Back from the End of the World For Surgery

Well the last 5 days of my Russian trip were very sunny and pleasant but that will all end sometime soon. I organised my return out of Russia to spend a short break at home with my poor wife as she is getting desperate to have me at home at all after the last 7 weeks of me travelling around the world without any date of return. I had a reasonable 14 hour train ride back to the provincial capital of Yuzhno and spoke to my manager there and he seems to be happy with my performance so that was good. I had a few hours in the hotel Strawberry Hills, the one that gave me bad food poisoning with the nasty shrimp. I got to the airport to find I was two hours early, I was desperate to get away. I had to book the flight myself as this island is just so far from anywhere the time zones are a killer for contacting the office. I got my flight to Korea and the airport there is really fantastic, well laid out and well designed, I got into the business lounge and got internet access, all on Korean computers of course. Got myself some noodles, really hot and spicy ones, fantastic junk food as the camp had nothing like it. A few beers and two hours later I was winging my way to the good ole US of A, on an 11 hour journey, I popped my sleeping pill and got a good 6 hours rest, the rest of the time was concerned with eating food and drinking wine, normal flying stuff. When I landed in Los Angeles I was severely disappointed as I had expected a really new airport but found a really old one, with an antiquated layout and bad signposting and nothing in the way of convenience, it is a 60’s design and it really shows, time for them to spend $15 billion I think. Well the only problem I had there was that all the afternoon connection to Costa Rica were full and I had to wait 11 hours to catch the midnight express, man that was a painful and tiresome waiting experience, I couldn’t even go through into the lounges as I couldn’t check in, nobody available, bad really bad, next time I will make sure I have a better connection. I am still making small changes to my bird book and did use the time wisely, I am getting very close to the point of it being totally finished.
So I land in CR next morning at 9 and I am met by my beautiful wife and it is wonderful to be home in the sunny tropical paradise of Costa Rica. I have a few things that I am desperate to do here, I need to get this cyst removed from my thumb, and I don’t want it to grow huge and then try to get it removed, I had been asking Jenny to find somewhere to get it done but not prohibitively expensive, I was even suggesting having it done at one of the many plastic surgery clinics that are springing up all over the place. But during a short conversation with her niece who is a nurse, she said she would ring her mother who is a nursing administrator in a local small town at the hospital. She rang back and told us we would get it done for nothing by going to her mother’s hospital. This was a perfect solution, I could do some bird photography and have a small holiday in the country, see all the relatives and have my thumb mutilated all for fun. It didn’t quite work out like that but was pretty entertaining. My wife’s sister is the nursing administrator and she has a new house that I hadn’t seen yet, it was on a large plot of 3 hectares and I was expecting a monster place, when we got there, the house was so small, that some of their old furniture was left outside on the patio, including bookshelves and sofas and loads of things, the house was nice but laid out so badly it had no room inside. it only has two bedrooms, it was a planning disaster, she spent so much money and got a pokey hole for her money, she also had 3 apartments built for rent to tourists, these are shockingly poor in quality and tiny also, this is where we slept, the problem was that they used gyprock walling with no insulation and it was roasting by night time and for me that was a nightmare, being jetlagged and a poor sleeper, I tried to sleep and got a couple of hours but then her chickens started crowing from midnight onwards, chickens from the whole neighbourhood were challenging each other all night, my god I wanted a gun so badly to kill them all. Hour after hour , cars driving passed at full speed and with our windows open the noise was shocking, I felt like crap. The next two nights I took a full valium tablet and slept like a baby. Life was nice though during the day and I spent time checking out the amazing birds in the garden,








then we went walking into town and Oh Buddha what a dump it is. It just happens to be in the flood plain of the giant River Sierrpe, and the town was badly flooded a few years ago and there are abandoned houses all over and houses falling down and the hospital is also in town, it was a miserable place, great birds though all over even a kingfisher in the tiny creek in town centre, but the town was crappy. It was getting dark on the way back home and the fields coming back were full of fireflies, thousands of them it was something that you only see in the wilder parts of the planet these days, it was a dancing carpet of glowing insects, a wonderful sight. The next day we went to an appointment with a doctor who said he would do all my surgery for $40, we went to his office and he looked at my finger, which had been looked at by 3 other doctors previously and said, yes it needs removing, that will be $40 for the appointment and $250 for the surgery, I was shocked, my wife nearly fell through the floor, we stood up and left with hardly saying a word. Jenny’s sister was so embarrassed and also very shocked that she had arranged this for us and we had driven for 5 hours to get there and to have this robber of a doctor tell us he was going to steal $300 from us. She said she will sort something out, the next day we went to another doctor who was complaining he was far too busy and said he could do it in a week’s time, which was not possible for me as I will be on my way to Russia before then. There was lots of hand wringing and questioning and he finally agreed to mutilate me on the Monday morning, we arrived that time to find him in a state of panic as he had lost his wallet and was frantically searching everywhere for it, he left the hospital to look at home for it and we had to wait, for another 3 hours, we went to the local café and had lots of different fresh fruit drinks, typical for a hot weather town like this, he came back and then finally I was called into his office and was sat down, my brother-in-law is also a nursing administrator and surgical assistant and he was doing the instruments for my surgery, without doubt the most painful part was the administering the anaesthetic, ironic that isn’t it. He stuck that needle in my cysts maybe 10 times and it was excruciating agony, it made every muscle of my urinary tract contract like it had never contracted before. Anyhow, I was thinking of watching the cutting but I thought better of it, as you kow there is very little skin spare on the thumb and when he had cut out that cyst it meant he was going to pull very hard to get the skin to close the wound and I am left with a thumb I cannot move for the pain and but I will have to remove the stitches myself this week maybe Friday as I cannot travel with stitches as I will not be able to carry anything of do anything with that hand. We drove home from the town, having seen some nice birds and lots of fireflies and a poor town but with my thumb lacerated and painful, good deal or what.