Hi Again...
People have told us many times, and we've read in many books, that SOMETHING always happens to disturb a sailing plan. We tempted fate and had a rather tight schedule and blamo, SOMETHING happened. They were right. We should have known, "they" always are.
Thursday while we were moving the boat so the boatyard could remove our mast (to solve a wiring problem, but that's another story), Thorsten threw his back out. He was just holding a rope and blamo, out went the back and down went Thorsten. We thought that I would just take him to the doctor some time that day but within about 5 minutes, he was rather overwhelmed with pain. An ambulance was called and we went to the hospital in it.
The hospital didn't have many folks who spoke English and my French is pretty limited, especially with the rather thick accents around here. Many people said many alarming things to us that had me scrambling for my dictionary and none of the words could be found. Through a variety of words, hand signals, and charades we made ourselves understood. Thorsten has had this happen before so he knew what was probably happening and basically what would be asked so that gave us a boost in the conversations. He had x-rays and people lifted his legs to see how far they would go with no pain (nowhere). Then they gave us a confusing array of prescriptions and called another ambulance to take us away.
We had decided that the boat wasn't he right place to go for him to recover. The bed is tough to get in and out of and it moves which could be BAD for him. The boatyard helped us find a hotel with a ground floor room (so we didn't have to mash him into a teeny elevator) (those of you who have seen European elevators know of what I speak). At some point while we were at the hospital, Thorsten's clothes were removed down to his underpants. When we left they hadn't redressed him and he couldn't handle me putting his pants back on either. We assumed that they would let us hang onto the little gown and drape that he had on him. Wrong. Poor guy was unceremoniously stripped and he was wheeled out with the x-ray envelope covering the good parts. I was trying desperately to get my sweather out of my bag so I could cover the rest of the parts but had no time. Thorsten was in a haze of pain meds and cared not. He was decently covered by the time we checked into the hotel, thank goodness.
He is current resting fairly comfortably. The pain meds help him a lot. I find him whatever he wants to eat or drink. The hotel has been really nice to us. Before we left the US we hired a medical service that we can call 24 hrs a day and we got them to explain the prescriptions to us (pain, anti inflammatory, sleeping pill, muscle relaxant). We will be here for at least a week, probably more. We will use the hired captain and crew to take the boat (without either of us) to Annapolis. We'll stick around till they get here and take off and then we'll probably head back to TX.
A personal plea from me to you... Please don't tell me that this is for the best, or that things happen for a reason, or that I was foolish for wanting to go accross the ocean while pregnant. We am greatly disappointed. We know that there will be sighs of releif, just please don't admit them to us. We will love you more for your discretion. :)
Heather and Thorsten