Sunday July 22nd - Gerome, Turkey

The staff at the wonderful Mithra Cave Hotel Cappadocia in Gerome had arranged for an airport shuttle van to pick us up at 8 AM and take us to the airport for a return flight to Istanbul. There we would spend 2 more days before returning to Azerbaijan.
As ever, we had a full breakfast on the terrace and watched the mornings hot air balloons before carrying our backpacks down the steps to the Mercedes-Benz van. We were the first passengers so we sat directly behind the driver as he drove to other hotels and picked up about 12 more passengers. I don't remember if the van had seat belts. It did not have shoulder belts.

We were traveling toward the airport on a well-maintained, four-lane divided highway when we noticed a semi-truck in the other direction as we crested a hill. Our driver slowed as the semi seemed to slow also. Then the semi made a turn and began crossing our lane of the highway. Our driver and Elaine and I saw that the semi did not stop and that we would hit the side of the truck - as I screamed: No, no, no! All of us aware that we would crash into this long and slow moving truck in our path.

After the crash, I recall the driver jumping out and running to the back of the van and opening the doors for the passengers to get out. Elaine and I were both stuck in our seats and vaguely aware that people were running away from the van. Would it explode? Then someone opened the side door and pulled me out, put me onto a gurney and waited for the ambulance. Bloody black skirt. Elaine and I were taken to separate hospitals in Nevsehir - a large town in Cappadocia.

My emergency room stay must have included x-rays and stitches but I don't recall. There was another vacationer from Australia named Versimilitude who was treated and released. In our fog, we agreed to take photos of each other on our cameras - as if this was just another part of our vacations.

After much discussion, the hospital agreed to release me to the same "tourist" hospital where Elaine had been admitted. I was moved into the same room on the maternity ward of the hospital. I was more alert than Elaine, so I used the cell phone of the social worker Bucket Solmaz to call the AZ PC Country Director and inform her of our accident.

By early afternoon it was decided that I would have surgery at 9PM that night for my broken right shoulder. That meant enough time to have a quick meal, then nothing to eat for 6 hours. I was visited by the anesthesiologist and by the orthopedic surgeon Dr. Erdogan who would perform surgery and spoke some English. I felt as if we were very special patients. Elaine was still quite groggy and needed an additional day before surgery.