An Injury So Unfortunate, It Merited Flying Home From China

Please BE WARNED: The following blog contains graphic depictions of a horrible bodily injury that I recently suffered in Beijing.

I've been fortunate in my travels across the world over the last few years. With the exception of one stolen bike in the Netherlands (which, in retrospect, was partially my fault in that I only had a wheel-lock and not a chain-lock), I've been able to avoid much thievery, injury, and general misfortune while traversing two oceans and four continents.

This all changed during my first 2 weeks in Beijing. As my last post outlined, my first night in Beijing ended with my wallet being gone, which was pretty inconvenient, but still manageable. The events of Thursday, August 18th, however, are something I will never be able to fully wrap my mind around.

It all started with a game of cricket. Some of the British kids from the program and a handful of Peking University students decided to play a bit of pickup cricket, which was a nice throwback to my days at HKU with their cricket club. After a little bit of playing, I was standing fairly nearby the batsman (as is common) when he hit the cricket ball directly into my groin. At about 90 miles per hour. Needless to say, I was on the ground writhing for the better part of 30 minutes, simply not knowing what to do. By this time it was evening, and there was no way I was going to try to find my way to a Chinese hospital. Shortly after the incident, my balls began swelling incredibly quickly--by morning they were literally grapefruit-sized. Anyway, now that we all have a wonderful mental image of grapefruit-sized balls... the next day I decided to go to Mandarin class in the morning and teach that afternoon, fulfilling my duties first, then go to the hospital after teaching. I ended up taking a cab with Victor, one of our program's Mandarin professors and a fully bilingual Chinese man, to a wealthy expatriate hospital in central Beijing. Upon walking into the hospital, I was pretty relieved to see that every other patient was either white or Middle-Eastern, which lured me into the false sense of security that this hospital would include English-speaking doctors and good facilities. Upon walking into the first doctor's office, I was asked to remove my pants. His two-word response to what he saw was incredibly discouraging... "Big problem!" He then left the room immediately. After that lovely bit of encouragement, Victor explained to me that the situation probably was not quite so bad--he reasoned that the doctor's English was quite poor, so while he may have had a more thorough and less pessimistic observation to make, he couldn't do so in English, so he simply said the simplest phrase he could think of while also somewhat describing the problem. Just as well there wasn't a fully fluent translator in the room, otherwise that argument would make no sense. Anyway, so I ended up getting an ultrasound at this Chinese hospital (bit awkward certainly) and the verdict was that there was no permanent damage (thank God), but that if the swelling doesn't go down in 2 weeks or so, I'll need to get an operation. He also told me to make sure to ice it. A brief side note: there is NO ice in China. They DO NOT BELIEVE IN ICE. It is, quite literally, the worst country in the world to find ice. Consequently, I was using popsicles to ice it for several days.

So the hospital visit was borderline encouraging in that there was no permanent damage, but a bit iffy, given that they'd basically implied I wouldn't be healed for a couple of weeks. Given that I was living in the amazingly interesting megacity that is Beijing, the prospect of being utterly incapacitated and resigned to my hotel room almost 24 hours per day was just devastating. After 3-4 days of basically hanging out in the room and leaving only for class and meals, the swelling wasn't really improving much, and there was starting to be a devastating pain when I stood up to walk anywhere. At this point, I had a chat with Scutt about what he would do in this situation, and he basically told me he'd without question go home and get the situation taken care of, then try to come back to China as soon as possible. After Skyping with the parents and going over the situation, we decided that it would be best if I came home. Yes, that's correct, Blaine Curcio, the kid who has to be on the brink of death in order to go from his house back home to the doctor's office--a 10 minute drive--decided to come home from Beijing, in order to get a medical problem taken care of. Should give one an idea of how bad the situation was, I guess.

On the morning of Wednesday August 17th, I went to Beijing's Capital Airport, hoping to catch a flight using a "Friends and Family" ticket from a good friend of my dad's. The beauty of this program is that the ticket is dirt cheap...the drawback is that I am not guaranteed a seat on the plane until about 1 hour before the flight, and if the plane is full that day, I'm not getting on it--better luck tomorrow. So at around 4:00pm, I went to the ticket counter asking about whether I can get on the plane or not. The ticket agent had a rather concerned look on her face, and was telling me "well there's still a chance you'll get on the plane... one moment". As I stood there, I realized that going home was certainly the correct choice, given that the pain in my groin caused by standing was enough to make me come close to collapsing. After several minutes that were agonizing both due to the pain and the uncertainty of whether I would be spending this night in Beijing Airport or getting on this plane in an hour, the ticket agent told me that there was one ticket left, and I got it. If I was nearly collapsing due to pain the minute before, I nearly collapsed from relief at this point. I basically ran through security.

Three minutes after the flight, the very Asian (read: inconsiderate) man in front of me threw his seat back with such vigor that I nearly ended up with a shattered kneecap. And such was the case for the next 12 and a half hours of my life. Also--the entertainment on United was complete crap as always. United is the only airline I've been on that still doesn't give everyone their own TV screen on trans-Pacific flights--even Air Canada did it!

So I got home. In the line for passport control, I nearly collapsed again from pain. Not good. The next day I saw a renowned surgeon who is also the brother of a close family friend. His reaction after asking me to remove my pants was simply

"This is better than it was before?!"

"Yeah. The swelling used to be about 3 times that size."

Not encouraging. Anyway, after seeing this surgeon and a urologist, the verdict was such: I suffered a minor hernia and what the urologist called "massive testicular trauma". Fortunately, there was no permanent damage, so I will one day be able to grace the world with offspring, but for the time being I'm basically in a bit of an iffy situation. It looks like I'll be able to return to China sometime in late September/early October. I've been informed by the teaching program that I can possibly get my visa reissued, but it's a bit questionable. If that doesn't work out, I've been applying like mad for jobs in Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Singapore, Shanghai, and Beijing. Worst case scenario, I can just go back to Shenzhen and tutor English for 250 yuan per hour. At any rate, it seems the most important thing I can do for myself now (and by now I mean in the next year or so) is learn Mandarin Chinese. Every trip I've taken to China has just further confirmed my feelings that China is going to be the world's economic powerhouse, and soon. Therefore, Mandarin is a MUST! And of course, the best place to learn Mandarin is... not Chicago. So it looks like it's the Orient for me for the foreseeable future, at least as soon as my testicles heal.

So what can we learn from this whole situation? Like I said before, prior to this, my luck had been pretty good when traveling abroad. I'd been pretty careless about safety in countries like the Philippines, Indonesia, Colombia, etc., so I guess eventually it would have to catch up to me. It's also going to be a hilarious story to look back on once everything is healed and I'm not walking around with a horrendous pain in my groin. And perhaps, just maybe, this will all work out for the best if I don't get my teaching job back, but do get some great job with a consulting firm or something of that nature in Hong Kong. In which case I'd have to devote the rest of my life to popularizing cricket in the US, so that other young men like myself can have their manhood all but destroyed only to have it be beneficial to them in the long run. Or not. But seriously, this whole situation reminds me (just as did the bike theft from July 2010 in NL) of the story of the zen master:

“So there’s a small village somewhere, and in this small village a farmer’s horse runs away, and all the villagers say “oh how terrible, the horse ran away”. And the Zen Master said, “we’ll see”. Two days later, the horse returns, bringing with it three more wild horses. Everyone says “Ah, how wonderful, now the farmer has 4 horses to tend to his crops!” and the Zen Master says, “we’ll see”. A short while later, the farmer’s son is riding one of the untamed horses, and he falls and mangles his leg. All the townspeople say “oh how horrible, his leg is broken”. “We’ll see”, said the Zen Master. A couple of weeks later, a war breaks out. All the young men are required to go fight in the war, except for the boy with the mangled leg. All the townspeople say “oh how wonderful”, and of course, the Zen Master replies… “we’ll see”.

Big thanks to anyone who's read this far, hope you got a laugh out of my immense misery, more to come as updates flow in!

Also please note: anyone reading this that's in the Chicagoland area--if you are around at all during the next month and want to hang out, let me know! Most of my good friends from home are either back at school for a 5th year, doing grad school, or have moved elsewhere, so if you want to see THE Blaine Curcio before I leave for China again, shoot me an email (blainecurcio@yahoo.com)

Bike Thievery, Company Tomfoolery, Blaine Curcio Hum-bugery, Zen Master wisdomery, Afternoon Sailboatery, and other made up words involving -ery

"It's been awhile since I posted anything" is becoming sort of a recurring theme for the first line of these blog posts, so for the one household reading these blogs, apologies, it's not that I've been terribly busy, I just haven't felt hugely motivated to write. However, I feel like the title to this blog may be my greatest creative achievement. Or just a weird combination of archaic words that’s a bit forced and nonsensical. But either way, here’s where we left off I guess: Missing Asia, and organizing a trip to somewhere last week on Saturday.

Saturday of last week Hunter and I went to Delightful Delft, perhaps the most appropriate alliteration of an adjective and a town name imaginable. Just a perfect little Dutch down of roughly 120,000 people (ish), with two very nice churches, a very Dutch (yeah that would be the best adjective) market, some wonderful canals, and a couple of interesting museums. The churches were both about 500 years old we think, though it was a bit difficult to be sure as they’d apparently gone through a number of refurbishments, rebuildings, fires, earthquakes, typhoons (in Holland), biblical plagues, and the like. But yes, point being, they were older than the US of A. The most interesting museum we saw was a museum outlining the history of Delft, which included a fair bit about William of Orange and Delft’s role as a revolutionary city. Decent, and the entry fee was negligible (like 3 euros or something). After that we went to the Indonesian museum. I thought this had some real potential, as I’d been to Indonesia and figured “well, I saw some Dutch colonial stuff there, it’d be cool to see what they have to say about it here”, or something like that. All I can say is thank God the entry was free. We walked in and I think they were under some kind of renovation or something, because the guy in the gift shop was like “oh the museum is right over there through that door”. We walked through that door, and I kid you not, the “museum” was basically a big glockenspiel on the floor surrounded by symbols and drums and such. We were pretty confused, and just left. We then went to this really cool public square that almost had a wild-west feel to it, in that there were, for lack of a better word, “walls” of storefronts on three sides of the place. By this I mean basically the buildings (in typical Dutch fashion) were build touching the neighboring buildings, so rather than having separate buildings, you had a “wall” of buildings. Again, for some reason, sort of wild-west-ish… or not. So Saturday night we got home and were just sort of hanging out watching Eurosport2 (think ESPN8, the Ocho, from Dodgeball… kind of) and they had on some big beach soccer tournament. We saw in the background “Crocs Challenge 2010: The Hague”. We were a bit surprised, and looked up this Cros Challenge online, only to find that it was taking place that very weekend at Schevinengen. So of course we went the following day.

Some observations about the beach soccer tourney: this was not a sporting event, per se, as much as it was just a social gathering. The crowd was fascinating. You had Rastafarian looking people just sitting on beanbags under a huge Red Bull tent just outside the place. The entry was free. During intermissions they had those same Rasta guys playing bongo drums and such on the field (beach). During the match they had music blaring the entire time, and all 500 people there (still about 100 times the readership of this blog!) were just sort of hanging out. Very interesting stuff. Also, beer was cheaper than soda. Welcome to Holland. Anyway, so we watched a couple of matches, including the Championship match between the Dutch and Turkish National teams. The match was 3 periods of 12 minutes each, and Turkey won 6-5. Yeah, 11 goals in 36 minutes. So basically, 3 times the goals of standard soccer, in 1/3 the time. Quite an exciting sport, at least for a short while.

So last week at work was decent. It was Hunter’s last week, so there was kind of a bittersweet feel to it, but overall I got some good work done and had some valuable meetings with some people. Good stuff. Friday was the much anticipated “Company Boat Tour”, which was basically 30 or so employees taking a boat ride around the canals of The Hague. At about 4:00pm we (about 15 of us) rode over from the office to the boat. We all parked our bikes near the boat. My bike was locked. Anyway, so we took the boat tour, got back about 90 minutes later, and to my general indifference, my bike was gone. It was actually a bit hilarious that I was probably the least upset out of anyone, but eh, the whole ordeal reminds me of the story of the Zen Master, which I first heard in the film Charlie Wilson’s War (though this is slightly different from that version) :

“So there’s a small village somewhere, and in this small village a farmer’s horse runs away, and all the villagers say “oh how terrible, the horse ran away”. And the Zen Master said, “we’ll see”. Two days later, the horse returns, bringing with it three more wild horses. Everyone says “Ah, how wonderful, now the farmer has 4 horses to tend to his crops!” and the Zen Master says, “we’ll see”. A short while later, the farmer’s son is riding one of the untamed horses, and he falls and mangles his leg. All the townspeople say “oh how horrible, his leg is broken”. “We’ll see”, said the Zen Master. A couple of weeks later, a war breaks out. All the young men are required to go fight in the war, except for the boy with the mangled leg. All the townspeople say “oh how wonderful”, and of course, the Zen Master replies… “we’ll see”.

Anyway, so now that I’ve rambled about the Zen Master: after the bike theft, we went to the company drinks held at a nearby restaurant/bar. Was a real good time, got to meet some employees I’d previously not talked to much, which was quite nice. I ended up taking the bus home awhile later while Hunter biked. Saturday we headed to Amsterdam for the last time for Hunter. It’s a bit interesting, he spent 11 years of his childhood here, but he’s more or less decided that, odds are, he’ll not be returning at any point (as he spent his childhood summers in Chicagoland prior anyway), so a bit sad to see him leaving the place for what will maybe be the last time.

Sunday morning Hunter left for the airport quite early (this would be the cause of the aforementioned Blaine Curcio hum-bugery), and I spent the morning Skyping Lexx all the way from Gold Coast, Australia. Good to hear the Aussie accent again, though as I type this I regret not asking her to pronounce an “h” related acronym just to hear their horrible mispronunciation. Spent the afternoon at some park in The Hague reading a book about second world economies before exploring The Hague’s “Chinatown” neighborhood (real dodgy relatively speaking), then headed home to speak with the parentals and Grammy. That was very nice, especially as I was also able to speak to Aunt Trina, Alex, and The Hen, as my family was at their house. So that was the weekend.

A bit bittersweet as well, word from the lads back home: Dan's 21st was the other day, so they went to Vegas where Dan rented the penthouse at the Aria. Apparently there's been a fair bit of debauchery, sounds like they've had a blast, and the legend of Mike Greenwood has made a guest appearance all the way from LA. So yeah, wish I could be there, but eh, Netherlands isnt' bad either, certainly.

This week should be interesting, I’ll be starting to wrap up this whole project, as I finish work here next Friday. This evening I’ll be going sailing with some people from the office. To answer the obvious: no, I have never sailed before. But then again, as a one Sabutai Haider can attest to, my introduction to cricket was a semi-competitive match, and while that ended in tears (ish), I did nonetheless show up and play (and still have the scars to prove it!). Plus my second time I batted an 8. So yeah, sailing today, should be good (provided I don’t fall into the water, and even if I do, I’m always one to see the hilarity in things like that). This weekend will be a trip to Paris which I booked last week, roughly $135 for R/T high speed train Rotterdam-Paris. Can’t complain. Hoping to see Chanwa there, as he may be around this weekend. Other than that, the next few weeks will undoubtedly be hectic, with Paris this weekend, The Hague/Amsterdam next weekend, flying home Monday, flying to Bogota Monday, then spending a bit of time there. Its been a real good internship, I must say I’ve learned far more than I’d’ve ever anticipated, about myself, satellites, marketing, sales, people in general, etc. It’ll be a bit sad to leave the Netherlands, but at the same time there isn’t much here that interests me at this very point and time. Anyway, that’s about all, this blog has far exceeded the length I was hoping it would be, but eh. If you’ve read all this, many thanks, it’s people like you that feed my ever expanding ego! (but really, a big thanks, I’ve been told by a few people how much they enjoy reading it, and that really, really does mean a whole lot to me, I can’t thank you all enough).