Helping amputees and phantom limb pain

ME AND MY MIRROR

Treating phantom limb pain with free mirrors and mirror therapy ...globally.

Outreach

WILDLIFE

By on Jun 5, 2012 in Outreach

If you enjoyed the read, please feel free to share itTime to wind down Phnom Penh-way for a final kick at the curing phantoms cat. Fresh out of the hospital from the second surgery to my now crab-like hand, and bike-less for a change (I’d left it in storage for 10 days in PP), I decided to hop on a bus. There are dozens of bus companies operating all over Cambodia; most every bus is full to the rain gutters and, more or less, each company is worse than the next. The only time they’ll leave on-time is when you’re runnin’ late. They leave with a belch of black diesel smoke, a wail on the horn and lope down the center of the road all loose in the hips and rolling on spent rubber and next-to-nothing brakes. It was Khmer New Year, their biggest holiday of the year and one that lasts a full 2 weeks for most and more for some. So the buses were extra-full with peeps traveling to see their peeps and the roads were landmined with 2-day drunks. Positively wild out there: smoking hulks overturned in roadside ditches, everything with a motor and wheels insanely overloaded and the aforementioned drunks weaving through it all on baling wire step-throughs; leering and waving their hats like blottoed Don Quixotes. More determined step-throughs also snake by with three passengers aboard, the middle one hoisting an IV bag taped to a bamboo stick for a more ardent yet banged-up reveller who’s also aboard. The bus drivers themselves are notoriously aggressive and sanguine about their chances at arriving safely at their scheduled destination. They appear to come from two (and only two) schools: there is the ‘Happy Dragon’ school where they are taught to perform astoundingly irresponsible driving feats while trusting wholly in DESTINY to take care of the outcome; and then there are the alumni from the ‘No Brain No Pain’ school who literally go out there and play ‘Chicken’ with oncoming in the spirit of sport. I made’er down in one piece, which I thought was remarkable, but just after the Khmer New Year smoke cleared I read in the Cambodia Daily that this holiday season was a...

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