It’s been just over a couple of years (10 years now) since two motorbikes collided head-on in Northeast Cambodia near the Vietnamese border. Unfortunately, my wife and I were on one of them.

      Road accidents are all too commonplace in Cambodia. This is due, primarily, to the fact that driver’s education is non-existent here and not even licenses are required to drive a motorbike…pre-teenagers drive the damn things. Road safety concerns and driver’s etiquette are abominable.

      It was a beautiful sunny afternoon on a relatively decent stretch of two-lane road. I spotted a truck approaching from the opposite direction. The two miscreants on a bike behind the truck failed to notice me as they swerved out to pass it. I recall an image of them that lasted no longer than a nano-second. Two bikes and four people were scattered across the road. I’m told the two Khmer boys reassembled themselves in short order and fled the scene. No surprise there. My wife (Nak) sustained three broken toes, a banged up knee and several bloody lacerations. I was knocked unconscious immediately and remained in that condition for twenty minutes until I came to in the back of a pick-up truck. A nearby rice farmer was kind enough to transport us to a provincial clinic ten miles up the road. There I sat on the end of a gurney as a small crowd gathered around to gape at what must have been a pretty sorry looking white guy. They were gaping at my left foot in particular. I glanced down. The foot was mangled…skin ripped off, tissue and tendons exposed, two toes dangling and blood oozing profusely. I just remember thinking, “Well, that’s gone.”

      I wasn’t really concerned about the foot at that moment. What bothered me was that I could barely breathe. As I learned later, five ribs had broken puncturing and collapsing both my lungs. Not being able to breathe…well, it’s alarming.

      The medic at the clinic wrapped up the foot and Nak and I headed towards Phnom Penh in a pre-World War II government ambulance. Phnom Penh was the only place where there was proper medical assistance to deal with my injuries.

      The journey lasted seven hours.

      Again, I had to sit up…the whole way. It was too painful to lie down. We did, however, have a highly skilled driver. There were one hundred and forty-seven bumps and potholes along the way and the son-of-a-bitch managed to hit every damn one of them. Try breathing thimblefuls of air for that long and under those circumstances when it feels like there’s a jagged knife twisting in your chest.

      Despite the agony of her own injuries, Nak kept me alive…she wouldn’t let me die…even when it seemed to me like a preferable alternative. When I felt I was going to pass out, I tapped my chest…the pain of that kept me conscious.

      We arrived at Calmette Hospital at 10:30 PM. By 3 the next morning, a third of my foot was gone but, my lungs had been repaired and, with compressed air, I could breathe again. Funny how we take breathing for granted. I don’t do that anymore.

      I spent a week in ICU attached to eight tubes…more than any other patient, which I was quite proud of.  Against the doctor’s judgment, I chose to check myself out. Good thing too because I found out, subsequently, that they intended to remove the rest of my foot. With all the wretched landmines in this country…it’s an orthopedic surgeon’s paradise.

      (This is not, by any means, the whole story. But, maudlin recollections of this nature tend to bore the hell out of me. I’m not the least bit interested in rousing anybody’s pity or making myself out to be some sort of intrepid character. My wife is the hero of this episode. And, the hero of my life.)

      Otherwise, much to the chagrin of the national tourist organization, I tell people: “Hey, come visit Cambodia, the Kingdom of Wonder, where you, too, can become an amputee!”