A Seemingly Harmless Hammock

I was playing with a cute little 5 year old girl, and swinging in a hammock. These should be particularly safe activities. But the hammock threads were grinding against a fence, and suddenly broke, sending me to the ground. I cut my hand and assumed it was on a rock. Luckily my boyfriend Atahualpa was right there, and we started walking across the street to the pharmacy, even though I felt nauseous from the injury. It was a nasty gash in the upper corner of my palm, but all I could think of was getting it clean. I made it to the pharmacy and the next thing I knew I was having an out of body experience. Do you remember the photo montage in the last 10 minutes of Requiem for a Dream? It was like that, an incomprehensible compilation of images and feelings that I was dead or on another planet. I had fainted in Ata arms, and woke up smelling rubbing alcohol and feeling much better. After it was clean, we went back to the hammock and looked underneath. There was the huge piece of glass that I had fallen on, a broken beer bottle. People who break bottles when they are drunk piss me off. Seriously, someone should do a public ad campaign with pictures of all the injuries people incur from broken bottles.

Later we went to a medical center to see if I needed stitches. Beforehand, I had to look up new vocab in my dictionary: stitches, antibiotics, gauze, bandage. I ended up getting 7 stitches, or puntos. And turns out that here in Peru, you can bargain not only in the market, but over medical bills too! It was going to cost me 40 sols, but Ata talked to the doctor and got it lowered to 30. So that was right around 10 dollars to have my hand cleaned, stitched, bandaged, and then later have a mid week check-in, and 7 days later get the stitches removed. Absolutely no paperwork either, my favorite part.



The last week has been a pretty low point of my trip though. The cut is deep, and I couldn't do ANTHING for 3 or 4 days. "Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got til it's gone..." Man, hands are useful and I am going to be so much more thankful for mine from now on. Even raising my arm over my head to get dressed would send shooting pains. Good thing Ata was there. He cut up my food, helped me get dressed, put sunscreen on my left arm, and one day washed all my laundry by hand. It was even worse, since I was just getting into making jewelry. Now I can't work at all. And the only thing worse than not being able to work is not being able to play. With the healing and the antibiotics, I couldn't drink. Plus no running, swimming, yoga, writing, nothing. What kind of vacation is this? I tried to still be an artisan student by taking notes on names of stones and seeds with my left hand. But I also kind of moped around and took a lot of naps.