipped off the road, got back on, wobbled a bit, and then went over for the last time, falling down a scraggly bank with his bike on top of him.

He is, thankfully, not seriously injured. He did receive some deep cuts that looked extremely painful, and I got a little scared while tending to his wounds on the side of the road, but nothing broken, nothing fractured or twisted. I was surrounded by a crowd of Indian men, many who had reached Aahlad before I had, right behind on my scooter. Ilan was there too, and a bit less shaken by the whole thing. I poured a few water bottles on his ankle, which was pretty dinged up, and borrowed a handkerchief to staunch the flow and wipe it up a little bit. Someone called an ambulance, a police car showed up and drove off with Aahlad in it; we were to follow, but I was busy collecting his shoes and helmet and keys and then had to move my bike to somewhere where it could actually start and then by the time Ilan and I had completed the U-turn across the heavy traffic of the one highway in Goa, the car was gone.

So we drove into the night. I kept nervously looking back to make sure that Ilan (whose headlight had slightly spotty behavior) was still on my tail, anxiously running over what happened and could happen and what were the inevitable outcomes and how Aahlad was doing (probably panicky, I had deliberately not really described what was going on with his wounds because they were rather gross, and then he had been taken away in a police car). Ilan would wave and say “Keep going, keep going” and then I would ask “where to?” and we would continue. We asked a few people where we were going and eventually made it to the hospital, to probably the correct building and we were walking down the halls and everything was incredibly surreal. No one told us where he might be, there were people suffering around every corner. Posters lined the walls, proclaiming that we were being watched in both Hindi and English; the English posters portrayed a single large eye hiding behind a rip in the papers, the Hindi posters, a wide human eye on an otherwise adorable puppy. The emergency operating theater was decked out in tinsel with a large metalic Christmas star hanging in front of the door, while behind the cloudy glass, purple Christmas lights flashed patterns. A mother dog and several very young puppies wandered around one abandoned hallway.

We found him eventually, on a bed in the “Casualty” ward, being ignored because while he merely had a gross cut, there were other people dying. A police man sat near him, taking down information and moving him up in the queue – I was worried about this at the time, as he had no license: was he in trouble? (Earlier, in fact, Aahlad had had another run in with the police. He was riding without a helmet and was whistled to the side, where they discovered he had no license and thus were able to double the asking price of the bribe that got him off the hook.) But the police seemed only there to help.

Anyways, they tended to his wounds in a hurried manner, although he still left little drops of blood wherever he stepped. They gave him an X-ray, declared it probably fine, and sent him on his way. While Ilan and I were dealing with getting three scooters back to the rental place two hours after it closed, he actually snuck off again and went to a private hospital, which was apparently much nicer. For the price of an expensive drink at Starbucks, they redressed all of his wounds, looked everything over, gave him some drugs and told him how to use them, and sent him back to the hotel, where he had the rest of the pasta dinner we had had sent to the room.

He is getting better now. The dressing has to be reapplied every two days. There is no fracture, although there might be an infection (was that borrowed handkerchief really a good idea?), and there is definitely a lot of swelling. He should be able to walk well in a week or so. Meanwhile, he hops around in a way that makes our AirBnB host exclaim: “Jumpy frog! He's just a jumpy frog!”

…

Ilan and I had arrived in Goa at 1 am on the 15th of December, twenty minutes after Aahlad arrived from Hyderabad. We were planning on spending the night in the airport, or, if that seemed particularly uncomfortable, getting a hostel somewhere close ish and taxiing there. Instead, Aahlad had the idea of calling Planet Hollywood resort, where we were to stay the next evening in an Executive Suite complete with ensuite massage chair. They sent a cab and gave us complimentary watermelon juice and checked us into our room, where we each enjoyed a massage and hot shower before falling to sleep in a large, soft bed with silk sheets. The cot they gave us that night happens to have been one of the most uncomfortable beds I've ever lay down upon, so we all three shared a bed, but there was room aplenty.

The days that followed were relaxed. We slept in late, walked along the beach, hung out by the large pool and ordered margaritas and jalapeno cheese fritters. We used the massage chair many times, discovering that the Chinese massage just wasn't programmed that well, that the Thai massage was quite nice until it gottothe part where it tried to rip off your legs (you just had to power through that section), and that the Korean relaxation was: relaxing. It was nice: to sleep. I hadn't really been doing that. The previous week, I had started with 6.5 hours and worked my way down to 4 hours per night and that probably wasn't terribly healthy. But to sleep now, in those silk sheets, with no obligations except maybe to wake up before the complimentary and compelling breakfast buffet closed (after which: more sleep) was delicious. Swadisht. I took some books from the library of the Cigar Lounge, which mostly had titles the likes of which you would see in a walmart. I found, however, the silly western Sin Killer by Larry McMurty and then the rather out of place The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, which is actually like good literature. We got drinks at one of the numerous Russian-owned beach-side shacks. Went swimming in the ocean at sunset, in the poold during the day. Played a lot of ping pong.

And then we tried to scooter. Which was quite nice! We got to see a lot of Goa, Old Goa, some cathedrals that form a UNESCO world heritage site, the city of Panjim, and then the inside of a governmental hospital. Nice until then.

…

The day after the accident was our last day at Planet Hollywood. We stayed around the hotel for the day, and then left in a hurry at night, Ilan going off to the airport to fly to his family in Mumbai, Aahlad and I off to an AirBnB that we had booked rather last-minute only 2 hours before we showed up.

Or rather: I had booked. Aahlad went off to the hospital again, to show them the X-Rays, so I went ahead and booked a place with good reviews. It was later brought to my attention that the place advertised pretty clearly that it was on the fourth floor with no elevator, and that thetoilet situation was Indian-style, where it is necessary to squat. Neither of these things work terribly well when you can't bend your ankle or indeed, put weight on it. So I was scared for a bit, and thought myself rather dumb.

It turned out great though!! Manjit and Kiran were our hosts, a retired couple who had traveled all around and kind of settled in Goa after Manjit's job forced him down. He acclimated and grew to love the place, while Kiran wants to move up to the mountains in the north, maybe near Darjeeling or some such place. But anyways, they were lovely people, extremely hospitable and accommodating to Aahlad's condition. They loved to talk with us, and told us a lot about their lives and Manjit drove us around, telling us where we should pick up some good take-away food and bringing me to a private-ish beach in front of a hotel that he liked to hang out on (and bringing Aahlad to the third distinct hospital he'd visited in as many days). Kiran called Aahlad a jumpy frog, but brought him chai and cookies in bed. I spent the days wandering around Panjim while Aahlad stayed in.

But he wanted to go home and recover, and so bought flight tickets back to Hyderabad for us. We had been planning on taking a few weeks, maybe hiking in the Western Ghats, visiting a hillstation in the region of Coorg, maybe seeing some of his friends in Bangalore. Without the ability to walk, these are difficult things to do. And for me, staying with his family would be a nice thing to do. So we went to Hyderabad. A day later by accident: the tickets were bought for the wrong day. But we went to Hyderabad and that is where I am now.