The Man Who Saved Me Twice

 

Kim Dooley likes to say she almost died in Peru at the hands of a bottle of juice. It is the kind of sentence only she could deliver with a straight face.

She and a close colleague had just wrapped a project in the Galapagos and, being sensible people, decided that flying all the way home only to fly back the next week made no sense. So they went to Machu Picchu instead. Somewhere along a path of dark brick pavement, glass bottle in hand, Kim missed a step. She felt herself falling. Her first thought, oddly practical, was to throw the bottle. She did not manage it in time, and her left hand came down directly on the broken glass.

In her memoir When Life Misses a Note: Gaining Wisdom Through Lived Experience, she describes the blood the way she describes most terrible things, with a movie reference and a joke. Think Kill Bill, she says. You know the scene. The clinic took one look and started saying "profundo," which she assumed meant profound and only later learned meant deep. Arteries and tendons were severed. She needed emergency surgery, the thing most travelers dread.

Here is where the story turns. The ambulance was little more than a 1960s station wagon, no medic, just transport. But her colleague happened to be an Eagle Scout. He climbed into the back, raised her arm, counted, and talked to her in a low, steady voice to keep her calm while she shivered and cried. By the time they reached the clinic, his white shirt was so soaked in blood that the staff assumed he was the one who had been shot.

He got her there alive. That was the first save.

The second one took longer to notice. This was the colleague who saw what Kim was good at, who folded her into the team and made her feel she belonged there, who became a research partner and a family friend for years afterward. He did not just keep her heart beating on a bad day in Peru. He recognized her strengths and made her feel like she was truly part of something. When she learned there was a heroism award for lifesaving action, she nominated him and went to watch him receive it.

He was, and still is, she writes, her hero.

That is the quiet thing tucked inside a gory travel story. We picture heroes as the people who show up in an emergency. But the ones who change your life are often the same people in the ordinary hours, the ones who see you clearly and make room for you. Sometimes, if you are very lucky, they turn out to be the same person.

When Life Misses a Note: Gaining Wisdom Through Lived Experience by Kim E. Dooley is available now on Amazon, for anyone who has been saved, in one way or another, by the right person at the right time.

Live link: https://booksbykimedooley.com/

Name: Kim Dooley

Email: k-dooley@techtraininggroup.com