Flying Nairobi to London and an English Ambulance Ride

Monday, September 12. 2005

The four of us flew all night long from Nairobi to England.

I'd had such a good time in Africa, but now with my arm in pain all I wanted to do was leave it behind and get to England. It was a long and miserable flight. I felt tired and nauseous.

Drat it all, this was my thirteenth wedding anniversary and I didn't want to feel this bad. Sigh. My arm felt like a dead weight. I kept trying to peek under my bandages to see how high the blisters were getting. Jen asked to see, but got a horrified look on her face when she did.

The bright moment in this laborious flight was Jeff's mom presenting us with tickets for a Andrew Lloyd Webber musical in London for our anniversary present. It was a lovely surprise! I hoped fervently I'd be able to go to the show on the 14th.

We landed at Heathrow at around six-thirty in the morning. As usual there was a zoo of people milling around to get through passport control. We hurriedly waved goodbye to a few of our safari group (Andy, Pauline, and Graham) as we all hurried off in separate directions. While Jeff and Jen and their mom got in the enormously long lineup, I scooted off to see if I could spot someone to help me.

I approached an airport security fellow in an orange vest and meekly asked him if there was a way I could get some medical help.

It was amazing how fast things happened after he got a look at my arm and found out I was coming in from Africa.

We were all whisked to the very front of the passport line-up and our passports were barely glanced at. An ambulance was called. Apparently I was going straight from Heathrow to a nearby hospital.

The airport security fellow waited with my family for the ambulance to arrive. At one point he jokingly said, "Oh, don't worry luv, they'll just chop it off and it'll be fine." Alas, his attempts to cheer me up didn't go over well. I burst into exhausted tears. "Oh dear", he said, "Just a little gallows humour there. Sorry about that."

Around about this time Jen had to leave for her flight to Canada. She looked ready to cry herself when she gave me a hug. Geez, I was such a downer at this point in the holiday.

The airport fellow told us that he'd seen quite a few people in his time coming back from holiday from places like Spain with injuries of this sort. Black henna had a well-known bad reputation apparently--wish I'd known that. It was illegal in England, and lots of other places too.

Anyway, I got in the ambulance by myself as Jeff and his mom had to stay behind with our luggage and take a taxi to the hospital. I rode to Hillingdon Hospital in Middlesex with a very cute paramedic named Maurizio. He tut-tutted over my arm a little but did a much better job at cheering me up than the well-intentioned fellow at the airport.

He also told me that once on vacation his wife had wanted to get a black henna tattoo from some gypsies on the beach and he had talked her out of it fortunately. Maurizio grinned and said. "I'm going to go home and use you as a shining example of why I was right!"

I was still waiting in Hillingdon's emergency waiting room with a stack of British tabloids when Jeff and his mom found me. Ambulance rides are free for travellers in England, but taxi rides are fabulously over-priced. I cringed at how much they had paid for the short ride here.

A nice nurse named Claire Picton looked at my henna burn and pondered aloud how best to treat it. At last she decided the best thing was to drain the blisters and loosen the pressure. Jeff's mom wasn't so sure this was such a good idea (blisters protect), but I was wildly happy at the idea of getting rid of that horrible tight feeling.

When the blisters were opened it felt like somebody was pouring a large cup of warm water over my arm. Ugh. It felt better instantly but my arm wasn't going to win any beauty contests.

Heather brought out her camera and I asked her to please not take a picture for posterity. Now I wish I'd let her. The photo in this blog taken three weeks later is nowhere near as gory. At the time I really didn't think I'd want to look at that later, but it would have been an interesting souvenir of sorts---here's me on vacation in the hospital. :)

Next nurse Claire fitted some sort of awkward rubber-like sleeve over the burn and then re-bandaged it. She also gave me a big bag of sterile gauze, bandages and the like free of charge to take with us.

Unlike a Canadian hospital, they did not ask to see my identification, my insurance, or indeed anything. It was all free. Heh, except for the taxi ride.

We left Hillingdon by mid-morning and made our way by bus to an Underground station where we rode to Victoria Station. The Bed and Breakfast we'd reserved was apparently within walking distance and we set out to find it.

It was in walking distance but we'd come out the wrong exit of the station and got a little confused finding it. What should have been a ten minute walk was half an hour.

I'd never felt so glad to finally find a place in my life.