What had happened to me was a bacteria called "pseudomonis aeriginosa". That name is certainly a mouthful?! One of the student doctors, or intern, wrote it down for me. When I came out of the hospital, I looked it up on the internet, because I had never heard of this bacteria before. Nasty piece of business, this bacteria is! I realized later that this was the primary cause of death in humans and also elephants who had died of bacterial infection. If the pseudominis bacteria finds it's way into the bloodstream, life expectancy is expected to fall to 50/50. Not very promising is it.
I'm getting ahead of my self now.....every day I was given something like 6 to 8 hard-boiled eggs to eat. The eggwhite is protein that will help the flesh on my foot to increase sufficiently to do a skin graft.
Looking at my feet, the missing skin and flesh, with tendons and bone showing....left me thinking and feeling...so this is the human body. Just meat really!! For lack of a better description.
The big day finally came and I was wheeled back into the operating theatre for part two of my ordeal...the long awaited skin graft. The skin layers were taken from my thigh and stitched up on my foot. Hygiene was critical for the healing process here. That meant constant cleaning, because less than 48 hours after surgery, the wound is treated as an open wound, to enable cleaning and promote healing.
I had entered the hospital without any money and the cost would have been far too great for the manager to bear himself. After some discussion with the hospital, myself and the manager, it was decided to start sending emails. In Thailand this is a most effective way to get help when help is really needed. I send email to friend and friend sends email to friend, and so on. At some point the TV stations got hold of this mail, but that's another story. In any case, the hospital was very helpful and helped keep the cost down, so that in the end, the bill came to only 55,000.- baht. This is very cheap if one considers 1 month hospitalization, 2 operations, not to mention all the medication that was required! People from around Thailand had sent money, some even came to visit me at the hospital to hand me the money personally! It was quite an experience, unlike anything that I had ever lived through....and believe me, there were many close shaves in my short life of 50 years!
Possibly a week after the skin graft, I was released from hospital. All was well and the wound was healing without further complication. I still couldn't walk, the day I left!! No weight had been placed on my foot since the infection put me in hospital. The manager didn't allow me to go back to the elephant camp. The risk of re-infection was too great for that. Instead I was to find shelter at his home, together with his wife and children. I stayed with the family for about 6 weeks before it was time to get back to the reality of everyday life. I say that because everything that had happened seemed to have happened through a maze of some kind. To me it seemed like all this was a movie....like it was happening to someone else and I was only the observer. People would come for a visit and then the newspapers and TV people followed up!
Suddenly I was front-page news....why? One for being a white female mahout and two, for having received such genorousity from the thai people. Another 3 weeks went by, and before I knew it, I was in a TV studio as a guest of VIP on Channel 9, elephant and all.....
I didn't have much strength at the time and still wasn't walking properly, but here I was propped up on the neck of Om, an adolescent female elephant of 20 years. Om had been performing in Japan and Taiwan and was difficult to unsettle.....but the studio did it!! She unnerved the truck-driver by attempting to check out the surrounding traffic with her trunk on the way to Bangkok from Ayutthaya!! Om took one look at the moving crane with mounted camera and decided this was not for her. Oh oh!! I knew she was gonna run and I was not prepared for this by a long shot!! I called to her mahout to help keep Om under control for the short shoot. She did settle down eventually...bananas go a long way! On the program VIP I told my life story and how it was that I became a mahout. Of course people also wanted to know the circumstances under which I ended up like this.
Some time after this Channel 5 also looked me up at the elephant camp and did a 10 minute spot which showed my work as a mahout and the fact that although salaries were minimum, I was happy doing what I was. I also received a basket full of health goodies and a 20,000.- cheque to help pay for post hospital care.
By now I was able to resume work, nothing fancy I might add. Picking up elephant shit all day and keeping the premises clean. Not too stressfull on the brain for sure. Basically I became bored. I was getting nowhere and no longer trusted that I had the strength to take on a 4 ton elephant full time. I would still regularly
take the elephants out for grass after work, or chain them up in the jungle for the night.
Within a year I had fully recovered from my ordeal. It was now time to give back to society what society had given to me.
I'm getting ahead of my self now.....every day I was given something like 6 to 8 hard-boiled eggs to eat. The eggwhite is protein that will help the flesh on my foot to increase sufficiently to do a skin graft.
Looking at my feet, the missing skin and flesh, with tendons and bone showing....left me thinking and feeling...so this is the human body. Just meat really!! For lack of a better description.
The big day finally came and I was wheeled back into the operating theatre for part two of my ordeal...the long awaited skin graft. The skin layers were taken from my thigh and stitched up on my foot. Hygiene was critical for the healing process here. That meant constant cleaning, because less than 48 hours after surgery, the wound is treated as an open wound, to enable cleaning and promote healing.
I had entered the hospital without any money and the cost would have been far too great for the manager to bear himself. After some discussion with the hospital, myself and the manager, it was decided to start sending emails. In Thailand this is a most effective way to get help when help is really needed. I send email to friend and friend sends email to friend, and so on. At some point the TV stations got hold of this mail, but that's another story. In any case, the hospital was very helpful and helped keep the cost down, so that in the end, the bill came to only 55,000.- baht. This is very cheap if one considers 1 month hospitalization, 2 operations, not to mention all the medication that was required! People from around Thailand had sent money, some even came to visit me at the hospital to hand me the money personally! It was quite an experience, unlike anything that I had ever lived through....and believe me, there were many close shaves in my short life of 50 years!
Possibly a week after the skin graft, I was released from hospital. All was well and the wound was healing without further complication. I still couldn't walk, the day I left!! No weight had been placed on my foot since the infection put me in hospital. The manager didn't allow me to go back to the elephant camp. The risk of re-infection was too great for that. Instead I was to find shelter at his home, together with his wife and children. I stayed with the family for about 6 weeks before it was time to get back to the reality of everyday life. I say that because everything that had happened seemed to have happened through a maze of some kind. To me it seemed like all this was a movie....like it was happening to someone else and I was only the observer. People would come for a visit and then the newspapers and TV people followed up!
Suddenly I was front-page news....why? One for being a white female mahout and two, for having received such genorousity from the thai people. Another 3 weeks went by, and before I knew it, I was in a TV studio as a guest of VIP on Channel 9, elephant and all.....
I didn't have much strength at the time and still wasn't walking properly, but here I was propped up on the neck of Om, an adolescent female elephant of 20 years. Om had been performing in Japan and Taiwan and was difficult to unsettle.....but the studio did it!! She unnerved the truck-driver by attempting to check out the surrounding traffic with her trunk on the way to Bangkok from Ayutthaya!! Om took one look at the moving crane with mounted camera and decided this was not for her. Oh oh!! I knew she was gonna run and I was not prepared for this by a long shot!! I called to her mahout to help keep Om under control for the short shoot. She did settle down eventually...bananas go a long way! On the program VIP I told my life story and how it was that I became a mahout. Of course people also wanted to know the circumstances under which I ended up like this.
Some time after this Channel 5 also looked me up at the elephant camp and did a 10 minute spot which showed my work as a mahout and the fact that although salaries were minimum, I was happy doing what I was. I also received a basket full of health goodies and a 20,000.- cheque to help pay for post hospital care.
By now I was able to resume work, nothing fancy I might add. Picking up elephant shit all day and keeping the premises clean. Not too stressfull on the brain for sure. Basically I became bored. I was getting nowhere and no longer trusted that I had the strength to take on a 4 ton elephant full time. I would still regularly
take the elephants out for grass after work, or chain them up in the jungle for the night.
Within a year I had fully recovered from my ordeal. It was now time to give back to society what society had given to me.
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