Falling Into A Sewer
[Adventures in Faith: India; 1991] I was doing volunteer work at a hospital. During a typhoon, I sprinted across the parking lot. I fell into an open sewer.
I was at the perimeter of the parking lot at Patel Community Hospital.
It was typhoon season in India, and it was pouring down rain. It was raining like I had never seen before. It felt like being hit by a firefighter’s hose. It almost knocked people over.
And it accumulated. Fast.
I had to go across the main parking lot. But the typhoon had flooded it. Instead of it looking like a parking lot, it looked like a lake. It was all water.
The water was filthy and brown and putrid. I couldn’t see pavement anywhere. It looked like a raging flood from a disaster movie.
With the typhoon raging, I couldn’t loiter. So I sprinted across the parking lot.
Each step, when my foot sliced through the water, water and filth sprayed out in all directions. Then my foot descended through inches of water until it hit the unseen pavement underneath.
Except for one step.
That one step cut through the water, then descended and descended. It never reached pavement. It kept going down. And down. And down.
I was falling into the parking lot. Had it caved in underneath me? Was the earth swallowing me alive?
Later, I was told the typhoon had pressurized the sewers. In that exact spot where I was falling, the pressure had blown off a manhole cover. I had fallen into a sewer.
As I fell, my leg scraped against the cast iron lip of the manhole. It ripped the skin from my shin, from ankle to knee.
Then my knee hit the cast iron lip of the manhole. Hard. I kept falling, only to inadvertently arrest my fall when my elbows banged into the pavement.
Nearly shoulder-deep in live sewage and filth, I screamed in pain.
Moments later, I recovered my wherewithal, at least slightly. I clawed my way out of the sewer. My leg had a big open wound. It was bleeding, and it had been fully submerged into sewage and filthy water.
I stumbled to the hospital entrance. I knew I needed medical attention. I imagined the hospital staff would address the wound and give me an injection.
When it comes to injections, I have always been afraid.
Standing there in the entryway, it took me way too long to talk myself into going to the E.R. and getting it taken care of.
I happened to have some Dettol. So I distracted myself by cleaning the wound with Dettol.
Finally, I summoned my courage. I went to the E.R. and sat in the waiting area. Then it was my turn.
I showed the doctor my wound. I asked him to help me.
He turned and walked to a shelf. He returned with a wooden rack. It was filled with little glass vials of liquids. The bottles were dirty and hand-labeled.
Then he turned and went to a different place, returning with an open-topped tray. It was filled with some liquid. I guessed it was a cleaning fluid.
He fished around in the tray with his bare fingers and came up with a syringe. It wasn’t the nice plastic ones I’d seen diabetics use back in the U.S.
No, this was a great big thing. It was made out of glass. The needle was already affixed to the glass.
The whole thing reminded me of syringes I had seen veterinarians use on cattle.
Then the doctor fished around in the liquid-filled tray and came up with a plunger.
The doctor shook most of the cleaning fluid off the syringe and plunger. He assembled them.
He stabbed the needle into one of the dirty hand-labeled vials, and withdrew medicine. Then he turned to me.
It was the best the hospital had to offer. At some level, I was thankful. But terrified.
I have no recollection of what happened next. Did I pass out? Did I repress the memory? Did I run away?
I can’t remember.
ADVENTURES IN FAITH
NOTE. Names, dates, and locations may have been changed.
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