In Thailand, people drive on the left side of the street. At first, it seems like just a curiosity and didn’t bother me until the first time our taxi driver turned left on red. There’s something just wrong about left on red.

In Koh Tao, there’s almost no way to get around the island except by moped. (They call them motorbikes). Our second day on the island, we decided to rent one and see if we could find cheaper accommodations.

The woman we rented it from showed us how the moped worked and Lauren took it out for a test drive. “On the left. Left!” the woman yelled.

Lauren came back and I hopped on the back and off we went.

We made it up to the main strip of the island (we were staying far South of it) and had lunch. Despite Lonely Planet saying that the island was still developing, the area was completely gringo-ified with a bowling alley, a paint ball field and even one hotel offering “Wi-Fi.” So much for roughing it.

After lunch, we decided to head over to another bay on the eastern side of the island. We heard it was cheaper out that way.

We were running low on gas but figured we’d get more gas in the town we were heading to.

Not long after turning off the main road, the roads turned to dirt roads. There were a few steep hills but after every curve, we thought, this has to be the town. After a long climb, we reached a cliff and saw a the beautiful bay and town below, probably another mile of twisting roads below. A Sweedish couple came up from the road.

“That way good not,” the woman said to us.

“The road is not good this way?” Lauren asked.

“Yes,” she said. She told us that the road only got worse and that, on the way back, her boyfriend had driven the moped up the hills while she walked because the roads were so steep they didn’t think they’d make it with both of them.

They headed on their way back to town.

Lauren and I debated. We were low on gas and weren’t sure we would make it all the way back to town. But we would be in worse shape if we went on and there was no gas in the village we were headed to.

We decided to turn back. I started walking up the hills to save gas. At the top of a hill, I would get on and we’d coast down.

We reached the top of another hill. Halfway down, the moped started skidding. The next thing I remember, we were on the ground. Lauren was standing up and bleeding. I miraculously had almost no scratches on me, but my left knee was killing me.

(Lauren: Miraculous because I was the buffer between Beth and the road. First thing I remember was gravel a few inches from my face, and yelling, ‘are you ok?! are you ok?!’. She landed on me and the bike on her - a Beth sandwich I keep saying. As soon as I got up and saw that Beth’s knee was hurt, and took one look at my knee, I knew we needed to get to a hospital. I was amazed at how deep my knee was cut and how much the skin had been ripped away. I was getting flashes of X-rays and hospitals and airplanes and worried mothers thinking of Beth’s leg. I went into survival mode and wanted to get back as fast as we could.)

“We have to get back to the main town,” Lauren kept saying.

“I can’t walk,” I said. I hadn’t tried, but I knew it was true.

Less than a minute later, a Swedish guy on a four wheeler drove up. Lauren flagged him down. He helped me onto the back of his four-wheeler and Lauren got back on the moped. I looked at her knee for the first time.

“Is that your knee cap?” I asked, uncharacteristically calm in the middle of such goriness.

“No,” Lauren insisted. (We later discovered that it was.)

The three of us headed to a clinic in the main port town. They called the doctor and treated Lauren first, stitching up her knee and putting iodine on her cuts.

(Lauren: I definitely had to go to my happy place for this little adventure. Given my hypochondriac leanings, getting stitches and shots in a shack of a clinic on the side of a dirt road didn’t exactly set my overactive mind at ease. But they said I had no choice, and looking at my knee, I wasn’t about to argue. I won’t go into details of the gore or the digging-around-your-innards pain, but I will say at one point the nurse jumped back with a yelp, the doctor nodded knowingly, and she moved toward my knee again, giggling. I put my gripped fists over my eyes, tried to breathe and kept saying ‘ok, ok, ok’, in a disembodied sing songy voice.)

The doctor then came out to me and told me that I needed to come inside.

I looked at him like he was crazy. There was no way I could walk.

After much arguing, the Swedish guy and the doctor helped me hobble inside. The doctor poked and prodded. What he touched didn’t hurt, but when he tried to straighten or bend my leg, the pain was the most excruciating pain I’d ever been in.

“Torn ligament,” he pronounced.

He gave me a shot of morphine for the pain and then put a knee brace on my knee. (Lauren: This elicited moans of pain you would expect to hear from a torture chamber.) He told me if I was still in pain in the morning, I should come back at 8am and they would sent me to the hospital. It was too late today to go because the last boat had already left.

Someone brought crutches and I made my way back to the front of the clinic and set down. I’m not sure if it was the morphine or the pain or the shock, but I grabbed a plastic bag and threw up.

A half hour later we got a taxi back to our bungalow. We ate peanut butter and our crackers and took pills they gave us.

(Lauren: I actually had to drive that God-forsaken bike back to our place and spent a while arguing with the woman about the price that we’d have to pay for the “damages,” a few scratches and nothing more. I won’t go into it too much, but it is fairly clear to me that the profit that is made from motorbike accidents is enough to keep the renters hoping for a wreck every now and again.)

Lauren opened the huge medical bag we brought. We started reading the first aid kit. For a sprained knee or torn ligament, all that was needed was rest, which I could do at the beach. For the road rash, however, Lauren needed to clean the wound thoroughly, which they hadn’t really done at the clinic. “This cleaning,” the book said, “is often more painful than the injury itself.”

Lauren mixed the iodine and water mixture and started scrubbing away. A scream would come from the bathroom every few minutes. When she finally returned, she started going through the gauze and band-aids. “There isn’t enough stuff here,” she complained. It was the largest pack we could have bought.

Finally, after hours of cleaning and with medical supplies strewn about our room like an ER, she was finished. We finally went to sleep.