{UPDATE: Golf is doing really well, her foot is healing well though she is now feeling sad at the loss of her toe. We’re hoping that she will still do really well on her exams and can try to get into medical school next year. Thanks everybody for the kind words and support.}

On Saturday Golf came off her moped and seriously damaged two toes on her left foot. The clinic on our island patched her up and sent her to Samui to the main hospital. They estimated that if she had surgery within a few hours she would keep her toes.

Golf is an incredibly bright, beautiful, hardworking young girl whose ambition is to be a nurse in the army because (though she’s got the grades) Crab and the family can’t afford medical school for her. Yesterday at the age of nineteen she had her toes amputated.

Golf, Egger, Way, and Crab in the kitchen

The first time she saw the doctor on Samui was at 5pm in the evening, in surgery. He was notified at 10am that she needed emergency surgery. She and crab sat on the ward, while the doctor on-call failed to show for seven hours and Golf’s toe died. When he did finally grace them with his presence he didn’t even check her first to assess the damage; fully unqualified to perform surgery, he met her for the first time on the operating table, where he proceeded to butcher her foot.

Then Golf was left for twenty-four hours with a blackened, gangrenous toe hanging off her foot. No doctor checked her after surgery, no dressing was changed. When I arrived at the hospital there were four nurses sitting behind glass, with four patients in the entire ward, yet Golf had dirty bandage hanging off her foot, hair stuck in her wound, and a clearly dead body part rapidly spreading gangrene and poisoning her bloodstream.

Once Shrimp and I arrived, you’d better believe things changed fast. Because we have the confidence to kick up a fuss and we are given this right by the fact that we are educated and I am a farang. What makes my blood boil is that Golf lost her toes because she is a young, poor, Thai, with the wrong skin tone and is thus afraid to speak up to authority.

Had I been there it would not have happened, had I been there the doctor would not have treated her body part as disposable, and her surgery as a non-priority. But I wasn’t there and Golf was not deemed important, wealthy, white or powerful enough to warrant basic medical care. She lost her toe because she lives in a country where a young, poor, dark-skinned girl has no right to anything and certainly not to ask when the doctor will arrive.

I will not rant here too much. It suffices to say that I am meditating on responsibility, that I have been resistant to for a long while, that I need to step up and accept; because I do have responsibility to those whom I take care of who are not able to stand up for themselves, and who lose their toes if they don’t have someone like me to speak up for them.

It suffices to say that the doctor, the hospital administrator, the director, and the ward nurse are hopefully all meditating on their negligence, their wrong decision-making, poor management and blatant disregard for humanity. As well as the lawsuit that is coming their way.

Golf is doing well, in a private international hospital that we can’t really afford, but which I blagged her into and into amputation surgery. We will deal with the rest as it comes, she is safe, though minus a body part. As is typical of her resilience, not a tear was shed, not a drama, not a histrionic in sight, her main concern was that I might be tired running the kitchen, and that Clear Sky is happy.

The private hospital have done everything they can to help us and to smooth things over. The director has personally asked us not to sue the negligent hospital as we will be taking resources away from those who need them and doctors are scarce. I hear and respect this point, I don’t believe in litigious societies, but I do feel that this doctor was not only negligent in the extreme, but that he was negligent based on a class judgement, a reality that is common in Thailand and which he admitted to me face-to-face.

This is why while I don’t believe in the lawsuit culture we’ve come to expect in the West I do believe in accountability, and I will be thinking very hard about the best way to achieve accountability on a nineteen year old girl’s behalf, in a classist, racist, elitist, corrupt society such as this.

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1. Golf is off to university…..

Today was a good day. I think. Or if not perhaps a good day then at least one of note, one where we managed to make baby steps towards achieving something. I think. Or perhaps if not actually achieving something then at least managing to keep my finger plugging the hole in the dam and staving off disaster for at least twenty four more hours.

Here is the main pseudo-achievement/finger plugging milestone of the day. We are open. Despite arriving to no water, no electric, no food, broken fridges, no staff and general monsoon sogginess, we are open for business.

Bad news, the only business we did was locals, all of whose beautiful friendly faces I am delighted to see and welcome as my friends, I hate that the cynic in me means that the joy I have in seeing my friends again is tempered by the awareness that all our money is spent on stock and all the locals are currently drinking that stock, on tab; which means tomorrow we will have even less cash than we do right now, and less stock and no money at all to pay for the beer they are drinking right now, which is on tick from the small shop.

In the morning my worst fears are confirmed as there is absolutely no money in the cash box, so we didn’t even make enough to buy the valve for the water pump today, or even the gasoline to drive to town to buy the valve we don’t have the money for. Which means how long without running water? and begs one of life’s eternal questions: How long can a person wash up in a bucket and pretend to run a bar with no way to clean glasses?

Crab has done a bunk apparently. This is not so unusual, she is known to abscond without warning, usually at critical times for the business. Like last year when our main investor was coming to inspect the black hole into which his money has disappeared.

Oh, and the night we closed for the season, when I was left to cook for a restaurant full of people entirely alone. And not forgetting the night I arrived back from giving birth in the UK, when I got in from three days of traveling and went straight into the kitchen, frying fish with a four week old newborn clutched in my arms.

My mum jokes that they don’t make spatter guards for babies, I think I would find it funnier if my baby wasn’t actually in danger in a Thai kitchen most of the time.

Anyway this time, again critical night – opening for the season, can’t do any Thai food, or about half the menu alone- there is really something up. I know there’s some sort of fight going on with Shrimp, she’s been complaining about her eyes, which is a sure indicator of intention to quit.

Shrimp’s being very cagey about what’s actually going on, and as usual I am getting the inscrutable, and totally useless Thai answer for everything: maybe yes, maybe no. This usually means worst case scenario, but the person is hoping they wont ever have to actually tell you that.

So I’m prepped and ready to lose my best asset the indefatigable Crab. I am sorely tempted to beg, don’t leave me Crab, please. Don’t surrender me to this sinking ship of blocked drains, broken pipes, water shortages, non-flushing toilets, electrifying fridges and baby death traps. Stay, please, only your Massaman curry can save us.

Actually I am glad to report the fridge is no longer a death trap, by some miracle of Thai electrics it has been earthed, and has stopped hurling people across the bar. This welcome respite from death by electrocution is only slightly negated by the fact that it has stopped working completely, and is duly compensated for by the fact that now the toaster oven has started electrocuting people instead. Oh well, you can’t have everything I suppose.

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The Thais believe that when you are pregnant you see snakes. This startling piece of information was relayed to me as gospel by Crab. I responded in the only way I could, with feigned incredulity and gratitude for the information, while mentally dismissing another old wives tale. I have somewhat revised my opinion from total dismissal to grudging possibility based on this highly scientific data: the number of snakes I saw from that point onwards.

Don’t get me wrong, snakes in Thailand are not that rare, in fact their commonness could be likened to red buses in London: in other words you never see one when you need one, and then loads come along at once. I have been coming to Thailand for ten years and living here for three, I have never come across a snake of my own volition as it were.

I have heard the war stories, of cobras as high as your head ready to strike, and deadly venomous snakes relaxing in bed with tourists, and gargantuan pythons leisurely crossing the road. I have witnessed snakes caught in the jungle, or even barbequed by workers on building sites, I have never had the terrifyingly thrilling discovery of a snake myself, not even a mini, harmless tree snake.

That is until I got pregnant, or more specifically until I found out I was pregnant and Crab filled me in on the whole snake-pregnancy continuum. Then suddenly snakes were slithering out from every rock to accost me, or so it seemed.

Not out King Cobra!

The first incident was at home, a place never previously, to my knowledge, inhabited by snakes. For several days as I passed the large damp wood pile stacked at the back door I had heard an ominous movement, not quite a slithering, but definitely a minor disturbance. In my gooey impregnated brain I neither fully computed the significance of this, or perhaps sub-consciously dismissed it as the monitor lizards which loved to leap around in the klong just behind the restaurant.

I was woken up quite rudely to the possibilities of slitherings in the wood pile in Thailand a few days later when Old Lucky shouted to Crab and she went flying past me at the sink washing dishes and out the back door. Pretty soon all the neighbours, family, passersby and construction workers were gathered at our back door; there was a king cobra in the wood pile. And not a little fella either.

There then ensued what I like to call the dance of the cobra, consisting of about ten bold and brave men surrounding the wood pile and proceeding to leap at it with sticks, their success at hitting the snake was measured by cheers and their relative machismo likewise. Everyone told me to get back in the kitchen, I as a pregnant woman was most likely to get bitten of course.

Finally a passing migrant worker, exhibiting the most machismo of all, leapt into the pile and grabbed the mighty beast’s tail. Whipping it out in one movement he cracked it like a whip to kill it; no mean feat as it was about two metres long. Everyone cheered, much inspecting of the snake followed, and eventually everyone dispersed, the workers taking the snake with them to eat. I was slightly disappointed we didn’t get to keep it as trophy, I was very excited by my first real interaction with a wild cobra.

The second one came shortly after – I was in my friend’s truck racing for the six am boat. The Jungle is gorgeous at that time of the morning, dew lying heavy, the coolness rising from the ground, the sky just pinking up for the day and a formidable calm over everything . We were racing down the twists and turns of our diabolical jungle road, me crammed in the back, Shrimp in front with her little boy.

I was just relaying the exciting story of the cobra when we rounded the bend and nearly hit a monster one. My friend swerved to avoid it and we careened on, but my hear was in my mouth, that was a bloody massive cobra coiled in the road, and two snakes in as many days. Maybe there was something to this pregnancy snake thing.

I went on to see another five snakes over the course of my pregnancy, in fact it got to the point where I was expecting them round every corner. I uncovered pythons behind vases in the restaurant, tree snakes under backpacks, and cobras drinking from the ponds at the front of the house.

A friend suggested maybe when you’re pregnant you have heightened awareness, and there may very well be something in that. Or indeed it may be pregnant woman are more in tune with their serpentine friends as thai myth supposes.

Either way I am just glad that now I have returned to normal the snakes have begun behaving themselves again and since Clear Sky was born I haven’t seen a one.

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