My brave boy.

After the flight to London Southend we travelled on by bus, train and underground and arrived at 11.30 hours at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. 369, Fulham Road. I'll never forget that address anymore.

Bas was in surgery, in theatre as the nurse called it, so we had time to talk to the two schoolteachers of Bas who had been with him all the time. They never left his side. We are so grateful to them for that.
They gave us coffee and we talked and got more and more details about what happened. It was even worse than we feared.
I will not get into much details here. All I can say is that Bas his left hand is badly badly hurt. His ring finger is gone and his middle finger is reconstructed and has a few metal pins in it. His index finger has multiple fractures. His little finger and thumb are ok.

The teachers told us Bas had been so so brave the whole time. The poor child was stuck for about one hour. The escalator had to be disassembled/taken apart to free him. Bas was very calm and even informed how the rest of his group was doing. He spoke fluently english all the time too. The police, fire brigade, ambulance staff and underground security were all very impressed by Bas.
My boy!!

The surgery lasted for 5 hours and then we finally could go see him.
The teachers then went back to their group and we said goodbye with tears in our eyes. It's so special how fast you can develop a special bond with people you've just met.

In the afternoon we stayed with Bas of course. He slowly got more and more awake.
I arranged a hotel for Annemarie and myself. One of us could even sleep in the hospital with Bas but we all agreed that wasn't necessary. We would all rest more when we had a good sleep.

Around 20.30 we said goodbye to Bas. Another heavy moment, and went to our hotel. A 10 minutes walk down Fulham road. It turned out our hotel, the Millennium & Copthorne Hotel was right at the Chelsea Football Club, Stamford Bridge.
We crashed on our beds (we had been awake now for almost 46 hours) and fell asleep right away.