By The truck rumbled through the jungle. There were three of us in the front, and the back was filled with Mexican military who wanted to get home. We were dropping them off at different points in the jungle on our way to the hospital.
In my mind, I was wondering why we were giving people a lift, considering they thought I may have been bitten by a scorpion. Surely that would just slow us down.
But there was no choice, so there was no point in complaining about it.
After a time, we arrived at the town with the hospital. It consisted of a few roads, made of compressed mud and gravel, alongside which were houses. It was set into the backdrop of jungle. In other circumstances, it may have been considered beautiful, currently though, all I cared about was seeing a doctor.
We were ushered into the hospital and seen almost immediately.
“You have a stomach problem”
Well, at least it wasn’t a scorpion bite. A stomach problem I can contend with.
It later transpired, after more than a year in and out of tropical disease hospitals, that this first doctor, in a small village in the middle of a Mexican jungle, had been 100% accurate in his diagnosis.
While he couldn’t tell us what the stomach problem was, neither could any of the other specialist hospitals with budgets beyond the imagination of this first doctor.
I was prescribed a large dose of antibiotics, given in the form of an injection.
The needle, thank god, came out of a sealed packet. It was only later when I went to use the toilet, and saw the dried blood uncleaned everywhere, that I realised the possible dangers had he not used a needle from a sealed packet.
Thirty minutes later I was feeling much better.
Heck, we were even discussing the possibility of going back to the village we started the trek from, spending a few days there to recuperate, and then heading back out into the jungle.
Sixty minutes later, I wasn’t feeling so well.
Ninety minutes later and I was back to where I had been before.
The doctor?
No idea. Antibiotics was all he could give me.
Which meant… moving on to the next hospital.
Luckily, they had an ambulance to take use there.
It took them an hour to find the ambulance drivers, who arrived all excited. This was the first time they’d had the opportunity to drive the ambulance since it was purchased.
They turned the engine on and… it promptly exploded.
It had been sitting outside in a damp, humid environment, unmaintained and unused for a number of years. Unsurprisingly, the engine didn’t work.
To make matters worse, I was finding it hard to breathe again.
The only option was a taxi. It was ordered, by which I mean everybody phoned their friends to see who was free, and the first one turned up an hour later. No good, the doctor didn’t want me in it because the exhaust was broken, and I was already struggling to breathe properly. The journey to the next bigger town was going to be a good few hours.
So… we waited another hour or so for another car to turn up.
Next problem… there was me, a couple of drips, Mark and two nurses.
I got in the passenger seat, carrying my drip bags. I passed them over the back seat to the two nurses, who sat behind me. Mark rammed our bags into the boot, and then squeezed into the passenger side rear seat.
We slammed the top of the drip bags into the car door, the perfect drip holder, and each nurse took one of the tubes leading back into me.
Saying the roads were uneven is an understatement, and they needed to balance the tubes so that a bump didn’t pull the canular out of my arm.
We were ready for the next part of the trip… which is when it began to rain.
Life is about making decisions and overcoming obstacles. It’s doing this that we find out more about ourselves and build up a resilience and strength.
I meet a lot of people who’ve begun trying to earn money online and failed. All they then do, is complain about how nothing works.
Well, I can guarantee that if you devote the majority of your thinking time to complaining about how nothing works, then you’re sure as hell never going to get anything to work.
It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
You will get knocked down. Heck, even folk who own huge companies get knocked down. The only option, if you want to run your own successful online business, is to pick yourself back up again, spend time understanding what went wrong, and then…
…find a solution and start again.
This may happen just once, but more likely it’s going to happen again and again and again.
But every time you pick yourself up and carry on, you’re going to be a bit further down the path.
Michael
P.S. Online you only need one thing to succeed, an email list. Everything else is optional. Heck, even how you email to that list is optional. There is no right or wrong. You can build relationships and tell stories, or you can just promote heavily. Both work. But the email list is your paddle to move you down the river.
I recommend you use Aweber:
What do you think?