Chronicles of a Wandering Mind

I was so jealous of TravelGal’s Swiss medical experience that I’ve decided to give it a try myself, and proceeded to fly over my bike while descending “La Dole”. Seemingly minor cut in my knee turned out to be a lot deeper and stuffed with pieces of gravel, and after a reluctant visit to the ER in Hospital Nyon, I’ve ended up a tube that goes into my knee with a drainage and a full leg cast to prevent me from moving my knee. Not what I had in mind for Sunday!

They’ve just removed the drainage but the cast needs to stay for another 10 days apparently. After that they’ll check whether the bourse is infected and close the knee for good if all is well.

As far as the Swiss hospital experience goes, it was quite nice indeed. I was quite puzzled to put it mildly watching them get ready for what seemed to be a surgery and using words like anesthesia where I was just expecting them to clean the wound and put some stiches. We’ve started talking in French where I tried to figure out what on earth was going on and was told about risk of bourse infection. After a while, noticing that my french is not exactly fluent and I did not understand what bourse is, the doc asked what language I spoke and switched to English with ease. Turns out bourse is bourse in English as well but he described what it is and I got the general idea, and resigned to watch him work on my knee with some disbelief, slowly realizing that my injury may be a tad more serious than I thought initially.  Little later I glanced at his name tag and saw that he had a Turkish name! Not sure what the odds are to running into a Turkish speaking doctor in an ER in Switzerland, but I’d imagine not that high. It turns out he was born in Germany, quite impressive individual to say the least.

Now, I’ll have to figure out how/whether  I can make it to London next week for a project. Are you allowed in a plane if you have a full leg cast and can’t bend your knee? wonder what I have to do ..