Apologies for Absence: The Monkey Bite Story

I have let my blog take a well deserved rest the last two months and hopefully some of you have missed it. I am back to explain why I have been absent and I think you will find it interesting...

Allow me to set the scene just a little. It is my one day off a week on Koh Samui and I am strolling down the road. This is the large Samui ring road and not a dusty track, I hasten to add. I am visiting one of the many 711 corner shops which are littered around Thailand. My aim is to get some hard earned cash from the ATM. When you have one day off a week spending money fast is a must.

I don’t even see the coconut truck at first, which was part of the problem in retrospect. I am stuck in my own scrambled thoughts about who, where, what and why in life and mainly how I should spend my life as well as my money. If only I had seen the monkey it might all have been very different. If I had been present and correct, in the moment and mindful of my steps I would have given it a wide birth, but I was simply scrambling inside instead: fatal error.

Suddenly I feel an impact on my left side. As I wrestle the weight off and jump back I see it is a monkey and before I have even registered the creatures audacity I realise I have been scratched and bitten. It is too late, these things happen so fast. The bite is deep, I can see the muscle and the tendon. The monkey was surely hungry, I know this because he took a mouthful and I sincerely hope he ate it, as it is now missing. Strangely the wound although deep, has no venous bleeding so I am forced to look into my arm and marvel at how it still moves despite its sudden lack.

Luckily I am near my friends tattoo shop, so I run over in shock to get some reassurance that this hole can exist and I can still be alive and moving. Suddenly I am so far removed emotionally from my alien arm. It is not mine, it is torn open, it cannot be mine? My friend hails a taxi after I convince him that the pharmacy is not going to suffice, Thai people have a tendency to make less of a fuss than us, but I know this time my urgency is warranted. His customer is left mid-tattoo, half standing, half sitting and baffled. She got bitten by a monkey?

The hospital is beautiful, I have been here before with Typhus fever and my friend Nick for a week, so it feels like home. Do not attend the Bangkok Samui without insurance, in fact do not travel at all without insurance.

This time they take too long. They leave me with my uncovered wound so I am forced to spend more time peering in with disbelief. Ten minutes feels like an hour. Rabies shots into the hole, necessary? It seems so. Stitches in the muscle, stitches in the skin. I am being sewn up like a rag doll and I do not feel entirely comfortable about the way my body suddenly seems so material, flesh being pulled about to compensate for flesh missing. It reminds me of my own stitching, large and wonky.

After being sent home with a half cast to keep the muscle in position (big white arm) I sit and reflect. My day off over, my arm has a hole. Thankfully I can no longer see it but I know what lurks within the big white arm and I don’t like it one bit.

The next day I am admitted to hospital with an infection, monkey’s mouths are not clean places I can now confirm. I spend a week in the Bangkok Samui, it really does feel like home now. Where do my ‘no pharmaceutical’ feelings stand in this scenario? They flop aimlessly. Please give me as many antibiotics as you see fit as this is one of the situations where modern medicine has its place. A fellow nutritional devotee calls me to ask how I am doing,

‘Let’s just hope you survive from all the drugs they give you’ he preaches ‘That will be truly amazing! I would have filled the wound with comfrey’.

‘How ridiculous’ I thought, ‘If he had that hole in his arm I bet he would have fled to the Bangkok Samui hospital as quickly as me, and if not? Then quite frankly, he is silly.’

Although he was certainly silly, he was irritatingly right as I had a reaction to the drugs and ended up covered from head to toe in a horrible red lumpy rash which lasted about four days. It makes you wonder what it might do to other areas of the body we cannot see so clearly. But, as I said before, in some situations, antibiotics are necessary and nasty infections are what they were designed for. It is our tendency to overuse them that causes problems. The allergy was unfortunate and gross. A month later I followed this antibiotic laden time with a one week fast, to clear out the toxins and start a fresh; I will go in to that more on a future blog.

So I now come around to where this story ends and a new one begins. It is where my blog also ended temporarily due to the ‘big white arm’. I had to leave my job as I could no longer work with the pain and only one useful arm was not sufficient. I already suffer physical problems from my tumbling descent down the stairs all those years ago and losing use of my arm highlighted old problems and created new imbalances. Physically and emotionally draining when you are so far from the reassurance of home.

My arm is much better now (two months on) I am swimming every day and doing yoga to get strength and flexibility back. It is going to take time and patience before I get full use of it back. The skin and muscle pull and tug strangely where the tissues now move as one instead of independently, a seam out of place that twists awkwardly. A scar with a story.

This period was difficult but it opened new opportunities for me and I am now living on an organic coconut farm in Khanom with my friend and his family. My little wooden hut is simply heaven to me right now and I finally have the time to enjoy this fantastic country. When one door closes, another one always opens and for now, I am enjoying each moment of what feels like freedom and learning to be mindful. After all, you never know where a monkey might be lurking and being present is terribly important if you want to remain intact.

I am back.

Stay tuned for more health tips and reassurance that feeling great is not rocket science.

Josie