The worst business trip ever

[nemo]

...or at least the worst business trip I’ve ever heard of. People have been telling me to write this down for some time now, so here it is – everything in this story is true and happened to me years ago.

 

I was working for a large company and was sent to Las Vegas to help support a military exercise at Nellis Air Force Base. On Sunday, the exercise was only conducted for the first half of the day, so sometime after noon I hopped into my rented Ford Explorer and went exploring for lunch. I drove around Las Vegas for a bit, and soon found myself crossing the Hoover Dam. At that point, I thought “I’ll just drive to the next place to eat and turn around”. The next place was in Kingman, Arizona. I walked in, grabbed a box of greasy chicken, filled the gas tank and headed back. As I was driving back to Las Vegas, I saw a sign that read ‘Grand Canyon’ and had an arrow pointing to the right. I thought, “I’ve never been to the Grand Canyon before” and immediately turned to the right. Eventually the paved road turned to gravel, which then became a dirt path through the mountains. Most people with some shred of sense would have turned around at that point; I threw my rental into four wheel drive and pressed on. After what seemed like hours of bouncing through the hills and ravines, I arrived at the Grand Canyon. It was beautiful. The sun was setting, the sky was purple and the canyon stretched to the end of the earth. Amazing.

 

Having completed my objective, I turned around and headed back. Fifteen minutes into my trip back, I ran off the road into a washout. If you have never lived in the American desert, you should know something about the rain there – it arrives quickly, pounds fiercely, and leaves as quickly as it came. One of the symptoms of this kind of rain is severe erosion, so when I mention that I ran off the road into a washout, understand that the difference between where I started and where I ended is about two meters, verticially. I don’t know if my tires burst before or after I left the road (I was using Firestone Wilderness AT’s on this Explorer at about that time), but the fact that my front axle was snapped made the issue a moot one anyway. After surveying the damage, I climbed up on the roof of the truck and took stock of my situation:

• Lost in the desert, without transportation
  
• No water
  
• No cell phone
  
• Nobody knows I'm here
  

Yeah, things could’ve been worse, but I wasn’t really in the glass-half-full frame of mind at the time. Amazingly enough, as I stood on the roof of my truck next to the road, I saw a jeep driving down the same trail I had just come from. As the jeep pulled up, the driver took a long look at both my truck and me and asked “need a ride?” Hmm... yes, I did need a ride. After climbing into the jeep, two things became immediately obvious: the seat belt was nowhere to be found, and my new companion was already through a half case of Old Milwaukee's Best. This day just kept on getting better.

 

As it turned out, my friend (whose name I no longer remember) was a park ranger at the Grand Canyon. His group worked three days on, then four days off, and he was heading home for his mini-vacation. He was the only person who regularly used this path any more, so the combination of his jeep and what was left of my Explorer constituted rush hour in those parts. Thankfully, he lived on a paved road, which made my next task of hitchhiking back to Las Vegas much easier than I had thought it would be.

 

I ended up getting a ride back to Las Vegas from an amazingly friendly gentleman who ran helicopter tours from Las Vegas to the Grand Canyon, and arrived at my hotel very late that evening. When I woke up the next morning, I felt worse than I could ever remember before that. I couldn’t move my neck, my back was screaming and my head was nearing critical mass. I couldn’t go support an exercise in that condition, so I had the hotel shuttle take me to the hospital.

 

After what seemed like a rather lengthy wait, I was finally seen and examined by a very excitable twelve year old doctor. He went through my list of symptoms, heard my adventures from the last twenty-four hours, and came to what he considered to be a solid conclusion.

“I think you may have spinal Meningitis.”

“Is that bad?”

“It’s fatal”

“That qualifies. You said you ‘think’; how far away from you ‘know’ are we?”

“There’s only one way to test for this.”

“Blood work?”

“Spinal tap.”

“Of course.”

I’d like to be able to tell you how long this process took, but time seems to slow down when you are going through something like this. I would imagine it took quite a while, because when we started, my back was intact and the nurse holding my hand and telling me everything would be alright was smiling; when we finished my pre-adolescent physician had made over 40 unsuccessful attempts to correctly perform a spinal tap, she was crying and screamed at him to stop, and my back was in worse condition than when I had arrived. As a last resort to apparently pulling my entire spinal column out with a pair of Vice Grips, I was sent to radiology where they performed my spinal tap perfectly the first time. Nice.

 

One of the many things I didn’t know about Meningitis is that it’s highly contagious – meaning that I would spend the next 24 hours in solitary confinement. It would be hard to paint an accurate picture of those joyful moments to someone who wasn’t actually there, but I’ll try. I was wheeled into a sterile white room on a gurney. The room was completely empty except for the gurney, me, one white sheet and the peekaboo dress they make you wear. The room had one fluorescent light that was apparently operated from outside the room (there was no switch inside, and they never shut it off). I drug myself off the mobile torture rack for one painful trip to an adjacent bathroom before being hurried back to my prison by a nurse who was not at all happy to be talking to someone who may have a variant of the plague.

 

At this point, you may be wondering what the people I’m supposed to be working with are thinking happened to me, since I’ve now fallen off the radar for a day and a half. I did manage to call my boss from the park ranger’s house, and let him know that I’d been in an accident (explaining how I ended up at the Grand Canyon was difficult, but he was pretty understanding for being woken up to hear my little epic). While I didn’t get to talk to him before being quarantined, he had a pretty good idea that I wasn’t out partying and wasn’t mad when I finally did get in touch with him. I managed to get a call to my wife between the diagnosis and the sewing machine impersonation on my back. Unfortunately, she knew quite a bit more about Meningitis than I did, because my “it’ll be okay” didn’t help much. I would imagine my time in quarantine was as long for her as it was for me.

 

As it turned out, I did not have Meningitis, spinal or otherwise. I was moved to a regular room for observation for a day and fed lukewarm cardboard while curious nurses constantly stopped by and mentioned how good I was looking. After a couple of hours of thinking these people really needed to get out more if I was considered something worth a trip down the hall, I finally heard the story: people heard I wrecked my truck at the Grand Canyon and had assumed I pulled some sort of “Thelma and Louise” routine, and lived to tell about it. Gossip can occasionally be truly entertaining.

 

After one day of observation the hospital gave me some pain killers, waited an hour and asked how I felt before discharging me. I called my boss and my wife and told them that I was alive and would be getting back to the exercise as soon as possible, but that I was glad this whole episode was over. Later that evening, I went for pizza with one of my coworkers but ended up having to leave due to a severe headache. I went back to the hotel to lay down and woke up the next morning virtually confined to my bed. The dominoes that led to this problem were the multiple attempts at a spinal tap and the fact that the fluid my young Frankenstein was trying to get at is also the fluid that keeps your brain from smacking the inside of your skull every time you move your head. Welcome to the wonderful world of epidural migraines. All that poking in my back had actually left quite a few holes in my spinal column, through which my spinal fluid had leaked out. Once the pain killers wore off, I discovered a whole new realm of knowing you’re alive. To make matters worse, I called my health provider (an HMO) and told them I was going back to the hospital. They told me that I wasn’t allowed to go back, because I’d already been seen for my accident, and if I wanted further care, I had to come back home and see one of my plan doctors.

 

I literally crawled around my room, packing my belongings and arranging a flight home, because I could keep my head in a relatively stable position if it was hanging almost straight down. I did make it all the way to the plane in an upright position, but was almost detained at the airport because the lady at the ticket counter thought I was in no condition to fly. I made the trip to the east coast with an air sickness bag in hand, and everyone on the plane stayed as far away from me as possible. The next day, my wife drove me to the doctor – we had just moved and had not changed plans yet, so the doctor’s office was two hours away – where we discovered that the symptoms I presented in Las Vegas were from dehydration, not illness. Awesome.

 

Finally, after a weekend to recuperate, I went back to the office and hoped to forget about the whole trip. That morning, the rental car company called. They were not happy that I’d left the state without returning their Explorer, and they wanted it back. I related the story to them, and said I’d call the local sheriff in Arizona, but that there wasn’t much I could do about it. They didn’t appreciate that either, and told me that the car was my responsibility; if I couldn’t get it back to them, I’d have to buy it. At this point, some background information is required: when I rented the truck, I bought the ‘covers everything’ insurance and rented it with my corporate credit card. When I spoke to my boss about it, he told me to drop the extra insurance because I was covered by the corporate card while on business travel. When the corporate card insurance group found out that I’d been in an accident at the Grand Canyon during a trip to Las Vegas on business, they said that I was obviously sightseeing and that they were not liable for coverage. This presented a bigger problem than you might think because at the time, I was ‘between policies’ on my personal automotive insurance. Being poor sucks. Avoid it whenever possible. Back to the present situation – I’ve lost an Explorer in the Arizona mountains, and nobody is planning on covering me.

 

My first decision was to locate and get in touch with the local sheriff. When I spoke with him, I described where the truck was, and asked if he could go by and at least make sure it was still there.

“Nope, can’t do it.”

“Why?”

“That, son, is the Halupi Indian Reservation. I’ve got no jurisdiction in there. You’ll have to call the tribal counsel, but I wouldn’t expect much help. They tend to have the ‘finders keepers’ mindset more often than not.”

“Of course. Thank you, Sheriff.”

 

And so began my negotiations with the tribal counsel. I made phone calls to individual elders, representatives, and assorted family members and got nowhere. After days of calling and frustration, I had a conversation with someone at our corporate office that changed everything. I called the Sheriff back and begged until he agreed to drive out to where I had crashed my Explorer. He called back the next day and reported that there was, in fact, an Explorer where I said it would be, and one nasty box of chicken still in the passenger seat.

 

The corporate card policy stated that I was covered going to and from work activities and meals – and there was no mileage limitation on how far you could go to get something to eat. As far as I know, the company and the card split the bill on the Explorer that is still out there in the desert somewhere, and I would imagine that particular area of the policy has seen some revision. It was two years before I was even asked to go on travel again.

[Queso]

WOW, what a crazy story. i am glad everything, eventually, turned out alright. epic tale!

[niviene]

Holy cow. You should publish that in a news column, that's such a horrific story that I couldn't stop reading it. If I were you, I would have sued for malpractice (I would prefer to simply beat the hell out of him, but laws being as they are....) - 40 unsuccessful tries to do a Spinal Tap is just a tad excessive in my opinion - and considering the rest of the extreme pain those failures caused you to have... that person is one of the many who eke by to becoming a doctor and really should not be. Ugh. I've had my share of cluster migraines, and I know what it's like to be in disabling cranial pain. If someone had directly caused me to have those, I would have fought tooth and nail. On a side note - aren't HMO's lovely? Glad to hear you are OK - but what a story. I'm also glad to hear you didn't have to pay for the Explorer.

[rockytriton]

I don't think that Stephen King could make up a better story than this. I can definitely see this as a "Lifetime" made for TV movie. You should submit it to them, they love stuff like that. I'm glad to hear that you made it through it alive. I'm sure you could have taken some action against Doogie Houser for the spinal tap failures too.

[nkt]

I'm sure you could have taken some action against Doogie Houser for the spinal tap failures too.

Hey! Doogie would have got it right in one! :xx: