Clearly, all we could do at that point was arrange for private evacuation service. I was already familiar with a company...and I knew the executive vice president. However, I had stubbornly not bought a policy from the company because I had heard several accounts of hunters arranging their own evacuation on commercial air carriers. Problems of the sort we ran into in Cameroon had just never appeared on my radar screen, so the risk/reward ratio involved in buying medical evacuation insurance had simply not computed. You would have to be a worry wart to buy that kind of insurance.

The transportation bill alone? $122,822.Boy, was I wrong! The amount of money involved in a private evacuation, I quickly learned, was stunning. It was such a large figure, and it needed to be raised so quickly, the only practical solution was to ask a wealthy friend to pledge the necessary amount.

He did so, and what ensued in amazingly short order was a flawless evacuation. It began with a King Air Flight from camp to Douala, arranged for by the camp owner, where I was met by a Citation twin-engine jet with a doctor on board and a medical assistant. I was whisked from Douala. to Aswan, Egypt. to Entebbe Airport in Uganda. to Nairobi, Kenya, where preliminary x-rays revealed that I had four fractured vertebra, one of them broken and so unstable the head of neurosurgery recommended against commercial aviation evacuation even if it could be found. I needed immediate medical care (in his opinion that included surgery) or private evacuation.

Since back surgery in Nairobi, with no second opinion, seemed out of the question, it was back to the air. The first leg, again aboard a Citation twin-engine jet, took me to Corfu, Greece, and thence to Brussels, Belgium, where an air ambulance service out of Atlanta happened to be delivering a seriously injured soccer player. Their Lear Jet took me to Shannon, Ireland; Gander, Newfoundland; Baltimore, Maryland; and finally Miami, Florida.

The transportation bill alone? $122,822.

At this writing, two weeks later, I still spend a good part of my days flat on my back, laptop balanced on my knees. I've lost 30 pounds, and I have a removable brace I have to wear whenever I sit or stand. Only stubbornness and an aversion to medicine keep me out of the painkiller bottle. I also still have occasional nightmares about falling. On the bright side, I can walk and climb stairs, and I am looking forward to getting back to the office. My prospects for a near-full recovery in time are excellent, according to my doctors, who all agree, incidentally, that anything but a full-scale evacuation would have probably left me crippled.

What have I learned? That life is fragile and terrible things happen. That you cannot wall yourself off from danger, but there are some important things you can - and should do - if you travel. One of them is buy evacuation insurance. You should do that, I've now learned, even if you don't take adventurous trips. One of the clear memories I have of the whole ordeal is lying on a stretcher in that Lear Jet somewhere over the North Atlantic, talking with the paramedic on board, who was battling to stay awake after flying all the way from Atlanta to Brussels and back with stops every five hours.

That paramedic wasn't really surprised to hear that my flight had not been arranged by an evacuation insurance company, that the up-front payment was coming out of my own pocket. It happened all the time, he said. American tourists in Europe. Fishermen in Canada who slip on a piece of ice. Saddest of all, he said, are retirees who book a cruise out of Ft. Lauderdale only to slip and fall in the shower and break their hip. To get home from somewhere like Cancun they have to pony up, on the spot, something like $18,000 or more.

"Someone needs to tell travelers that their regular insurance doesn't help them get home in the event of a medical crisis," he said.

"I'll do that," I said.

- Don Causey, President/Publisher, The Angling Report and The Hunting Report.

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