"Eeeeeeeeee, AAAAAAAAhhhhhhhhh."

Today is a day full of words I fear, ADMISSION. PATIENT. WAITING ROOM. I think most of us do living in a world Greys and ER and all the rest, these days we know too much before we're wheeled between the echoing walls. The familiarity of clashing wheelchairs, pastel walls and solicitous voices, the knowledge that this isn't going to end entirely well for one if us and it's unlikely to be the doctor. 

Dubai Saudi/German hospital is excellent. It's the neatest, tidiest, emptiest ER in the whole world. Either everyone is in cupboards or there's something odd going on. Maybe there's an emergency and they've shipped everyone away.

Two minutes of form filling, 30 seconds later I get an SMS welcoming me to the hospital and confirming my doctors name and time of appointment. On the way there they weigh me and take my blood pressure, it becomes obvious they're very big on blood pressure here.

The German doctor who is busy performing to spooky stereotypes with a small blond mustache and glinting spectacles, is well, efficient. He prods and pokes then decides I should make an appointment to see his specialist colleague, this is sounding more like the health service runaround I'm used to and I foresee the endless queues of medical normality stretching off in my mind. Ten minutes to see the top specialist? Maybe there just aren't any sick people here? Except me.

INFECTION. GANGRENE. AMPUTATION. More words to make a grown man shiver down to his now evidently, ruinous toes. The specialist is defiant in his clinical hypothesis, cut the toe off, save the foot. A sort of Tory medical theory, spare the rod and spoil the child in reverse.

Limping back to the hotel I realise I should tell someone, well the long suffering wife really, who is currently on the last few days of a 24 day shoot in SA. I could call her mobile phone but it seems it has gone and got itself stolen in Cape Town, all its own fault, nothing to do with SA being crammed with opportunistic thieving bastards at all.

True to her spectacular form she immediately walks off the worldwide shoot, throws everything in two big cases and jumps on a plane. Ten hours later she's through the front door and in control, overflowing with good will, bravery and love. What a gel.

Saturday and we are wheeled through doctors and specialists and battalions of nurses brimming with super efficiency and friendliness. The surgeon, who has to go on holiday tomorrow, has clearly put aside enough time to do the op for no reason other than he sees my foot as an affront to all he lives for. And I think he likes Ali too. 

In the dark no one can hear you fart. Which is about as much fun as you’re going to get in ICU, unless you count raising and lowering the bed a couple of hundred times.

The Orc screams again, "shhhhheeeeeeyaaaaaaashhaaaaaggggggg" it rants, then exhales heavily, I'm no longer scared by it, not in the daylight anyway, when the shadows have withdrawn and fears are more easily tamed. And since it turned out to be a wheezing aircon. 

4.30am and I’m leaning out of my bed which has a stranglehold on my genitals, giving me a bit of a Freddy Mercury voice, not the most convincing tone to use to apologise.

17 years in Johannesburg doesn't really prepare you for large figures looming over your bed in the dark but it does lead to several lively encounters with nurses and piss bottles both of which have landed in a heap after flying through the air. That’s the last I’ll see of the lime jelly and chocolate cake treat.

The operation, which was done under local anesthetic so the doc could ask me questions…”Does that hurt?” “How about that...?” casual dentist-type banter along those lines, oh and the more memorable, “I need to take the other toe off as well, can you sign the form please…” is mostly a scene from Zorro with flashing blades, funny accents and loud exclamations, mostly from me.

There are three nurses, an seemingly unemployed anaesthetist and a neuro-surgeon in the room, individually they all offer me the chance to see, keep or wave goodbye to my digits. I respond with the finger, at least that’s still working. One of the nurses suggests I could make a nice paperweight with them in a jar. I really hope this is some kind of a LSD type painkiller finally kicking in, but I doubt it.

The surgeon is on the phone telling someone it all went well and the amputee can be collected and returned to ICU. Lucky him I think, then realise I’m now the amputee. Limbless. Dis-abled. Hop a long, put your best foot forward, toe the line… nope, that wasn’t as much fun as I hoped.

I think I’ll ring the bell for a little attention. More later I think.

Nov 27th at the border

Off to Oman for the day, a chance to see more of the country from what is advertised as "a fun, happy, musical occasion while renewing your passport visa."
I meet my fellow travellers, a happy mix of Canadians, Irish and Spanish  and one incredibly sulky Italian, and our rather well appointed and air conditioned VW van.
The Irish guy has done it five times and laughed when I said it took 8 to 10 hours. Two each way he said, easy but dull.

We set out and it's actually quite pleasant compared to the treacherous Abu Dhabi run. At first it was lots of sand, then lots of big spikey mountains, and some camels. And rows of brightly colored, falling apart shops that looks like south Manchester in the late 70's.
Couple of stops for passport stamps later, AED 50 to re-enter and we head back.

The fact that it's national day on the coming weekend and the 2020 vote today in Dubai did begin to add to a certain friskiness of the road. Minibuses packed with migrant worker families looking hot, and bored, kids squealing in the fetid air.
We turn a corner and literally In front of us it looks like the Pakistan Afghanistan border, on a really bad day. At least six miles of traffic at a standstill, as immobile as the air.

Two hours of crazy Dick Dastardly like manouvers, being dive bombed by dudes in Lamborghinis, who know the lanes aren't anything to do with them, racing from lane to lane and back again, growling over their engines in frustration. Road trains packed with recycled cardboard boxes packed into new cardboard boxes, dropping them on car roofs as they shuffle past.
Two hours of wandering listlessly for five long, mind numbing miles we roll into the Dubai border stop.
The car and bus loads have exploded over the half mile of burning, soft
carpark. It's a sea of surging, screaming, shouting people waving arms, passports, babies to get the attention of half a dozen passport guards who are busy pretending ten thousand people don't exist.
Eventually we become part of a game of pass the EU/US passport holders, sent from queue to queue and door to door. The lines cruelly disappear after half an hour leaving us to find another just as it disintegrates, before reappearing on the other side of a fence, or a bin, or both.
There are camels fainting in distance. Two German woman try to get in front of us but an Irish woman with three kids all but head butts them and they retreat into their bunkers. Two hours more of this and we pop rather unexpectantly into the relatively calm mayhem of the customs office, holding back a thousand screaming Indians with a stern look I get the hallowed stamp. Then, like a girls blouse, I decide to collapse just a tad, hey it was hot, and  pop off to use the toilet, unfortunately I'm faced with, well let's just say it was a non flushing, non wiping environment where the flies were the only ones happy as shit, as it were.
We flee back to the camper van full of aircon and hit the road at a surprising speed so we hit Dubai only an hour or so later, and meander into the centre to drop people at some mall I've never seen before. Then onto the evening traffic to the marina. Any minute now we'll be singing cumbaya, everyone is laid back and talking of doing it again next month. How soon we forget.

whether, or not.

The view from our balcony is quite, erm, changeable.

When you decide to decamp to Dubai no one ever mentions the weather. It's just a given, Hot, Very Hot, Fry egg on head hot, (what is this obsession with frying eggs on things?). Anyway, this has proven to be rather untrue,  this morning is a balmy 11 degrees and the view from our balcony I awoke to was rather undefined so, reluctantly, I've had to put the eggs back in the fridge.

Doobey, doobey do, as Frank used to say.

Dubai is unique.
Like everywhere. These guys just love to build, stand still for a minute and they'll put a bus stop next to you. And a roundabout, they love roundabouts.
The view from our hotel room window changed in a month, from five shiny, neon wrapped edifices of mind-boggling leans and warps, to a small pile of rubble in the middle of them. That became a large stack of bricks. And a cement mixer, or two, or three. Then a whole heap of concrete clutching huge panes of smokey glass and there it was, a new shiny building. Shutting off light from the others and offering strange insights into people's lives.

I don't know how that makes me feel, after years of casual building in SA and careless building in the UK it's weird to see it done so efficiently. But what about all those warnings I was given by builders elsewhere? "Can't do that till the cement's dry mate, and then there's the grouting." "There's no way we can paint 'til that plasters gone off, be weeks that." Where they telling fibs?
Or am I going to wake up in downstairs' bedroom one morning? I am starting to have this reoccurring dream of high-rise, ultra shiny dominoes casually flicking into each other, that tends to leave me a bit breathless in the mornings.

Of course that could be the other major love of the locals, they do love a good smoke. I mean, really. Huge fistfulls of fags, like 70's working men's clubs in Middlesbrough, a wall of smoke that just hits you and covers you and wrings you out leaving a wrinkled, wheezing slightly surprised husk of your former self. They smoke anywhere. You'll walk into a lift that's totally empty except for a large cloud of nicotine waiting to take hold of every individual piece of clothing and cover them in a carcinogenic tincture. 
It's really odd how alien it feels, that once all-pervading fugg that we used to freely inhale with every double V&T as if it were our life's breath, now is so foreign that you really can't understand how you managed just one breath without expiring instantly.
And the rules have changed, again. Now it's back to being the weird one out if you don't partake, the 80's raised eyebrow, the curled lip of derision, the blot on your burgeoning manliness. It's just too much to take, excuse me, I need some air.