In the last years, travel has come to mean more than the predictable week at the beach with the family. People are traveling to out of the way places and undeveloped areas of the world. As this happens more travelers are returning home with untreated diseases or tales of receiving medical care that was unlike what they may have been expecting.

My husband, Stassi, and I divide our lives between our home in Montserrat in the West Indies and our apartment in Taxco, Mexico. Life in the small island country of Montserrat is as tranquil as one could hope to find. We don’t have a movie theater, but then we don’t have graffiti. We do have an active volcano and our beautiful intimate black sand beaches are washed by some of the cleanest water you’ll find. With a population of only about 5,000, one might not expect professional emergency medical care and, naively, we never thought about it until one fateful day in our lovely garden.

As on any normal morning we drank coffee on the deck and went off for our morning garden walk. We headed first to the front of the house--the cactus garden, the bamboo garden, and the wall gardens--then walked down the road by the hibiscus hedge, pausing to comment on the small bougainvilleas we planted last year; they’re doing well. We walked around the corner and into the side of the property where we’ve planted bamboo, papaya, lime and breadfruit trees. This is a savage part of the garden–vines strangling trees, volunteers struggling for a place with the already established scraggly trees and bushes. It still needs lot of work, but is slowly taking on some character.

Then we strolled over to the lower vegetable garden for the daily harvest of too many Mexican hot peppers– guajillo pulla, mira el ciel, and habanero the fiery hot chili. We passed by the ever flowering orchids in the mahogany tree and the never flowering orchids in another tree ending at the upper vegetable garden where the spinach, cilantro, and sorrel were doing fine.

I went back to the house with our pepper harvest and we were off to the banana garden which has long been in a terrible state, but is finally showing promise. Everything got a bit of fertilizer–the new papaya, the plantains and the beautiful sweet banana along with the bamboo plants. I watered the squash and Stassi took care of the other plants.

This is when our idyllic morning in the garden ended. As we turned to leave I looked down to see my foot sliding backwards in the wet clay soil. I fell slowly, breaking my left leg as I landed. Screaming, I dragged myself to the nearby stone stairs with Stassi’s help and could go no further. He ran to the house to call the emergency rescue team who had to travel from the other end of the island up and down and around its hills and mountains to get here. Finally, two men in uniform came down the stairs bringing a pole stretcher and with kindness and expertise lifted me onto a sheet, inserted stout poles in the runners along its edges and carried me to the ambulance. Setting me down with care they carefully braced my leg for the trip to the hospital. Stassi climbed in and we were off on what was a painful ride as bone’s rubbed on bones with every pothole jarring thump of the wheels, but soon we were on the smooth new road. At the small hospital they carried me carefully from the truck and placed me gently on the one examining table.

Dr. Gopal confirmed the break, authorized a pain shot and asked St. Clair to wheel me to the X-ray Department. The modern equipment and the kind and professional X-ray technician quieted me and confirmed the break–a nice neat diagonal split in the fibula, the smaller of the two leg bones. Back in St. Clair’s able hands I was wheeled to a ward bed to await the surgeon who would set the bone and apply a cast. 

Lying quietly in the bed, I felt relieved, like I was in good hands and the pain shot had eased the worst of the situation. A nurse came by and asked if we wanted lunch or something to drink. The bone was set and a cast applied.

As I waited outside the hospital while Stassi paid the bill, the hospital’s Clerical Officer, Janice Ponde, called a taxi for us. When one did not arrive right away, she asked St. Clair to take us home in the emergency van, stopping by the Red Cross office for crutches and a wheelchair. The pharmacy was closed when we were leaving the hospital, but it proved no problem; Janice generously offered to drop by our house later in the day with pain medication.

It was a very different experience than we’d had a few years earlier in the States when our bright shiny red rental car was hit by a drunk driver traveling at 100 mph. After careening off the right side highway barrier blowing the air bags, we rolled three times across five lanes of traffic landing upside down on the left side of the highway. We crawled out the one uncrushed window. Within a few minutes, two huge rescue trucks arrived. Though we were coherent and able to walk, we were forced onto flat hard boards, our heads, bodies and hands strapped down. No one talked to us, no one listened to us; they had a job to do, they had procedures.

The players:

Theresa Meade

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