Guest View: True story of life – or death

Like your family, we’ve sadly turned the calendar-page from the Blessed Holiday Season of Sharing. To the Cursed January Season of Scraping-up the Minimum Payments on Our Credit Card Bills. But can we still “share” with you a true story of life – or death?
A young American fighting for his life in a tropical jungle might not seem like a timely subject, right after the official birthdays of two empire-threatening martyrs for peace and social justice: Jesus and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. But –
Dave and Tom were young Americans riding 10-speed bikes across the triathlon-long island of Jamaica. (Jamaica stretches west of the recently earthquake, flood, epidemic and hurricane(s)-hammered island of Haiti. Jamaicans, like Haitians, are descendants of kidnapped Africans. Two-thirds of the Africans left the slave ships alive. The slave-traders dumped the other Africans’ corpses overboard.) The two young Americans pedaled carefully through the jungle at night to beat the heat. Suddenly, an unmapped, unmarked and unwarned-of hairpin turn loomed ahead out of the darkness. Dave hit the dirt.
Helmets were unheard of in those primordial days. Except maybe for women’s roller derby gladiators and embattled local school board members.
Dave’s collarbone was broken. Blood gushed from his deeply-gashed head. (So kids, don’t try this @ home.)
Tom jumped into the road in front of Dave’s body to flag a car down. The first driver swerved around them, not risking a jungle-ambush on that violence-plagued island.
Dave’s blood was drenching the lonely road. Desperate, Tom jumped in front of a speeding van. It screeched to a stop inches in front of them.
The van rushed them to a jungle clinic. But the nurses couldn’t reach the hamlet’s only doctor. Soon, they had to change Dave’s blood-soaked bandages.
Tom knew from his first-aid class that it was an artery that squirted blood onto a nearby wall. Without surgery, Dave would die.
For a fair price, without wasting priceless time to negotiate, a sleepy villager sped them across the mountainous island to a hospital. Tom cradled Dave’s bloody head throughout the tooth-loosening, roller-coaster marathon. The surgeon rushed Dave in ahead of the native patients, who kept waiting – well, patiently. He graciously let Tom watch anxiously in the operating room as he skillfully snipped and stitched the deadly wound.
Karen and Tom Lantz, Hollister