moose eater
Well-known member
I had my right foot and ankle between my crank case of my motorcycle and a woman's bumper in 1975, when I went into a slide trying to avoid a more serious impact, and it hammered my foot and ankle between the 2 more solid objects.Had a similar incident with 'home-grown' doctors vs. the 'imports' that people seem to complain about a lot. Had a somewhat bad motorcycle accident and it took a few days getting back to civilization before I could see a doctor, I decided to go private and pay through the nose for 'the best help money could buy'. The kiwi doctor who owned the practice and had been a osteopath for 20+ years told me there was very little to worry about with both my swollen foot and smashed tibia. I was concerned as I had previous injuries on both areas, but took the guy at his word. A week and a half went by and I was in so much pain I couldn't walk, had what looked like bruising all around the smashed area of my leg. Decided to get a second opinion from the local free clinic. Thought I needed an x-ray to see what had happened to the bone and previous titanium rod in that leg. The radiologist on that day had recently arrived from Taiwan and spoke very little English, but enough to sit me down and say, "Mate, I'm the professional here, you don't have bruising you have a major infection." Turns out I did and when I went to their specialist he said it was good I went for a second opinion because the infection was so bad that if I left it another week they would have had to take my leg.
The local PD showed up after a biker and a trucker had carried me out of the highway, and when they removed my shoe, my foot immediately turned into a huge orb. The cop was grinning, as I was a bit of a known 'commodity' in that place, even at that age.
No broken bones, but I'd burst a vessel in the instep of my right foot, and it acted like inflating a basketball.
But the ambulance driver, racing down the street with lights and siren blaring, wouldn't blow any red lights. So, every time he'd be flashing along, and a light would turn yellow, he'd hit the brakes, and my foot was to the rear of the ambulance, the fluids (blood, etc.) in my foot would try to push their way up my leg from the inertia of his braking and THAT hurt like a bastard.
Finally, I asked the guy that if he wasn't going to blow the lights, would he please slow down, as the abrupt stops were killing me.
I contracted gangrene in the open tissue where I'd lost the skin on the inside of the right ankle, but got it straightened out.
That was back when a good family Doc took care of damned near everything. There were specialists for cancer, heart issues, etc., but the system hadn't become so convoluted as to require a different Doc for everything under the Sun.
I looked at spine surgery through private clinics in India about 7 or 8 years ago and have acquaintances up here who had gone to similar clinics in India, one for a double knee replacement. They had very good experiences.
The concept of foreign Docs doesn't typically concern me that much. Docs who are beyond culpability in court, like priests and cops are/were due to social conditioning of the average juror, and poorly written protectionist regs or laws, those scare the hell out of me.
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