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tonight i fly back to minneapolis to join sub zero for the fall ultimate season. so this morning was my last run with peter. about 15 minutes into our run, we were moving along a stretch of road that was full of parked trucks so there wasn’t space along the shoulder. peter was on the road side of the trucks but i took the other side (next to the kampala equivalent of a garden center; basically a wide open lot full of plants, trees, etc. for sale) because it looked like the gravel along the shoulder continued next to a row of planted seedlings.

yeah. so. that gravel path and the row of planted seedlings was ringed by an ankle-high string of barbed wire. it either wasn’t complete or i miraculously stepped over the first line because i made it in to the rectangle, but i sure didn’t make it out. at least not upright.

the wire caught my ankle and i was instantly on the ground, but hey, at least with good lay-out form. arms up, land on your chest, all that. unfortunately my left palm found something sharp in the dusty bed of gravel because when i popped up there was a canyon staring back at me. i told peter, “this is bad.” so we turned around and ran the 15 minutes home with him apologizing the whole time and me feeling bad that he felt bad.

as it turns out, people do stare at the white guy running down the side of the road when he’s holding his hand up and there’s blood everywhere.

after getting home, i spent the next half hour or so washing with surgical scrub from paige’s brother and trying to dig out the dirt. we were thinking of closing the cut with 3M steristrips and just getting stitches when i got back to the US on sunday. but once we could better see how deep it was and how impossible it was to really clean it, we decided to see the professionals. our neighbor and friend astrid gave us a recommendation for the good clinic, so off we went.

we walked in, paige wrote my name and address on their sign-in sheet, and after putting down a 60,000 shilling deposit, the doctor called me in. if you’ve seen babe (the movie about the sheep pig) she (the doc) reminded me a lot of the farmers wife. jolly, roly poly, sweaty. the latter being less surprising after learning that she was here for two months on a rotation from sweden. not quite as hot up there. she and the cute finnish nurse were pleasantly all business and appear to have done a stellar job on my hand. so 9 stitches and 45 minutes after leaving home, we were out the door.
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cost for stitches, antibiotics and pain killers was 70,000 shillings = $38 USD. last time i had stitches, four above my eye, the fairview urgent care bill (not including drugs) was over $400. and i was in and out the door in 2+ hours.

if you don’t mind a little blood, paige’s pics from the trip to the doctor are here.

afterward: now that it’s been a couple hours, my wrist is starting to hurt. i definitely hit it in a place that’s easy to break one of those little hand/wrist bones. i’m not that worried about it, but it leads in to a good suggestion from astrid that neither paige nor i had thought of. she said to get an x-ray here; it would cost 20,000 ($11 USD) and i could just bring the film home for my radiologist friend to look at. i don’t have time because i leave for the airport in two hours, but a good idea that could save me a couple hundred dollars. so all in all a very stress-free first medical experience.