Charles Apple

Tuesday night, I had my first accident here in South Africa. Or, at least, the first accident that actually hurt me.

I was coming home from work. I took the hotel elevator to the sixth floor, where I found a maintenance man waiting with one of those big luggage trolleys that you use to haul stuff to and from your room. With the big metal tubes that loop around as handles, right?

So I exited the middle elevator and then turned to hold the door for the guy. Just like I’ve held the door open dozens of times over the past two months.

Except this time, the door suddenly slammed shut. Hard.

The man was about halfway into the elevator with his cart. I wasn’t able to pull my hand out quickly enough. It was pinned between the door and the huge metal handles on the cart.

And man, did it hurt. I let out a yelp. But the damn door wouldn’t open. It was like a vise.

Somehow, the man wrestled the door open and I extracted my hand. He pushed the cart into the elevator, thanked me for my help and remarked it was lucky I wasn’t injured.

Actually, I am injured, I told him. The guy looked alarmed, but it was too late. The doors closed and he was on his way to the lobby.

I took out my contact lenses, unloaded my briefcase and then headed back downstairs to the restaurant to eat dinner and to order some ice to put on my hand. As I passed through the lobby, I found the front desk staff frantically calling my room to make sure I was OK.

And I was, of course. Nothing was broken. I have a very low threshold of pain. If my hand was broken, believe me, I’d be rolling around on the floor and screaming like a little girl.

The door caught the middle and ring fingers of my right hand and where they join the palm. I think this picture taken with my MacBook camera might show a little of the swelling.

Right now — a day-and-a-half after the accident — I still have a small bruise or indention on my middle finger. I’ve been telling folks here that an injury to my middle finger might prevent me from driving in the U.S., but no one gets the joke. Apparently, South African motorists don’t flip off one another.

The hand felt much better the next morning, but as the day went on — and as I typed e-mails and memos and so forth — it began to swell a bit and to throb with pain. I gobbled down a lot of Advil Wednesday.

Last night, I went back downstairs to the restaurant for more ice. Ice for the hand and beer for the pain. Worked out pretty well, too.

Today, it’s a little sore but it’s not throbbing like it did on Wednesday. I’m going to try to hold off on pain relievers.

I have to admit, I’m especially missing Sharon and Elizabeth today. And I regret very much that I won’t be eating turkey and dressing and macaroni and cheese and ham biscuits with my dad’s family in Anderson.

It might be Thanksgiving Day in the U.S., but here, it’s just Thursday. Day 58 of my 62-day stay here in South Africa.

I head back home on Monday.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 26th, 2009 at 3:52 am and is filed under Travelogue, Trip to South Africa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.