Hello.ladies and gents. Thx for reading my blog. I apologize for my last blog having some simple spelling mistakes. My thumbs are too big sometimes and hit the wrong buttons on the phone. Sorry to all you nice people reading. In the last blog i said my next blog would have some safety tips and also.some preparations. I also teased you about my experience with travel insurance and why i ALWAYS recommend you investing in it. Yes, it's an investment in saving your life and sometimes in safeguarding your documents and property. That all depends on what policy you choose. I fly most of the time with Delta/KLM/Air France because they are all partnered together. Occasionally i fly Aeroflot, Russia's state owned Airline, but i really enjoy Air France. KLM.and Delta also are great. For those that have never traveled to Russia, there will always be an employee of Russia on an airline that is not a Russian airline. I assume it's a security measure or something like that. They are easy to recognize....they were alot of red and there is always a man in the crew and he will be trained in airline security. OK, back to travel tips and recommendations. First ALWAYS read the fine print on your airline ticket. There can be fee's hidden everywhere. A ticket change is costly and so this leads us to my second tip about travel insurance. $75 to $90 in travel insurance will almost always cover some change in your travel itinerary and for sure pay for ticket changes. Those fee's start at $75 and go up to $300 or more if seats are short. See, right there the travel insurance paid for itself. Next read up about your travel insurance and make sure it is NOT just a reimbursement policy. Trust me when i say that they will try to wiggle out of reimbursing you in any way they can. You want a policy that is active from the time you buy the ticket and not when you begin the travel. I mean for example that you need to leave for your trip a day or 2 later than normal. That is covered if you pick the right policy and they will just rebook your seat at no charge. Be prepared to explain why you changed your departure time. I used TravelGuard travel insurance and i have nothing but GREAT words to describe my experiences with them. In November of 2013. My insurance cost me $86. It covered hospitalization and evacuation as well as smaller things like document replacement. It also covered reimbursement of expenses and ticket changes if necessary. My trip that time was to Lviv to see my friends Vlad and his girlfriend and his family. I met Vlad when i was on the Black Sea near Evpatoria. He overheard me speaking English and trying to explain something in Russian to the woman i was renting my flat from. He popped in to help me solve the hot water problem. Who knew that hot water would be such a big deal in summer??? But still it was :) Vlad and i immediately became great friends and hung out for the rest of my 2 weeks by the sea. I actually live on an island on the Atlantic ocean so you may be wondering why i traveled all the way to Evpatoria. That is another blog topic. I will leave a teaser and just say i enjoy living all sides of life...the rich and poor. After my vacation was over i promised to visit Vlad if he invited me. He did and so that took me to Lviv in Ukraine's Western border with Poland. I stayed there for a few days and arrived there by purchasing a ticket on their high speed train network. The man that sat across from me in first class turned out to be the man that helped them decide what train to buy. He was some engineer for the government and we got into deep conversation about the then new High Speed trains purchased by the Ukraine from Hyundai. These trains travel east to west and north to south. They don't stop at every city because they are meant to only travel at high speed from big city to other big city. He invited me to travel with him if i would help them with their 3g Wi-Fi and cellular hotspots that the train provides for free. I agreed and we traveled to Kharkov next. I stayed in Kharkov for 3 days before disaster struck. I call it disaster because no one could have predicted what was about to change my life forever. Even as i write this blog i still suffer the life altering events that happened in my rented flat on Darwin(Darvinea)street in the city center. There was a McDonald's and a nice park and metro station within a 3 minute walk from my flat. It seemed to be a nice, safe area. On my 3rd day there i returned from dinner out to find my flat smelling like cigarette smoke. If you don't smoke then you know this smell well. It was not the smell of someone smoking in my apartment but more the smell on someone's clothes that had been or maybe still were in the flat. My hair really did stand on end. In short i was on high alert and my body responded like it. Hormones and other cool stuff took over my thoughts and indeed the strength in my body. Things slowed down it seemed. I remember what happened next like i know my name. There was a bathroom immediately on the right. I entered it and shut the door. I acted like i was using the toilet but i really was putting my feet on the base of the plunger(the tool used to unclog a toilet). This one had a wooden handle and was about 18 inches long. I put it in my right hand and opened the door, ready for what or who was in the kitchen. I entered the kitchen and turned on the light. It was empty. I drank.some water from a glass and kept the glass in my left hand. To be more clear...i studied self defense and Korean martial arts for 14 years before this event. I became a black belt after 4 years at it and studied and practiced alot....4 nights a week. I was also in the U.S. military so i know how to be self aware. My body had taken over and was getting ready for whatever was gonna happen. No one in the kitchen ✔ No one in the bathroom ✔ so the only place someone could have been was the bedroom. Sure, someone reading this is asking why i didn't just leave and call the police and my answer is that it's the Ukraine and not the USA. If the police came i still needed to explain what was going on or maybe even pay them to enter the apartment. I ruled that out right away and decided to enter the bedroom. Well, here things got serious. 2 men awaited me in the bedroom. One lunged at me from my bed and the other came at me from around the desk where a safe was locked. A large fat man pinned me against the door while a smaller slim man put his hands low around my neck. HIS MISTAKE! He said to me in bad English " just give us your money and your passport and we will leave." I knew i was not gonna give them anything for breaking into my flat and i knew for sure they would not just leave peacefully. The man that had his hands around my neck was trying to choke me but his hands were too low. Readers, never choke low like in the movies. Choke higher and closer to the head...it works faster and is harder to defend. I rather easily removed his hands from my neck by grabbing his opposing thumbs and peeling them off my neck. With a quick motion i broke his thumb and with another motion gave him a hard hammer fist to his collar bone(clavicle). It broke with a loud pop and he ran out of the room. That left me with the fat guy that was around my waist. I hit him several times with the wooden handle from the toilet tool. I hit him so hard that it broke the wooden stick. I switched to putting my thumbs in his ears and pushing with all my strength. He was drunk and slow but very heavy. He had some earrings as well and no matter how i hit him, elbows to the head, punches to the head, palm hands to his ears, thumbs in ears, none of this worked. I remember him slamming into the door over and over. It knocked the air from my lungs and they burned trying to catch my breath. I remember thinking that my hand below my thumb felt metal and little earrings. My fingers felt the earrings below my thumbs. I kept hitting him on the jaw with hammer fists but nothing worked. I decided after i guess a minute or 2 that i was gonna rip his damn ear off. I yelled that i was gonna rip his ear off with 50/50 chances that he would turn his head away from me the right way. I wanted his left ear with all the small earrings in it. He had a big hole in his right ear and it would have just hurt but not ripped his ear off. At first he just banged me into the door over and over but eventually he turned his head the way i needed to get out of there. I warn you now...if you get sick over such things then just skip down a few lines. Things will sound graphic!!! I put my hand on the outside of his ear and ripped down and away really hard. The earrings came off along with most of his ear. There was alot of blood along with the flesh of his ear. He LET GO OF ME! He ran out of my room and didn't look back. It all happened so fast. I was worried about the woman and her son that had a flat next to mine. I had traded her a homemade dinner if i bought all the groceries to make the meal. She was older than me by 10 or so years and i was worried about them. We just shared a dinner but something in me worried about if they had been robbed or if she was safe. She had a son that was maybe in his early 30's but had the mind and mental abilities of a 9 year old boy. Maybe that is why i was worried. I knocked loudly on her door and she came to the door. Her eyes met mine and i said in bad Russian that i needed her to call the police and an ambulance. It is totally true about that "is someone standing behind me" look we see on T.V. and movies. I knew someone was behind me. Before i could turn and fight something hard hit me on the back right side of my head. It was so hard that i fell to the ground. I remember trying to protect the temple on my head...those soft spots near our ears and between them and our eyes. A bat or metal object could hit you there and kill you. I raised my right hand to cover that side of my head and a small metal pipe came down and smashed my wrist and broke it. I tried to roll over so i could be on my back but i could barely move. I was seeing stars and my ears were ringing. As i tried to turn over i was aware that the mother of the mentally handicapped man bad returned to the door. She had a broom in her hands and her son had grabbed me by my feet. As he pulled me into their apartment the man that i never saw struck me 3 more times on the back of my head and then my neck. I didnt know then but he had crushed my spine into 19 pieces and i could not move. She was using the broom to shove him away and that is what i saw last. I woke2 days later with my head taped down and a C collar on my neck. My left arm didn't move and neither did my left leg. The doctor there told me that my neck was broken and that i had spinal cord damage. I was so scared. I am a father and my son needs me. I had beaten 2 men that had somehow gotten into my flat and had done well. I just didn't think fast enough to think of a 3rd man. If all 3 would have had no weapons then all 3 would have been in the hospital, not me! But that didn't happen. One man was caught trying to get his finger fixed and the other had been caught because half of his ear was in my closed hand when i arrived at the hospital. I was told that his ear was in my hand. I spent 7 days having tests and having my travel insurance make all the arrangements that they needed to do to have me moved out of the country. An embassy representative came to see me along with constant telephone communication from the travel insurance doctors to the doctors in Kharkov. I knew exactly what was going on with my health and i knew what would happen if i stayed there. On the 6th day the insurance company nurse had me on the phone and i remember this because i had a horrible headache that wouldn't go away. She immediately got a doctor on the phone and as he read over my injuries he also spoke with the doctors again. In that conversation he decided to have me flown out and he reassured me that they would take care of me. Within an hour of ending that conversation the nurse from TravelGuard called me back and asked me where i wanted to go...France or Germany. I told her to decide what she thought was best. She told me that a private jet would come get me with a doctor and a nurse and armed guards to ensure my safety. I was ready at 4pm exactly with the help of another man that was in the same hospital room. He helped me get dressed and helped me make sure that they didn't keep my passport. Literally at 4:05 in the afternoon a man with a gun came in and behind that another man that was a doctor with a nurse and 2 paramedics came in followed by another guard with a gun. They had come from France to get me. In one fast motion they put me in a wheelchair and had me down to an ambulance. We had police in the front and behind the ambulance as we arrived at the back gate at Kharkov international airport. We were allowed through and soon after someone came and stamped our passports. Within 10 minutes we were up in the air and on our way to Paris. That video is also on my social media page. I could only use one arm because my left side was paralyzed. Over 4 hours later an ambulance waited for us on the ground. I was taken to the American Hospital of Paris. It was top notch and the opposite of the Ukraine. I had room service and a private nurse and the best care, all provided by the travel insurance company. I spent7 days there enduring more tests and exams and was then ready to fly back to the USA. A nurse from the USA was flown to Paris to take me home. They put me in first class so i could lay down. The flight home was very painful. Evidently a flight at 38,000 feet has a crushing atmosphere from the pressure in the cabin. I was flown to a big airport then loaded onto a smaller jet to fly to my home airport. There an ambulance waited for us and i was taken right up to the neurological intensive care unit. The next few days meant more tests and exams. My neck was all broken. The doctors fused my neck with titanium and now it's fused from level C3 to C7. I will always have limited mobility. That was December 10, 2013. Wait...it was November when i started this adventure and by the time i made it home and had surgery it was December 10th. The surgeons were great and some of the feeling in my left side came back immediately...some is still coming back. But i was able to stand and walk and use my left arm. All of this would have been on me, hundreds of thousands of dollars would have been on me if i had not had travel insurance. $86 had saved me from financial ruin and it possibly saved my life. They were with me the whole way through. The air ambulance was $56,000, plus the hospital in Paris and the nurse and flight back to the USA. All together is was $282,000! I spent $86 and they spent all that money to get me home and healthy. Do that math huh? I have probably spent $2000 on travel insurance over my lifetime and never used it, all paid $70 to $90 at a time....and all worth it when i got seriously injured in the Ukraine! Buy it...check your coverage and be doubly sure you are covered. Always have that information ready and in a safe place because you never know when you will need it. Unreal? No...all true. Guys...feel free to contact the customer service ladies if you want to get in touch with me. I will gladly help you get squared away and in order. Now i suffer from TBI SD. That's traumatic brain injury seizure disorder. I never once had a seizure before those men tried to rob me. Since the injury and surgeries i can walk and run and keep in decent shape but i will always have this titanium jewelry attached to my spine. The scar is small...it's called an ACDF. Google it. That's my type of injury and surgical repair. I still actually don't feel some of my face and the last3 fingers on my left hand. I can move them and they are strong but they are still numb! I have video and pics from all this saved if anyone wants to test if this is true. It is! And travel insurance saved my life and saved me from financial ruin! I have been back to Kharkov since then and to Russia also. That didn't scare me into not traveling...it made me stronger as a man and more aware of my surroundings. By the way, it was the housekeeper that let the robbers into my flat. She had the key and let them in. My life is changed forever now. Ok...enough serious stuff. Next we can talk about ways to avoid having to have someone send you money in the Ukraine if you lose your credit card. Many banks will flag your card for fraudulent use if you travel alot in one day. For example if you fly from New York to Kiev then go to Lviv in one 25 hour period they may see this as fraud and when you insert your card into an ATM for cash...BOOM..it eats your card like a hungry alligator! I had this happen to not one but 2 cards on a trip to Russia. I had money sent via western union and vowed to never worry like that again. Now when i travel i always send money ahead of myself. I will have my mother or sister or a friend come with me to western union in the USA and we will send my money to me. I get it cash from my bank in the USA and send it to myself in the city or country i go to. It's a safe way to be sure you don't keep alot of cash around for someone to rob from you and it also is extra money in the pocket in your last few days there. Just go pick it up before you leave there and you will have the money to put right back in the bank when you arrive back in the USA. Be aware of the safety situation in the country and city you visit. Like for instance...right now in Donetsk and Lugansk. That is an unsafe risk. Meet your lady in Russia or in the Ukraine in a safer environment. If she can't come out to see you then you should not go out to see her in those places. It's all about reducing risk and maximizing the tools we have available to us. Keep a number to the embassy available and of course make them aware of your travel plans, and be detailed. They might have to come and represent you like they did for me in Kharkov. Sorry it was such a long blog but every word is true and i have the pics and video to prove it, along with the scars on my neck, wrist and ankle. The metal in my body is worth alot of money...enough to buy several vacations to visit a lady reading this right now. Be safe and plan ahead. Your friend, Andy S