A Series of Unfortunate Events

I pootled down the highway on my underpowered scooter, my jaw throbbing inside a sweaty full-face helmet. I was going to the hospital. The only problem was that I was practically potless and without a working card; before I could get better, I would need to somehow get money.

At the bank next door, I turned on my ailing phone to ask my wife for help with a cardless ATM withdrawal. The phone awakened with the speed and grace of Frankenstein’s monster rising from the slab, loading at an interminable speed. As it sputtered to life, the battery counter in the corner nosedived each second: 10%, 9%, 8%. Surely this must be a mistake. I tried to dial in desperation. 6%, 5%, 4%. No network. With its dying breath, the phone summoned the last of its energy to tell me that it was shutting down. True to its word, the screen promptly turned black and I was left staring at my own incredulous face in the now useless black mirror.

I mentally scrambled for a Plan B. There was a 7-Eleven across the street which had a Wifi router for my phone network. Standing next to a busy Chiang Mai thoroughfare at rush hour, I removed my laptop from the backpack, prised open its aged clamshell and fired it up. It came to life nearly as glacially as the phone, all whilst proclaiming the annoyingly perky message “Just a moment”. This did strike me as a particularly redundant phrase; surely everything is momentary, provided you allow the passing of enough moments? I exhaled impatiently.

My password for the Wifi was incorrect; it turned out that the correct password was safely secured in a text message on my recently deceased phone. I gave up and decided that I may as well go into the hospital and get the ball rolling on my treatment.

I was seen relatively quickly. I tried to explain my predicament using some Thai words that I had translated. The nurse dutifully listened, before saying “Can you tell me in English?” in a tone that implied she had understood absolutely nothing of what I’d tried to say.

“I have been sick for three days. I have a very bad cold. But most importantly, I have swollen glands in my jaw. They’re very painful. I can’t sleep.”

I am swiftly shown to a doctor, and I repeat my symptoms. During our conversation, he looks at me like a particularly challenging crossword puzzle. I take this to not be a good thing. He decided that I needed further tests to find out what was wrong with me, which is always lovely news to receive when in a hospital.

After paying most of what little money I had, I was shown to the blood test room. After much searching, a willing vein was reluctantly found. The nurse asked me where I came from. “Northampton, in EngLAND” I intoned oddly as I was pricked with the syringe. I'd fallen for the oldest trick in the book; distracting small talk whilst you are being stabbed in the arm with an exceptionally pointy bit of metal. 

“I thought you were from England, you have a nice accent. Like you say, ‘Queen’s English’?”

“Thank you very much,” I wheezed.

“Some English speak very…I don’t know the word. ‘Local’? They say ‘Brih-isssh’”

I burst out laughing, quickly replaced by a short coughing fit. On balance, it was worth it. I was then sent to yet another room- was this a test of my physical endurance?- to receive my swabbing. It resembled a cotton bud the length of a pen.

“Look up, please” asked the nurse gently.

I smiled cordially, looked up at the ceiling, and gamely held my mouth agape.

¡JESUS CHRIST ON A BICYCLE!

My dear reader; to say I was taken aback would be an understatement of staggering magnitude. She had not in fact swabbed my mouth, but instead gone straight up my totally unguarded and unprepared nostril. I think I may have starfished my limbs; I certainly squirmed as though the chair had instantly become electrified. The nurse counted to three, but it felt like hours. If she’d explored my nasal orifice any further, I’m convinced that it would have started scratching my pre-frontal cortex.

I staggered spluttering from the examination room and was told that I had an hour before I’d get the results. Recomposing myself, I formed a new plan to solve my temporary but concerning cash-flow problem. I would call my wife from a payphone. I put my coin into the dusty payphone, only to have it drop repeatedly back out to the change compartment. Leaving the hospital, I crossed the road via a filthy footbridge to use the payphone outside the 7-Eleven, only to find it similarly out of commission. “Obviously, it’s 2019”, I thought ruefully. Plan D percolated: I would have to drive to McDonalds and use their Wifi to send the digital distress flare to my Mrs.

I hopped on my motorbike, only to have my heart drop several storeys. NO. NOT NOW. It was a flat tire. Ordinarily, I would’ve said that such cosmic bad luck was un-fucking-believable, but given the week that I had experienced it was sadly all too fucking-believable. Was I, in fact, actually cursed?

I went to a gas station in the futile, desperate hope that I could re-inflate it. Seeing me struggle to get my stand down, a fellow patron on a sidecarred motorbike took pity and helped me. He tried valiantly for a good few minutes, but even with my limited Thai I knew what he was telling me; the tire had gone. I tried to offer him some cash for helping me, but he simply smiled and refused. Already in somewhat of an emotionally fragile state, this unexpected and unprompted act of genuine selflessness pushed me over the edge. As he drove off, I couldn’t help but have a little cry inside my helmet. Things were not going well.

To cut the rest of a horrendously long story short: I got the money (at last), returned to the hospital, and left 30 minutes later with a small carrier bag stuffed with a veritable smorgasbord of pills. I slowly made my way home on tires that were by now flatter than a Dutch pancake. As I rode down the road with my spine compressing like a coiled slinky, I couldn’t help but appreciate that tires really do work much better when they are both a) full of air, and b) circular. Despite what I’d been through in the preceding few hours, I tried my best to see the funny side. After all, an obese white man riding a broken motorcycle making a regular and conspicuously loud ‘donk’ sound is objectively funny. I would have laughed.