This is in English because I am adding an account which is intended for friends in other countries as well. On Dec 2, me and the 11 friends that I was travelling with were in a very bad bus crash in Peru, not far from Caral. Our mini bus was hit by a double decker tourist bus travelling at high speed, our bus was totalled and flipped over several times. Two of our friends died and a third is still in critical condition at the Ricardo Palma Clinic in Lima, with a broken neck. For my own part, I’m essentially and comparatively OK – the rest of us were incredibly protected and it’s actually a miracle that any of us are alive at all. What still remains for me is damaged and torn muscles and ligaments in my left calf, some hematomas in my left hip, a wound on my right foot that was infected and still hasn’t healed, a sprained wrist and a very persistent bump at the base of my skull which is causing dizzy spells. Everything else has healed now and all stitches have been removed.
I’m back in Stockholm now and an account of the events follows. I was drifting in and out of consciousness and had a concussion, so it’s taken me a bit of time to reconstruct the correct sequence of events, but you can find it below. Those of you who know the Andean tools or other types of healing tools, please send healing to our Dutch friend Louise who remains in Lima and to the families of the two friends, Joke from Holland and José Alberto from Peru, who lost their lives. Thank you, with all my heart!
I’m not entirely sure about the chronology here, what order some of these things actually happened in, as I had several periods of unconsciousness plus a concussion, but I have done my best to try to reconstruct the events of what one newspaper headline called “Black Tuesday”.
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Twelve of us, all friends, are in a white mini bus on the Pan-American Highway in Peru, just turning off onto a small dirt road towards Caral, the oldest city in South America. The group consists of me, my mother, Krister and Jane from Sweden, Dorthe from Denmark, Rob & Joke, Louise and Anne from Holland and Juan, Ivan and our driver José Alberto from Peru. We had been travelling along hideously bad roads in the Andes mountains during the previous week, so my mother and I turn to eachother and smile a bit, both of us thinking that it was going to be yet another bumpy ride.
* nothingness *
I’m extremely dizzy and nauseous. I’m being dragged along the ground on my back, someone is pulling me by the arms, and I get a brief glimpse of our mini bus lying upside down, looking extremely strange and smashed up.
Aaah, stop pulling on me, I’ll throw up! Is that our bus? What’s wrong with it? What is this? Oh, I must have fallen asleep and now I’m dreaming. OK.
* nothingness *
I’m being lifted onto what appears to be the back of a pick-up truck but I don’t really have enough time to see. I’m placed on my back next to someone else, someone who is completely covered in blood. I can’t lift my head to take a closer look.
Who is that? Is that one of my friends, and if so, who?? Where am I being taken, and by whom?
* nothingness *
Fluorescent ceiling lights flash by and we pass a statue of the Virgin Mary. I realize that I’m being pushed on a gurney through the corridor of a primitive hospital. Then Peruvian faces crowd in on me, gibbering things at me in Spanish which I’m completely at a loss to understand a single word of at that point.
Where am I? Where are my friends? Am I all alone here?
* nothingness *
My eyes don’t open, but I feel and hear my t-shirt being cut off and that someone is pulling pieces of glass out of my right foot. The pieces seem quite large, based on the sound they make when they are dropped into some metal receptacle. There are no thoughts, only sounds and sensations.
* nothingness *
I wake up and find myself in a rather shabby hospital ward. I have an intravenous drip going into my left arm. Later, I discover that I have stitches, although I don’t remember being sewn up. I look around, and find that three of the other beds are occupied by my friends Krister, Dorthe and Rob. For some strange reason, I don’t begin to wonder what my injuries are. I suppose it’s enough to just establish that I’m alive. I think I ask the others what happened, but I’m not sure. I’m still dizzy and disoriented. The brief glimpses of consciousness I had before waking up in the hospital bed were very surrealistic and dream-like, so it isn’t until this point that I realize that those glimpses were actually real, not some strange dream. I understand that something happened to our mini bus, that we’ve all been hurt, and that we are in the hospital in Supe, near Caral. No one on the hospital staff speaks any English, and my Spanish is very limited, at best. A nurse comes in. I ask, in halting Spanish, about my mother and my other friends. She says something about my mother being in unstable condition and being transported to Lima, and something vague about other friends in other rooms. I ask about our driver, and she shakes her head. I begin to cry a little, realizing that José Alberto, an incredibly sweet man and the most careful driver I’ve ever seen, is dead and that the accident was obviously quite serious.
I’m suddenly freezing, although it’s quite warm on the ward. I realize that this is an effect of shock, nothing to do but to ride it out. I have a sheet and a blanket, so I huddle up underneath them and just wait, teeth chattering. After a while, I have no idea how long, it passes.
Two nurses help Rob to get to the bathroom in the ward right next to us. I hear him exclaiming that he can see others working on his wife Joke and that he wants to see her. The nurses refuse and lead him back to his bed. He’s worried and crying, for obvious reasons.
A nurse shows up with my jeans, shoes and fleece jacket and asks me if I want her to put them away in an office for safe-keeping. Too tired and disoriented to do anything else, simply trying to understand Spanish is a huge effort at that point, I simply nod.
Our Danish friend Dorthe is in the best physical condition of all of us. She’s able to get around, brings me something to drink and tells me that my mother is in another room, together with Juan.
My stomach is cramping and I can tell that there’s diarrhoea on the way, so I insist that one of the nurses help me to the bathroom. She brings a bed pan, but I wave it away. She questions whether or not I’m actually able to get into the wheelchair I make her bring me, but I insist. After some monumental efforts to get out of bed, I’m forced to realize that she is right. I can’t do it. My entire left side is in pain and will not cooperate, my right hand will not support me, both my wrist and my elbow hurt badly, and I get severe dizzy spells when I try to move. The loathsome bed pan is produced again and I manage to get it under me with some major effort, but there’s no paper and nothing at all to clean myself with. I demand paper, but can barely manage to do anything with it, because my hand and wrist hurt too badly. The nurses don’t make the slightest move to help.
A while later, this whole procedure is repeated once more. An hour after that, when I once again feel the need, I’ve had enough. I have no idea how, but somehow I manage to get myself into a wheelchair and also manage to hobble on one foot from the wheelchair to the toilet, and I could never have imagined that it could be so blissful to be able to go to an actual toilet.
A bit later, two women from the Dutch embassy arrive. They speak to all of us, and I begin to ask one of them again about my mother and my other friends. She repeats the nurse’s story, that my mother is being transported to Lima in critical condition. She then begins to tell me who she has spoken to in the hospital. She mentions Juan, Ivan, Jane, Anne, Helene… I stop her, demanding that she repeat the last name. “Helene,” she says. I exclaim that Helene is my mother, whereupon I insist on hopping off, pretty much on one leg, to the room where Juan and my mother are. Juan has an enormous black eye, almost exactly matching my own. My mother is wearing a metal neck brace, which looks extremely uncomfortable, and is therefore unable to move her head. After speaking to both of them, I hobble along to yet another room and get the opportunity to exchange a few words with Jane, Anne and Ivan. At some point during this visit, I find out that Louise is in fact the one in critical condition who had been transported to Lima. This same confusion between Louise and my mother appeared in some news stories as well, we found later.
Ivan expresses concern about my injuries, worried that he might have made them worse when he pulled me out of the wreck. That’s when I find out that he was the one pulling me, in that brief glimpse of consciousness that I remembered, in spite of the fact that he had a broken arm, a broken leg and several broken ribs. I later find out from my mother, who regained consciousness almost immediately after the crash, that he also ran around collecting our passports and my camera, so that they wouldn’t be stolen. Unbelievable!
Back in my bed, one of the Dutch embassy people show up and hands me a telephone. It’s the Swedish consul in Lima, Lotta, calling to find out how we are and what we need. She starts dealing with all of our insurances so that we don’t have to worry about that, and also collects names and telephone numbers so that the Swedish State department can begin to notify our relatives and friends back home.
Juan comes into the room in a wheelchair, followed by Dorthe, and they go over to Rob’s bed. Juan says something to Rob, and Rob cries out “No! Why?!” We all realize immediately what Juan had told Rob. Joke is dead. We all cry. Later, we find out that Joke had died immediately, so the person Rob saw the hospital staff working on earlier was actually someone else, which is why the nurses refused his demand and just led him back to his bed.
At some point, I’m taken away for x-rays, but I barely remember this. I remember it being very painful to assume the physical positions that they demanded of me, and that it was very difficult to get on and off the gurney, but that’s all.
We receive no evening meal, nothing to eat or drink at all, and a request for something to drink results only in a large plastic bottle of rather warm distilled water. I ask for Coke, juice, tea, anything at all apart from this completely tasteless and therefore rather vile liquid, but there is apparently nothing else available.
Night falls and we try to sleep. Impossible. We are in some pain and have a difficult time finding any position at all which offers even a modicum of physical comfort. There’s a TV in the room which turns off and on by itself, apparently, at quite a loud volume, the hospital staff is making an enormous amount of noise in the hallway right outside and there are no doors, only open doorways, babies are crying in a nearby ward, and there are people in the next ward as well as our own shouting “Señorita! Señorita!” very loudly throughout most of the night, to no avail as the night nurse seemed to be either asleep or mostly ignoring the calls.
The night finally passes. We are each brought a bowl of some thin, grey liquid substance, which tastes vaguely of apples and cinnamon, along with a dry piece of bread with two black olives stuffed into it. No spoons or other cutlery, so we’re obviously meant to drink the stuff straight from the bowl. A little while later, a young woman shows up and proudly exclaims that she’s the hospital’s nutritional expert, i e responsible for the travesty they called breakfast. None of us feel especially inclined to return her smiles.
Cecilia and Lisa, Ivan’s wife and sister and Juan’s daughter-in-law and daughter, respectively, show up. Lisa is a doctor and speaks English, so she immediately starts to mediate between us and the hospital staff, to our great relief. Cecilia disappears and returns a bit later, having purchased t-shirts and sweat pants for all of us, so that we would have clean and whole clothes to wear.
We are informed that we’re all going to be transferred to Lima. However, our luggage is in the care of the local police, and the “fiscal” is being quite difficult about the whole thing. He wants all of us to come to the police station individually to identify our luggage, which is absolutely ridiculous as many of us simply cannot move of our own accord. Even if he was to ferry us back and forth, his car is hardly built to accommodate wheelchairs, stands for intravenous medications, gurneys and so on. Several different people, among them the Swedish consul, apply pressure, but nearly the whole day passes before he can be persuaded to bring the luggage to the hospital and let us identify it there. In the meantime, we wait…
As usual, no lunch, nothing to drink etc. I was up, rolling around in a wheelchair to take calls from the Swedish consulate on various telephones around the hospital, and before I know it, someone else is in my bed. There are paparazzi all over the place, and the hospital doesn’t seem inclined to do anything to stop them – luckily, Lisa is running around closing doors in their faces so that they can’t photograph or film us.
I try to find out the results of my x-rays, but all such queries are only met with shrugs from the nurses. We are told nothing except that we’re going to another hospital in Lima.
Eventually, the fiscal shows up with our luggage, transported there in an ambulance, and we are allowed to identify it and begin to reclaim what’s left of our belongings. My mother’s backpack is missing altogether, but most of us actually get most of our things back. My mp3-player, sunglasses and neck pillow are missing, but everything else is miraculously enough there. Our suitcases are badly damaged for the most part, and there’s blood on my backpack, but that’s a very minor concern at that point.
Ambulances and a bus are organized and we can finally begin the journey to Lima in late afternoon, after dodging more paparazzi on our very slow way to the vehicles. After a couple of hours or so, we pull up in front of a much more modern-looking facility than the hospital in Supe, Lima’s Ricardo Palma Clinic. As we pull up, a woman starts waving frantically at us. I’ve never seen her before, so I feel a bit puzzled. Next to her, however, is a man that I recognize from photos, Juano Murillo, so I realize that the woman must be Barbara Perrins, an American living in Peru. I think “Thank God, someone who speaks both English and Spanish!” We are taken inside and installed in little booths with curtains in the emergency room, and Barbara almost immediately starts to run around to get us all Cokes and something to eat, which is extremely welcome.
More x-rays follow, as well as CT-scans. Once again, the staff speaks only Spanish, although Lisa is running around to everyone, trying her best to help with translations and to put pressure on her fellow doctors to hurry things along. Not only that, Juan’s and Ivan’s entire family is there, all of them checking in on all of us. Juan’s wife Lida and her sisters speak only Spanish, but the four children (all of them adults, just to clear that up) all speak English, which we are all very grateful for.
Rising to a sitting position on the gurney in the x-ray room, I have a massive dizzy spell and almost fall off. No one takes any notice, however, they just stabilize me and wheel me back to the booth that I share with my mother. A trauma doctor shows up and wants to know where I’ve been impacted during the crash, but this is pretty much everywhere so the question is difficult to answer. Taking stock of my injuries, I establish that I have general cuts, scrapes and bruises pretty much everywhere, stitches in my right elbow next to a very large abrasion, a huge black eye, my nose has been scraped and there are various smaller cuts on my face, the largest bruise I have ever seen stretching across my left thigh, hip and buttock, swollen bumps all over my head and obviously there was some head trauma and a concussion, another huge bruise stretching from the base of my skull and down to cover my neck, a cut and a lot of bruising on my left arm, the muscles and ligaments in my left calf hurt and aren’t functioning properly, my right wrist is sprained and the muscles hurt, and there’s a fairly large wound on my right foot where they’ve pulled out shards of glass but not put any stitches in.
Not having had any sleep in a long time, I realize that this is what I need more than anything right now, and after quite a long time, we manage to procure releases for me, my mother and Dorthe, so that we can be transported to a nearby hotel to rest. We receive single rooms with large double beds, which feels like absolute heaven at this point. I manage to take a very slow and very careful shower, which is extremely welcome as the dust from being dragged from the bus is still in my hair and I feel absolutely filthy.
The only problem is that the fire alarm keeps going off throughout the night. The first time, I manage after much effort to get myself out of bed and down to the lobby, only to be told that it’s a malfunction. The alarm goes off several more times during the night, but now I ignore it. Even something as apparently simple as turning over in bed requires monumental effort and produces both pain and dizziness. There’s also no restaurant, as the hotel is brand new and the kitchen is not finished yet, but the staff helps us to order deliveries from nearby restaurants. It’s expensive, but at this point we don’t care, as this is our first real food since our lunch before the accident.
I can’t remember exactly how long we were in Lima, the days are a bit of a blur, but after a couple of days or so, Juano Murillo and Barbara Perrins transport me, my mother, Dorthe and Krister, who has now also been released, to a small, beautiful hotel in the Sacred Valley, to recuperate surrounded by stunning mountains in a quiet and peaceful setting. We are almost the only guests and the staff takes extremely good care of us, so this feels like absolute heaven. There’s a fairly large garden and they organize tables, chairs and everything else that we need to eat outside, and the hotel pet, a very sweet dog named Jack, adopts us all.
After this point, everything else is recuperation. We stay in the Sacred Valley for a few days, then check in at the Pardo Clinic in Cuzco to have our stitches removed and to see to wounds which have become infected. We then spend the rest of the time in Cuzco. With the help of Juano and Barbara, plus crutches, canes and slings, we manage to visit Ollantaytambo, Machu Picchu, Qoriqancha, Pachaqamaq and the cathedral, and to perform ceremonies there for ourselves and the rest of the group. It was painful and utterly exhausting, but worth it.
On Dec 16, we return to Lima and get to see Juan, Ivan and Louise. The next day, we board a KLM flight for home, managing after much hassle to be allowed to buy upgrades to business class. We could never have managed the long flight from Lima to Amsterdam in economy class seats, as we weren’t (and still aren’t) able to sit in a normal position in a chair for more than 20 minutes without severe pain. As it was, the effects of my head trauma didn’t agree at all with flying and cabin pressure, so I spent about half of the flight time to Amsterdam getting sick, it was coming out both ends at once, and this continued on the flight to Stockholm. I don’t normally feel any ill effects at all from flying, and it passed as soon as we got on the ground, so there’s no question that it must have been the interaction between the flight and my injuries. We got wheelchairs and special assistance in the airports of Lima, Amsterdam and Stockholm, and Susanna picked us up at Arlanda, got us home and then went shopping for us.
We have now been home for a while, and what still remains for my own part is dizziness, a swollen bump at the base of my skull, fatigue, pain and cramping in my left calf, hematomas and pain in my left hip, pain and weakness in my right wrist. The infected wound on my right foot has finally begun to heal. We are now waiting to be called for x-rays, CT-scans and ultrasound examinations at St Goran’s Hospital, so that we can then begin physical therapy. Walking is a challenge and I can only manage short distances, which take a very long time, and I have to be careful with sudden movements, bending over or shifting positions since this produces dizzy spells and sets the whole room spinning. Use of my right hand is limited, because of the pain in my wrist. The regimen of two different types of antibiotics is thankfully finished, so now it’s just muscle relaxants and pain killers. The medications, as well as the healing process, make me very tired, so I sleep anywhere from 10 to 17 hours a day at the moment.
Physically, I’m not exactly in perfect shape, but I do feel OK psychologically and emotionally, which is a blessing. Thoughts and reflections? Yes, many, but that’s for a separate posting, I think – this is long enough already. One thing I do want to add, though. My deepest and heartfelt thanks to a number of people: Juan and Ivan and their entire family, especially Lisa and Cecilia, Juano Murillo and Barbara Perrins who took tremendously good care of us after leaving Lima and if it hadn’t been for Juano I’d probably still be at Machu Picchu – he pretty much had to carry me down from there to the bus station as my left leg went on strike completely, staff at the bus company Taruka Tours (especially Julio who all but carried me on his back down from Pachaqamaq), staff at the various hotels (Ocean Hotel in Lima, the Ollantaytambo Lodge in the Sacred Valley and the Eco Inn in Cuzco) for being so thoughtful and attentive to our recuperative needs, the Swedish consul in Lima (Lotta) as well as SOS International and the Swedish state department for all of their tremendous assistance, and of course the whole network of friends and fellow paqos. Among the Q’ero indians, Don Humberto and Doña Bernadina performed soul retrievals for us all, Don Francisco and Don Ignacio performed despacho ceremonies for us and Don Sebastian made a statement about the accident, and all of our fellow paqos in North America and Europe responded immediately, joining together to send healing saywas, do despachos etc. That entire network now feels more than ever like a large and very important and dear family, and we are immeasurably grateful for having you and for your coordinated help and support!
PS: In all of this, there is a positive report. Even at such high altitudes as 4500 metres, there wasn’t a single twinge of any altitude sickness, either before or after the crash!
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Inkamästarnas arv, Anna Southerington 