It was the ultimate hunting horror story. For hours that night, Dougie and I lay in the rain, trying vainly to reach the camp some 50 miles away with a satellite phone. When we finally did, days of ordeal still lay ahead of me.
Unable to rise more than a few degrees from horizontal without searing pain, I instructed my office to contact MedJetAssist, the medical evacuation company we have been representing for more than a year. A non-member at that point, I arranged to have MedJetAssist transport me home on a fee basis. That fee, you may recall, came to well over $100,000.
What I got for that was a circuitous jet flight from Douala to Miami, Florida, with a stopover in Kenya, where I was examined by doctors at Nairobi hospital. Importantly, I had to get to Douala on my own by chartering a flight out of the jungle, and that meant I had to get from the camp to the plane on my own with the help of inexpert handlers who dropped me, causing pain so severe I briefly blacked out.
And bear with me as I point out some additional details about this journey that I have not written about before.
When the charter flight from the camp arrived in Douala, the evacuation jet had not arrived as scheduled. The charter pilot had no idea how to care for me, so he simply pulled........(continued)
