Medical retreat for summer break

The Jakarta Post ,  Jakarta   |  Sun, 06/25/2006 3:45 PM  |  Life

When considering future Metro Mads recently, it occurred to me that Jakarta's hospitals and health services would make an interesting subject. They would be a topical one, too, what with ex-president Soeharto's well-publicized stay in hospital.

Yes, the old man and his doctors seem to have cheated death once more, denying the lava Beelzebub emerging from Mount Merapi, which has been trying to haul the ex-dictator down into the fiery depths of Hades.

It honestly wasn't my plan to be admitted as an inpatient to one of the city's hospitals in order to research the project. Nevertheless, admitted I was when my motorcycling luck finally ran out two weeks ago.

When something like this happens you torture yourself with ""what ifs"". What if I'd set off on my journey five seconds later? What if I had ridden a different route to the office?

Looking at the whole sorry business more rationally though, on how many other occasions had I ridden my luck and had a near miss? Perhaps statistics were just catching up with me -- statistics which say that 50 percent of hospital beds in Southeast Asia are taken up by the victims of motorcycle accidents.

And so it came to pass that I found myself spinning through the air like a rag doll before crunching into a heap on the road. My first thought was, ""I'm still conscious, thank God I was wearing a proper helmet instead of one of those polyurethane baseball hats that are favored by many of Jakarta's bikers.""

My second thought, which followed about three quarters of a second later, was, ""Aaagh! My leg! My leg! Oh my God!"" After this second thought had made its weighty presence felt, remaining conscious then became somewhat of a mixed blessing.

I had clipped a bajaj (to the great amusement of my friends) which had swerved recklessly in front of me. Thankfully, a policeman was immediately at my side (how often does one hear that in this country?) and he helped me as I lay prostrate, emitting feeble cries of pain. He removed my life-saving helmet and helped to lay me gently onto the backseat of a taxi.

Thankfully, hordes of young guys hadn't started to emerge from the bushes in order to start unbolting my carburetor and various other parts of my vehicle, as had happened to a friend of mine when he came off his bike. My iron horse would be taken to a police station vehicle lock-up and it was with somewhat bitter irony that I learned, a few days later, that it was almost completely unscratched.

Ten minutes -- that seemed like 10 days -- later, we arrived at Pertamina hospital. Soeharto Mansions, no less! I was then taken to an emergency room and lay, a broken man, on a trolley while the kindly constable called my boss for me. When he arrived, there followed a conversation, just out of earshot, in which presumably my boss was reassuring hospital administrators that, whilst English teachers are hardly the highest paid expatriates in town, we were all medically insured nevertheless and that the bill would be paid.

A lack of basic healthcare is one of the most unpleasant realities that citizens of this country face on a daily basis. No money means no vital operation, which means death. Even as I was lying there in the emergency room, a man was turned away from the hospital doors. Admittedly, he was already dead though.

The taxi driver who had brought him in was remonstrating with the hospital staff thusly:

""But why can't I leave him here? He's dead.""

""Does he have a KTP (identity card) on him?""

""No, I can't find one.""

""Well, take him away. He may be dead but he's not being dead in here.""

Yogyakarta's pitiful earthquake victims have faced similar problems of hospital intransigence recently. Many citizens of the richest country in the history of the world, the U.S.A., also face these problems though, and are often bankrupted or have to sell their houses in order to pay crippling medical bills.

I thanked my lucky stars that my colleagues and I were insured, and also that my own country, the U.K., still offers free healthcare to all of its citizens through the National Health Service (NHS). Despite the Brits' frequent moans about NHS service and hospital waiting lists, the system remains one of the greatest things that any country ever did for its people.

Back to me crying in the emergency room though. I was eventually wheeled away for a painful X-ray which revealed the true extent of my injuries -- a broken leg, a fractured wrist and collar bone. Bad enough, sure, but it could have been so much worse. I could have also been turned away for being dead, for starters.

I was then taken up to surgery because, these days, the preferred procedure for broken bones involves bits of metal being put into you as opposed to the more traditional, and less accurate, plaster casts. The general anesthetic mask was pulled down over my mouth and I breathed hard, willing sweet oblivion down on my battered frame...

(To be continued next week... You've been warned...!)

-- Simon Pitchforth

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