Knocking on Wood does a Person Good

Since my last blog update, I have had the wonderful opportunity of visiting one of the many run down hospitals here in Nepal. As a patient this time.

Apparently the antibiotics that I took for my infection the week before was not strong enough. Strong enough to get me by for a couple of healthy days (during which I had much fun, if you read my previous post) while the bacteria festered and grew in my stomach and bowels until it was ready to strike again.

And strike again it did, with force, on Monday night of last week. Sorry to be graphic, but after hours of everything inside of me coming out of both ends, some of the volunteers and my host father Lok decided to take me to the Banepa hospital in the middle of the night.

Being a patient there was as terrible as I had imagined. The beds were dirty and had a single sheet on them, no pillow, no blankets and they don't ever provide any either. You have to use your IV-free arm as a pillow if you want one. They had me walk through the maze of dirty rooms in the hospital to use a toilet that had no toilet paper to collect stool and urine samples. When they put in my IV and collected blood samples, the doctor didn't wear gloves. He handed over the open blood vials to Lok, who wasn't wearing any gloves either, and told him where to take them. Flies were landing all over the hand with my IV and I had to continually swipe them away. And I felt miserable. Luckily, one of my good friends/roommate Suse came with me and stayed the several hours at the hospital with me while the tests were run. We found out it was just bacteria, and they got me on some better antibiotics, and mercifully let me go home to my bed.

The week of antibiotics was up and down but now I've almost fully recovered (knock on wood) and hope that I can escape a similar experience for the rest of my time here in Nepal (knock on wood again, just to be sure).