Galata Tower

How cute is this fat little Türk smoking his water pipe and checking text messages from da honies?

My Blue Moon

Yesterday, I had my second experience with the Turkish emergency medical system, on a grand scale. I am fine, but really really sore. I was at school, rushing off to a meeting in another building, through a playground in the rain. When I got into the new building, I was a little too careless on the hard linoleum stairs and my feet went out from under me and I fell down them, onto my back and arms. At first, I genuinely couldn't move and it made me quite nervous. I was helped up by my principal and a few stray teachers who also hadn't made it into the meeting room yet. My first thought was 'are there security cameras here and was this caught on tape?' I was assisted onto some chairs where I found myself unable to sit down because my lower back side on the right and at the base of my spine was throbbing viciously. The school doctor and nurse rushed to the scene (or casually walked, I didn't actually see them on the move) and decided it was quite important that an ambulance be called and I head to the emergency room. Security guards were called to lift me on to the stretcher and by this time, the mortification started to set in, as I held an ice pack on my ass and realized that I could probably limp onto a stretcher and gently lay myself down on it. The room was full of worried on-lookers and nobody was going to allow me to move. When the two guards came in with the stretcher I said to myself 'they're going to need more dudes.'

Once on the stretcher, laid out on the floor of the pre-school teacher's lounge, we all waited for the ambulance to arrive. When it did arrive, i was lifted onto a gurney and wheeled out of the building into the now glaring sun. I was slid into the ambulance and two medics hopped in after me. They offered me a shot of pain medication, but I really wanted to remain lucid. A Turkish teacher came with me for translation and her English is impeccable, but better safe than sorry. I'd hate to wake up with an amputated anus. The ambulance took off like a bat out of hell. The sirens were blaring and I was thrown from side to side because at that point, I realized that I wasn't actually strapped to anything. I was just laying on a cot on wheels in an erratically moving vehicle through bumpy streets full of other insane Turkish drivers. The medics got comfortable, propped their feet up on my stretcher and relaxed for the long ride to the German hospital, which is an incredibly state of the art facility and beautifully decorated for comfort and style by the way. They were worried I had hurt my neck and spinal cord because of the location of the injury and so a neurosurgeon and an orthopedic were going to be examining me. This was their fear, yet no precautions were taken to secure my body to anything at any point and my head was allowed to loll about on a squishy pillow. They wouldn't let me walk because moving would be bad for me, but it was ok for them to turn me into a human pin ball. Hmm.

I was wheeled into the emergency room and pushed past a pink curtain to wait for the doctors to see me and nicely enough, that only took about 20 minutes. They determined that a pelvic x-ray and a chest x-ray would be necessary and I was wheeled down to radiology. At some point, the orderlies got tired of lifting me from bed to bed, so they started having me scoot onto the next gurney. It was like they had already determined that I was ok, but they weren't done with formalities yet. While getting my x-rays done, the nurse started tearing off my clothes while the orderlies were standing around and when I balked, she waited for them to turn their backs to leave and then tried to tear them off again while the doors were wide open to the hallway. They kept saying 'no problem no problem' – I hate that. The radiologist was positioning me on the table and grabbed my hips and pulled them across the table, which caused me to scream an expletive in English and burst into fresh tears. It was agony and for that, she's dead to me. Who grabs a purple region of somebody's flesh and squeezes? The film was looked at almost immediately and the doctors agreed that my spine was narrow and they were surprised I didn't have more back trouble, but that nothing was broken or fractured. Then, the neurosurgeon asked if he could see the region again, which is actually my upper right butt-cheek, so I had to pull down my pants a bit and as a final examination, he poked it with his index finger. At that point, they decided I could stand and walk on my own.

I am to spend the next 2 days lying down, walking minimally, and not standing still in one place, or doing household chores. I was given pain medication, which I actually need because this is very painful and I can't sit down properly and my butt cheek is so dark purple and red that it amazes all my friends. If it weren't for the fact that I've always been opposed to having my bare ass on the internet, a picture of the area in question would accompany this entry. Pictures will be taken, rest assured, just not posted on a blog. Or a porn site, so don't ask. At that point, I desperately needed to go to the bathroom and one of my roommates was kind enough to arrive as soon as possible to escort me home. So the nurse took me to the bathroom, which was downstairs from the lobby and stairs were painful to walk down and I hobbled and clutched the railing and gasped a lot, so the nurse decided that we could take the elevator back up to the lobby because it hurt to walk. What a dip shit, there was an elevator all along? How did these people end up in charge of the care of others? I guess I shouldn't be too angry, she wasn't even smart enough to leave the side of my bed while I was getting x-rays, she just stood there staring at me while the radiologist ran behind her metal screen. I was given no lead apron, of course.

I live with the 2 most wonderful roommates anybody could ever want. They both came to the hospital and escorted me home, made dinner and have been very caring and considerate. In return, I let them stare at my blue moon.

These fish are gross - I like pretty ones better

If these weren't mosques, this could totally be Vegas