Throughout my growing-up years, I was always the more sensible of the two MacVay boys. My brother Troy and I were both daredevils, but somehow he always managed to go a bit too far. We’ve both taken falls, from cliffs and trees and other things, but his falls were almost always more serious. Usually that was because when we were climbing something he rarely gave a single thought to how he would get back down; it also probably had a lot to do with the fact that he was really into mountain-biking. He’s broken a lot of bones over the years, from his arms (several times) to his nose to his collarbone to his sternum. He can’t wear his hair too short these days because he’s got so many scars it looks like he has a map of Damansara Heights on his head. He still has a bump on his upper lip from the time we were biking down by the government wharf and he did a face-plant onto cement. He was feeding through a straw for a while after that.

Me, I was the sensible one. I’ve had my share of spills, but my history of broken bones is limited to the three times I broke my nose, the one time I slipped and landed on a finger and blew a piece of the knuckle out, and the two times I cracked a rib (the most recent being a mere few weeks ago when I went back to judo after several years). Even if we include all types of injuries, I’ve done much better than my brother, who has damaged his body in an impressive variety of ways.

So there I was last Thursday, showing Hijabman around KL, and we ended up strolling by Pudu Prison. We walked down Lorong Hang Tuah to the mosque behind the prison and then slowly walked back towards the main road, killing time before our scheduled lunch meeting with Azlin over at Times Square. As we walked along the prison wall, something caught my eye: a thick vine, snaking its way down the wall from a tree inside the compound. I pulled on the vine a couple of times; it felt strong. Hmmm, I thought, I’ve always wanted to see what’s on the other side of this wall up close. Maybe I can just take a peek. We were still near the back of the compound, where the wall is shorter and doesn’t have much barbed wire. After two or three more exploratory tugs on the vine, I hoisted myself up and planted my feet on the wall. Then the vine snapped.

I hit the cement pretty hard. My first reaction was to writhe around a bit, cursing through laughter (after all, it may have hurt like hell but it was still somehow funny). For those who are curious what that sounded like, it was something like “OH FAHAHACK!” I was still laughing when I tried to get up and a lightning bolt of pain shot through my left heel. My left arm felt like it had suffered a nasty jolt as well. My back, surprisingly, didn’t hurt much. I tried to get up again and failed yet again; this time I felt dizzy. I kept laughing while the world spun around me. I was laughing, but I was also a bit worried: I thought I’d broken my foot, maybe my arm as well.

While Hijabman went up to Jalan Hang Tuah to get a taxi, I made a ‘guess what I just did’ call to Leen, who told me she’d meet me at Hospital Kuala Lumpur. The taxi that eventually rolled down the lane took me to HKL, where I had to sit in a wheelchair because I couldn’t put any weight whatsoever on my left foot. We were still waiting when Leen arrived. The wait seemed to take forever, but eventually I was wheeled in to see a young doctor, who sent me for an x-ray. The x-ray technician was gentle with my foot but whacked my arm into the table. After a painful ‘twist it a little more this way’ session I was wheeled back to see the doctor, this time with a disturbing lump on my arm.

The doctor was as surprised as I was that nothing was broken; he even had to consult with a senior doctor just in case. But it was true: nothing was broken. I did, however, have what the doctor rather vaguely called “tissue damage”, apparently his way of saying I’d made a mess of my Achilles tendon. He prescribed me some strong painkillers and something for inflammation and soon I was being wheeled out of the hospital, with not even so much as a wrap on either my foot or my arm. That might sound positive, but it didn’t help me walk. I still couldn’t put any weight on my foot; I had to hop on one foot from the car to our apartment, not something I would like to do again.

Leen strongly suggested I go for a ‘traditional massage’. I strongly objected, but she swore it would help. I was feeling a bit sheepish about the whole incident in a stereotypical buffoonish sitcom husband kind of way, so I reluctantly agreed. I slowly hopped back to the car and before I knew it I was hopping into As-Syifa, a ‘traditional health centre’ in Bangi, where my foot was ‘massaged’ by four different men. One was Ustaz Sheikh, As-Syifa’s friendly, grandfatherly proprietor; the other three were Indonesian guys with arms like Popeye. They took turns squeezing, pressing and wrenching my foot and the rest of my lower leg as if they were determined to eventually tear it off and keep it. The last guy was the worst. He was so rough he had me growling like a lion. After two hours of excruciating ‘massage’ I actually managed to limp out of there instead of hop. I still felt incredible pain with every step, but compared to the massage it wasn’t so bad.

I don’t bruise easily. In fact, falling backwards three or four feet onto cement didn’t leave me with a single bruise. The massage, however, left me with a small bruise on my arm (Popeye’s Indonesian cousins had given that some loving too) and a really nasty bruise on the sole of my foot. Ustaz Sheikh was sure this indicated a problem with my bowels or something. I kept telling him to focus on my heel, but these reflexology people apparently just love bruising the hell out of the arches of people’s feet and then telling them it’s proof of some underlying condition. They even have a big poster that shows your guts on the arch of your foot. Anyway, Ustaz Sheikh wanted me to come in for a follow-up and bekam lintah, which basically means they wanted to make that bruise go away the old-fashioned way: with leeches.

Bring on the bloodsuckers

On Saturday I drove back to As-Syifa and managed to limp in. Hey, that was a big improvement in a short time. So it seems the massage, as painful as it was, actually helped. Sure, my foot was hideously swollen and had a huge black bruise on it. Sure, my arm felt worse than on the day I fell. Sure, the massage had left my left shin with a massive rash. But dammit, I could limp. Yes, that was an improvement. However, as I limped in through the door of As-Syifa, I wasn’t thinking so much about how much I’d improved. I was thinking about the leeches.

Since I’ve been writing about my family history lately, maybe now is a good time to mention that leeches actually feature somewhat prominently in the history of the MacVay family. Not all of my ancestors in Scotland bore the family name MacBheatha. Some became known for their profession; because they were physicians, and because medicine at that time seems to have mostly consisted of bloodletting, some of them got the family name Leech. Had I inherited that name, I might be more amenable to changing my name as per Malay custom, just as I would if my family name were Snodgrass or Dick or Fluffernutter or something unpronounceable in almost every language on earth. (Apologies if anyone with such names takes offence. I’m sure they’re all fine names, really.) But my direct ancestors kept the name MacBheatha and just changed the spelling to MacVay. Way to go, fellas.

Fast forward several hundred years to me lying on a table in a very small room while the Indonesian sadists from two days before gently and lovingly took leeches out of a plastic container and set them loose on my foot. The first two leeches latched right on and started siphoning my blood right away. Like the mosquitoes here, they were probably pretty excited about getting a chance to eat Western food instead of the same old boring Asian food. The third leech, however, was rather picky and didn’t want to bite my foot — at least not until after yet another Indonesian sadist rather unceremoniously jabbed my foot with a needle. Cue blood; enter leech, centre stage.

After about an hour of that, the leeches were killed off and promptly regurgitated a ridiculous amount of my blood. As nasty as that sounds, I wouldn’t have even gone for the treatment if Ustadh had not promised to immediately kill the leeches, which is actually standard procedure at his centre for obvious reasons. Anyway, after bandages were placed on my foot a pretty lady came into the room and started massaging my heel. She spoke to me with an Indonesian accent and I felt the urge to bolt for the door, but it was too late. She tightened her grip on my foot and she proceeded to focus every bit of strength she had on just the area that had been injured. The optimist in me thought, Well, at least the rash on my shin won’t get any worse.

Lucky for me the lovely little lady, who as it turns out is from Bali (as are the Popeyes), didn’t tear my foot off. On my way back to the car, I noticed my limping gait was not nearly as bad as before. Hooray again for painful massage.

Thanks to a nifty anti-coagulant that leeches inject into their victims (they even inject painkillers, which is kinda neat), and the location of the leech bites, my foot bled for days. If the Hansaplast people think they’re still doing better than other companies despite the worldwide recession, I may be responsible. Fortunately, four days after the bloodletting and almost a week after my fall, the bleeding has stopped and I only look slightly disabled when I walk. My heel still hurts, and I can’t stand on it very long; my arm actually hurts more than it did last week, probably because I’ve been driving. But I’m feeling much better now, really. And I even have a cool story to tell the folks back home. I mean, how many people have been injured while trying to get into Pudu Prison?

So what have I learned from all this? Two things:

1) While I am a good climber, I’m not a very good judge of the tensile strength of vines, and
2) I’m not as different from my brother as I thought.

But it’s all good.