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You might be thinking, "Hit by a TRAIN?!? Yeah, right, maybe a small train, or a tram!" Well, no! I was hit by a train. A real double decker train. One that weighs about 20 TONS per axle! Upon the relating of this phrase, "I have been hit by a train before", many people question my intelligence. "A train?", "How do you get hit by a train?", "What are you some kind of a moron?" Well, no! The story I am about to relate to you, the story you are about to read is ENTIRELY TRUE! Enjoy!

This story began when I accepted an assignment to live in the Netherlands for two years as a teacher. The Netherlands is located in Europe and is bordered by the North Sea, Germany, Luxemburg, and Belgium. Many people associate the Netherlands with Holland. Holland is further associated with Amsterdam, a city made famous by its lax rules on drugs and prostitution. Which is unfortunate because there is so much more to the city than the perverse things that has made it famous. Holland and the Netherlands are the same place. Holland is merely a province in the Netherlands (as British Columbia is a province in Canada). This assignment would include a two month language speed course for the native tongue of Holland, Dutch. (I will refer to the Netherlands as Holland from now on so as not to confuse the layman) So on March 31st, 1999 I left for the training center. I would not see my family or friends for two years. We were only allowed to correspond by mail. I had just turned 19 years old. So you can imagine my emotions at this time. I had never been away from my home for more than a few months at a time and I have always had friends around that I could hang out with. I was learning a language that I would be expected to speak, write, and understand fluently four months later. A strange land, a strange language, and the only comfort I had could be found in two suitcases, which held all of my earthly possesions. I was very intimidated.
I spent the next two months learning Dutch. It was hard, but we hit it hard, learning about 30 words a day. It's much like an anatomy course you would take at school. Terms are thrown at you every day and you are expected to know them by the next day and also be prepared to learn more words. We studied grammer, verbs, and pronunciation. Everyday for two months was hit hard. Don't get me wrong, we had relaxation time, but it was still intense. The two months went by fast and we were ready to fly to Europe. My group consisted of three other teachers, two other guys my age and a 21 year old female. We were ready to get out of the training center and see the land we had heard so much about over the past couple of months.
We had three connecting flights and after what seemed like 16 hours, oh, wait it was a 16 hour flight, we arrived at Schipol airport, located outside of Amsterdam. I was so jet lagged I couldn't see straight. For some reason it hit me so hard. Two days later after I had arrived in the city where I would be teaching my friend and I were at the store buying some food and I was falling asleep with the basket in my hand as I walked down the aisles. I dropped the milk I was carrying a couple of times because I was falling asleep as I was walking. I had a headache bigger than a whole bottle of 1000mg bottle of ibuprofen could handle. I felt this way five days later but it was coupled with the fact that I couldn't understand one person. I felt like the speed course didn't help me a bit. I could say hello and I could talk a bit to some people, but they spoke so darn fast. I kept thinking. "I am in Holland, 8,000 miles from anyone I know, I cant understand anyone, I'm tired, frustrated, cold, wet (it had been raining like a waterfall for four days straight), I can't speak Dutch, my bike is a piece of crap, and I am going to be here for two more years." Joy. I still remained happy through all of this however, and on the fifth day of me being in Holland, the rain stopped. The sun came out and birds were chirping. I wasn't tired anymore and my breakfast tasted good. Have you ever woken up to a bright sun, a good shower, meal, and you get to put on your favorite clothes? This was one of those days. We were going to go to a petting zoo this morning and help out a friend of ours. I put on my favorite jeans and my favorite flannel and we headed out the door.
My bike lock unlocked easily and we jumped on our bikes. My bike was in the right gear and we took off. Everyhing was going right. It's like when you go to school and you forgot to do your homework and your teacher says the whole assignment is cancelled. We were a little late and so we were pushing it pretty hard. We were pedaling fast and a bit of sweat managed to form on my forehead. We were riding parallel to the train tracks and every 15 minutes or so a train would zoom by at 75 mph. We weren't very close to them but theymade alot of noise when they came thumping down the track. Two days ago we had been talking abput how bad it would suck to get hit by a train. Little did I know that this conversation would turn out to be an ironic 'fortune telling'.
The following is a drawing of a sky view of the intersection. It's a big one.



This picture does no justice whatsoever to what the intersection really looks like. Thats what you get when you decide to use microsoft paint instead of adobe. What I did was number the picture to also help you understand what is going on better.

#3. There are actually two train tracks at the intersection, but to save room I made only one. This intersection is HUGE. It's a T-intersection with four lanes meeting four lanes. You can see some sweet looking cars in the picture I drew. So there we were cruising as fast as our legs could pedal coming up to this intersection. As I came down the bike path (1) my buddy yelled to me to make a left at the intersection. Since we were going fast I only glanced to the left and seeing bushes I kept going acroos the street to take the other bike path (7), and then make my left there. My buddy was a bit confused on where to turn left so he stopped on his bike in the road (4). He yelled to me again to take a left, so I glanced a couple of times to look for CARS and started a diagonal approach towards the bike path on the other side of the track. Not having much contact with trains in the United States it did not occur to me to look for gates that blocked the tracks from traffic. The intersection is so huge to begin with that these gates probably would not have been sen anyway. It was at this moment that everything seemed to slow down. Things went by fast though and this next part of the story happened inless than 10 seconds.
When I was around point (5) I heard a train whistle. It didn't really startle me but it caught my attention (they are EXTREMELY loud). I glanced over my shoulder and saw the train coming and then I immediately looked at the tracks. I thought to myself, "I have to stop before I get to those tracks!" I kept my eyes on the tracks and pressed the rear brakes as hards as I could. I didn't even see the train come from behind and slam into my left upper thigh. I remember braking and then being all of a sudden airborne. I saw a succesion of images as I flipped through the air. They went from pavement, sky, train, pavement, train, sky, train, sky, pavement and I remeber thinking to try to keep everything in perspective so I didn't fall under the train. SLAM! I hit the ground and the train kept whooshing by making the loudest sound as it trampled the track. It was going so fats the wind started sucking me towards it. I remember making a loud scream as I leapt away from the train and dragged my body a couple of feet from the tracks. As I did I could feel that my left leg had no feeling and that I couldn't really use it. I looked at my thumb first, it was pretty banged up and dripping with blood. This would prove to be a minor wound. I was on my right side curled up in a fetal position and I strained to look at my leg. I lifted my head up and looked down towards my leg and thought I saw a bone sticking out of my leg. I sat there and recalled a time when I was watching the movie "Dante's Peak" with my dad. There is a scene I remebered in the end where Pierce Brosnan get a compound fracture, yet manages to crawl another 5 feet or so to flip a switch that saves the day. I asked my dad (he being a doc) if that was possible. He said yes, but USUALLY someone would just go into shock and pass out. As I sat on the pavement thinking of this memory I put my head down on the pavement so when I fainted I wouldn't give myself a concussion. Nothing happened. I even tried to let myself faint. When this failed I told myself that I would have to write my dad and tell him he is wrong, a compound fracture does not make you pass out. Strange what ideas run through your head after being hit by an inner city train going 75 miles per hour...
My buddy was the first one to reach me and I asked him how bad it was, he said there was alot of blood. He held my hand as the pain grew more intense. I won't try to describe how it felt. To be truthful, I can't remember how bad the pain was. I like to think that that part has been repressed. I can remeber every detail of the WHOLE accident, even the pattern the concrete made in front of my face as I waited for the ambulance to arrive, but I can't describe the pain. I only remember that it HURT. It hurt ALOT. It was 10 minutes before the ambulance came and by this time I wanted some morphine. I had never had it before, but I had seen enough movies to know that it would subside the pain! My wish was granted, they pumped me full of morphine and who knows what else. When it hit me I was in lala land. They rolled me over onto my back and onto a stretcher and the whole time I was raising my hands and yelling,
"WHEEEEEEEE!"
I thought I was on a roller coaster! The people around the stretcher were my heros and I did not know any better way to thank them than to SLAP them in the face. Yes, I started slapping the guy closest to me in the face and yelling,
"THANK YOU! THANK YOU!"
Then I thought for a moment, wait, these people speak dutch, so I started translating.
"THANK YOU BETEKENT BEDANKT!" (thank you 'means thank you') The ambulance ride was fun, but I remeber getting very angry because the siren wasn't on and I started making a scene and I think they put me out because I woke up inside the hospital, either that or the morphine high tuckered me out, anyway I had made it to the hospital in one piece. I sat in the ER for four hours. FOUR HOURS! No more pain medication, no idea as to what was going on. I was miserable. My clothes had been stripped from me, I was given a small towel to cover myself while they wheeled me around the hospital for all to see. They took me to x-ray, ultrasound, and who knows what else. 30 x-rays later (they had to develop everyone before they could help out my situation) and a complete evaluation of my ultrasound (by every doctor in Europe it seemed) and they could start the surgery. Turned out I had not one broken bone. My leg had just been thrashed open pretty big as you can see in the following photo.



This one shows me with my buddy and I am giving the thumbs up sign.



Here is a close up of the wound. About a foot long and it went to the bone. This shot is taken before they stripped me of my clothes and gave me a small towel.

Finally after what seemed like days, they wheeled me into the operating room. I was anxious to see what they would do to me. They sat me up and I felt a pin prick in my spine. Four of them. Come to find out later they missed three times before they got me on the fourth one. Thats why they pricked me four times...
They layed me back down, and I kid you not, one doctor immediately started to sew my leg up. He stuck the needle into my swollen leg and I jumped.
"OWW! What are yopu DOING!?"
I glared at the guy. I was in a bad mood, and for good reason. There were two doctors and a nurse or something, and the 'more experianced' doctor told the doc who had poked me to wait ten minutes. I understood only a couple words, the words stupid (stommert), wait (wachten), and 10 minutes (tien minuten). Even I knew to wait 10 minutes after injecting a paralyzing agent. I was scared by that time and thought that maybe I would lose my legs to these incompetent doctors. They put in three stitches and finished. It took 15 minutes.
I was wheeled back to my room where I had the worst nights sleep of my life. I had to sit up all night long and every 3 hours a nurse came in and gave me a shot in my leg. The next morning a team of doctors came into my room and they had with them a tray full of weird probe like materials. There was one lady who looked like the brains of what looked to be a group of residents/students. They came in and asked how I was and that they needed to look at my wound. Thats when the misery began. They took this 10inch 'spreader' and literally shoved it into my wound. Remember, this is on the back of my thigh in the meaty part and they shoved this thing to my bone and started to spread slowly. I had braced my self by grabbing the arm rails of the bed and I shoved the blankets into my mouth and bit down. I would have rather been hit by another train. They said a bunch of things and looked and asked questions. I felt like a cadaver! They did this every couple of days for two weeks. They would come in, stick something in my leg and then they would leave. I think they were checking for infection. Well all their checking helped. I did get an infection. Why didn't they have me on antibiotics?
I was supposed to be released after one week, and they found infection the day before my release. So now instead of coming in with the spreaders, they came in with long cotton swabs. They put some sort of gel on the ends and then went into town. They took the antibiotic express into my leg and shoved and smothered this stuff all over the place.
I didn't mind though because they were always nice about it. They seemed to care about not causing me pain. There was a nurse there though, who didn't care about my pain. Every night she wuld come in to give me a small shot in the thigh. No big deal the first couple of times. A small bruise had developed on my thigh at the point of the first few injections. So one night she came in and this is the dialogue as follows:

Nurse: "Wow! That's quite the bruise you got there!"

Me: "Yeah, it hurts alot." I said chuckling in a serious way.

So she took the needle and SLAMMED it right down into the bruise, injected, and left. Gee, thanks alot...
Other than that nurse, my stay was fine. I left the hospital after two weeks and slowly went back to work. The following is a sequence of pictures of how my leg healed. I have not had any lasting effects from the accident and can do anything that I was able to do before the accident.



Here are some photos of the recovery. My fingers are in the picture so you can get an idea of how big the wound is. My pointer finger is 3 3/4" long.

In this photo, starting at top left working clockwise we see:
1.) Still in the hospital. See the yellow? Thats called infection. I never got antibiotics...weird. See how the skin is sealed together? Everyday for a week the doctor would come in and they would have to pry that wound open and swap it with cotton swabs. Every had lime juice or salt in an open wound? Multiply it by 1,000 and you know how bad it hurt...
2.) Hanging out at the apartment. I had to change the bandages about four times a day and let the wound dry out for a couple hours. Still real swollen. Notice the horizontal lines of the wound. This is where they sewed my leg up. Only three stiches. The wound kind of resembles a train track. What a cool souvenir!
3.) See the drips? The wound went to the bone so it leaked like crazy. Swelling has gone down considerably. I got sick of ripping out my hair along with the bandages, so I shaved my thigh.
4.)Still deep, but a better scab has developed, leaking has declined. This is almost like a glamour shot...and notice my flexibility! You might be able to tell, but most of the muscle in my thigh has atrophied.

Peace! Don't make war with trains even if you look as hard as I do in this photo.

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