| March 7th, 2013 |
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So, earlier this morning I was looking at options for renting a motorcycle for the few days I'll be on my own in the US in October - contemplating getting a bike and seeing some of America that way.
However, I've come to realise that that's just not a good plan, for one simple reason:
Bikes have a higher chance of an accident, or at least a higher chance that in the event of an accident, you'll be injured.
And the thing is? While I've been injured before, and even injured in motorcycle accidents, and I could handle it, those incidents all happened in Australia. Not only did this mean that I had my family and/or friends to help me deal with recovery, it meant that any professional intervention I required happened in Australia, too.
I truly dread the prospect of having to deal with the American health care "system". Yes, I'm getting travel insurance - because you can't guarantee you *won't* need health care - but I just can't take the risk on a bike.
I'll save my Amazing Motorcycle Holiday Dream Journey for Tasmania or New Zealand, still. Because I pretty much trust Medicare - my badly-broken leg was treated excellently - and New Zealand's system is relatively similar to Australia's. (Plus New Zealand is near enough that it is conceptually feasible that if I were injured there, I could still make it home again even while I was still recovering.)
I have a sense of breakability I didn't used to have, since 27/12/11 marked the first time my body actually, truly broke - always before I'd been injured, but largely structurally intact. That had nothing to do with bikes, but I'm aware that I *can* be hurt that badly on a more visceral level than I used to be.
Nothing I've ever heard about the health care experience in the USA suggests that, really, any part of the process of treatment and recovery I went through would have been handled even close to as well as it was handled here.
And even if the medical staff were exactly as kind, exactly as pleasant, and exactly as competent, even if somehow the astronomically-higher medical costs were handled by the insurance without being stressful for me (which I doubt) and didn't cost me anything out-of-pocket (ditto), I think it would be vastly more stressful and unpleasant and difficult to deal with just because I'd be in a foreign country, which has to it an inherent level of alienation.
Here, I got treated by people with familiar accents and familiar cultural preconceptions, and while I was in hospital I was visited daily by family and friends.
Somehow I don't think as many of my most beloveds would make it to my bedside on another continent.
So. Bikes are too high-risk for tourism outside of Oceania. I have decided.
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