I was heading home on my bicycle Sunday night when two men rushed out of the darkness and split my skull open with a sword. They hit me twice more in the torso and were aiming another blow to my head when I lunged out of the way and was hit below my right kidney. About this time two people came up on a motorbike and the robbers ran off. I walked to the emergency room with bone fragments in my brain and leaking arterial blood through my fingers. They stitched me up to stop the blood flow and put me on a gurney where I stayed all night with no pain meds, water, information, no nothing. As a thunderstorm was going on outside a doctor came to me and showed me an xray of dime to quarter size bone fragments and said he was going to operate and remove them. I was anesthesized within the hour and awoke at about noon feeling much less pain. I’ve been in the hospital here for eight days and will have to be here for seven to eight more until the antibiotics I’ve been recieving(two weeks course)are done plus a day of observation when I’m finished with them. The hospital wants their money immediately since I’m not insured though I may try to get my State of Hawaii Insurance to pay. It may be hard to explain how I’m in Thailand though. The proceedure is the State Department pays my bill if I can’t, then flies me home to the US where they take the money they spent out of my Social Security check until it’s paid off or I die of starvation. I hope this isn’t the end of my Thai adventure but it looks like it may be. More in about a week when I can get back to a computer, I snuck out to write this….~baba