Third Time, Defintely Not a Charm, Actually It's a Trip to the Hospital

The morning started off well enough, with a big breakfast buffet, where my husband and I gorged on ripe papayas and sweet pineapples.  The girls on the other hand thought fruit loops and doughnuts were more to their liking.

After breakfast we made our way to the lagoon where the girls and their cousins all played with the surfboards.  I was thinking how cute…all four of them sitting on one surfboard.  Then I saw the board go towards the lava rocks…and the boys scramble up the rocks and the board with the girls drift away.  All the adults were on the beach and when we saw the boys on the rocks, we all knew it was not a good situation.  We told the girls to go back to the boys and when they all came back to shore we knew there was trouble.  There was blood, lots of blood.  My younger nephew had cut his toes very badly.  My sister is a physician and when she couldn’t stop the bleeding, I knew this was serious.  It was terrible.  This injury warranted a trip to the hospital.  Since the toes weren’t easily accessible for suturing, the physician at the hospital used derma bond…super glued the wounds.  Really unlucky!  My nephew had fallen twice the day before and had arrived at the hotel with huge bandages on his shin…a fall at the waterfall and at a shave ice stand, and now this.  This of course meant that my nephew was out of the water for the next couple of days and we cancelled our snorkeling trip. 

While my sister and her husband took their son to the hospital, we spent the rest of the morning at the pool and at the lagoon with our girls and our older nephew – had a great time but we worried about the rest of the group at the hospital.  They finally got back around 2:30pm – they had left around 10am.  We hung around the hotel and we were off to dinner at Roy’s to celebrate my sister’s birthday. 

Roy’s as usual is located in a shopping center – this one King’s Shops, located at the next turn off from the Orchid.  The food was good and the view of the fake lake fine (reminded me of Foster City, CA).  I ordered what I always order – misoyaki butterfish, with a spicy tuna appetizer.  For dessert – the usual – chocolate soufflé cake – yum.

As we spent more days at the hotel, we learned of more families whose kids had cut their feet on the lava rocks.  My husband ran into a man who was waiting for a wheelchair at the lagoon who had moments ago cut his feet on the rocks.   We were puzzled the hotel did not have visible signs warning about the sharp rocks.  It seemed that injury on the rocks wasn’t uncommon.  Maybe the Hawaiians know all about the sharp lava rocks but us naïve tourists certainly were not as aware.



Saturday, August 7, 2010