Homesick

Being sick is generally lousy. Being sick when you’re alone in a foreign country is even less fun than that. Tuesday morning I woke up violently unwell with fever, chills, stomach woes, headache, etc. Felt godawful, but figured it would be the sort of thing that at least passes quickly. Wednesday I felt a teeny bit better, but by the evening started having agonizing stomach cramps. I decided to see a doctor the next day, but then around 5:30 in the morning, the pain was relentless enough that I changed my mind and headed off to an emergency room listed in one of my travel guides.

The cabby left me off at the Faculty of Medicine building by mistake, so I had to walk a slow block to the hospital. I get to the front desk and a sleepy-headed guy looks up and explains to me that “due to a problem with the team” there are no doctors attending just now. No doctors! In an emergency room! His attitude suggested there was nothing particularly unusual about this. He gave me the name of another hospital and directions to the bathroom. But when I got to the latter at the end of a long corridor, it was a scene Poe would have admired, with dripping walls and scrapings of rust everywhere. Worse, inside each stall was one of those awful squat-blocks in the floor instead of a toilet. Plus, not a scrap of toilet paper. So I left and didn’t feel up to trying another hospital, so I got a cab and came home.

Got a doctor’s appointment for 10:45. He gave me a rather cursory once over, listened to my stomach with his stethoscope, and took my blood pressure. His verdict: stomach infection. So I’m on antibiotics. They sure don’t go in for non-essential testing here. No blood test or samples or even temperature. Still, he seemed quite certain. I hope he’s right.