Getting sick while travelling happens to me a lot.
After leaving Koh Lanta for the first time I headed to Bali. Now, this is hard for me to talk about as I am supposed to be going back tomorrow afternoon, but I’m in lockdown in the UK writing this blog.
So I arrived at the airport, expecting to be in Kuta a few minutes later but immigration had other ideas. The queue took me nearly 3 hours to get my visa on arrival.
I finally arrived in Canggu.
Now the thing with Canggu is everyone is beautiful. The surfing paradise town, home to echo beach and is full of stunning people. It’s all washboard bellies, scooters with surfboard mounts and party people.
Unfortunately, my memories of Bali is sharing a bathroom with a large lizard that watched me throw up for 10 days in slight amusement.
His name was Bob and he was the only thing I spoke to for at least a week.
I met up with a few guys I first got to know in Koh Lanta, we went partying to a really cool bar called Pretty Poison. A night club built around a skate park with easily a thousand people there. It’s amazing.
What is even more amazing is there was only one barman and there was never a queue at the bar. The airport could learn a lot from them.
On the way home, we found a burger place and I got drunk food.
I started throwing up an hour after and stopped 10 days later.
On day 7 I started to panic, I know if you are sick for that long its time to see a doctor and also I had a flight to Thailand in 4 days. I was in no fit state to fly.
I was staying at a homestead in the centre of Chaggu and the lady that ran the place noticed I had not left my room for a week. She delivered a bowl of fruit to my room every morning and that was all I ate during this time. Most days I didn’t even eat that.
She knocked on my door and told me she was worried about me, her husband was downstairs getting his scooter ready and she wanted me to go with him to see a doctor.
She was right, I needed help.
We got to the clinic and I offered him some money for petrol and his time, he refused. I thanked him for the ride and said I didn’t know how long I would be so I will get Tuk-Tuk back. He shook his head, laid on his bike with his bare feet on the handlebars and said “ I wait”
My experience with clinics so far in my life was all in the UK, I expected an hours wait at least or be told to come back in 5 days for an appointment.
Things don’t work like that in Asia.
The young girl at the desk took my details and said the doctor will see you now, I walked right in, no waiting. She looked about 16 years old.
While I was finished off the forms an Australian surfer walked in. “Dude, I totalled my bike man, check out my legs! It’s just a scratch” He was pouring in blood and now so was the floor. A nurse came out and started patching him up.
I walked into the doctor’s room to find the young receptionist waiting. She now had a white lad coat on. Turns out she was the doctor, I nearly asked if her dad is at home or an adult at least.
Balinese seem to age slowly, she was a fully qualified doctor but looked like she should be in school.
She was so tiny she needed to stand on a stool to examine me. I left the clinic within 10 minutes of arrival with a bag of pills and powders. I explained I am allergic to most antibiotics so she gave me one I could take.
Well, so we thought. The sickness cleared up in 24 hours but I was now covered in a rash from the reaction to the antibiotics. This is normal for me, happens every time. At least I have another pill to my list that I cant take.
I finally said goodbye to my pet Lizzard Bob and headed back to Thailand, this time back to Chiang Mai as I was meeting a few other nomads there, Ketan and Mike.
We had a weekend trip to Pai, I woke up one morning with a new lump on my hand, It seems I was bitten in my sleep, I don’t think it was Ketan, but you never know.
On return to Chiang Mai, I showed it to Salom, a friend that worked at my hotel, she said: “Goto hospital, that will get bigger, that’s a spider bite.” Her English is amazing, in fact, she was one of my Thai language teachers.
It turns out that northern Thailand uses slightly different words sometimes to southern Thailand. That explains why no one understands me on Koh Lanta when I try to speak Thai. Plus tonal languages are extremely hard for a westerner to pick up.
Instead of going to the hospital, that seemed a bit of an overkill for a bite, I went to the pharmacy.
In Thailand and a lot of Asian countries, the pharmacy is like a GP in the UK. They give advice and help to people that don’t need hospital care. The pharmacist said, “Go to hospital now! ...right now...go go go go” she pushed me out the door.
I knew where the hospital was, I walked past it often, its called Chiang Ram.
I had no idea what a hospital was going to be like, what they would do or how much this was going to cost, I popped home on the way to pick up a few credit cards expecting the worst.
I was greeted at the door by a girl that spoke perfect English, she was very caring and instantly made me feel comfortable. She would be my personal guide to the hospital during my visit.
She took my hand and led me to triage where forms and stats were taken care of. Then my guide/carer took my hand and let me to see a nurse.
More forms and more stats were taken.
Then it was time to see the doctor, now not once have I waited so far, in fact, I don’t remember seeing a waiting room except for the one in near the main entrance.
I was thinking damn 2 nurses a carer and a doctor, this is going to be expensive.
The Doctor gave me some pills and some cream and confirmed it was, in fact, a spider bite, she said it was a good job I came as the bite can often grow and end up covering a very large area. I was suddenly missing the tiny spiders back in the UK.
My caring helper once again took my hand and led me to the counter where you pay for your treatment. I took a deep breath, waiting for the huge bill.
“That will be 500 baht please Sir,” said the girl behind the desk. I didn’t need my credit card for that, I had it in small change in my pocket, 500b was around £12 at the time.
This is why it is important to have a Lizzard living in your apartment as I had in Bali. They take care of the spiders and insects for you.
Normally it’s a little gecko, but there are reports of Monitor Lizards (Komono dragon family) moving into apartments. If that happens to you, just rent another place and let him live there. No one wants to fight a Monitor. It’s probably best to fill the fridge with food and beer for him too, you really don’t want to piss off a Monitor Lizard.
That’s not the last time I was to see the inside of a hospital during my travels.
Back on Lanta a while later, I was sat in our favourite restaurant with Josh when he started to look a bit poorly. In less than an hour he went from normal Josh to ‘shit, am I going to have to carry him home’. He was getting poorly fast and hard.
The next day he got himself to the hospital some 3 hours away with a bad case of Dengue fever. It happens, pockets of dengue crops up all the time in south-east Asia, for some reason the locals don’t seem to get it as much as the tourists, but they don’t seem to get bitten as much as we do by mosquitoes.
Talking about mosquitoes, I had one little bite on my ankle, it was itchy, it was normal, actually normal would be about 30 bites but I just had one. It appeared that evening when Josh got poorly.
Dengue is passed by mosquitoes in case you didn’t know, it bites the host then the bites new victim.
A few days later I didn’t feel too good.
I was sweating more than normal, and normal is leaving a puddle behind where ever you go.
I really didn’t feel too good. Kinda like the Flu but with a higher fever at that point. I stayed in bed and got a Netflix subscription.
A friend James drove me to the doctors to get a blood test, the test came back saying I had a low platelet count, not seriously low like Josh, but low enough for it to be a positive result for Dengue.
Yup, I’ve joined the Dengue club.
I left Dr Salarin’s clinic (who is now my usual GP) and stood on the road waiting for a Tuk-Tuk to take me home, walking was becoming an issue so was standing up. It was low season so Tuk-Tuks are rare.
A Muslim Thai girl pulled her car off the sand-covered road and wound down the window. She called me and said get in, you look poorly, I want to get you to your home.
I found this to be extraordinary and a great example of the differences between our cultures. I could never imagine a stranger helping another stranger in this way back in the UK. Thai people are very caring.
I got back to my apartment to find a message on my phone, it was from someone I met once a week or so ago. A girl named Emma.
“I hear you joined the Dengue club, me too I’ve had it about a week, this is what’s going to happen”
Emma has been travelling for a long time, in fact, I am supposed to be catching up with her tomorrow in Bali if I was not stuck in the UK.
“On day 4-5 you will start feeling better, day 6 you will feel like death. Your bones will feel like they are broken, but it’s OK, after day 8 you start feeling better, but you will struggle to eat and drink for a month at least”
For me it felt like I broke my hip, I couldn’t lay in one position for more than 5 mins without being in pain, I crawled to the bathroom on all fours a few times too, I couldn’t stand up to good.
On day 8, I finally left my apartment and watched England in the world cup with Emma. Drinking long island ice teas on Dengue is not easy or a good idea. I got home from the bar at 4 am.
Emma did a Visa run to KL with dengue I believe, I’ve no idea how she did that.
We called it the Netflix disease as you cant focus on work, all you can do is lay in bed and watch Netflix.
I recovered without needing hospital care, I was lucky, it didn’t hit me as hard as some of the others.
I was also lucky as my parents came to visit, and they left the day before I got poorly. I would hate to think of them catching Dengue and having to miss their flights home. I could have done with my mum though, I needed looking after.
That’s the other good thing about travel, the people you meet become close like family quickly. I was well cared for and had people dropping off food and medicine.
Dengue Fever comes in four or five strains. This is what makes it dangerous. The first time is normally OK unless you are very unlucky and you will be immune to that strain. The second time you get it, your body thinks it is immune and doesn’t bother fighting it off until it is much more advanced. I don’t think many people have got it 4 times and lived.
This is why I ended up in hospital in Kathmandu a year later.
Nepal was my original dream destination and I finally made it after about 18 months of travelling. I will talk more about this magical place soon.
I decided to spend two weeks in Kathmandu before exploring the rest of the country, I am glad I did as by the second day I was showing signs of Dengue Fever again.
I knew this time it could get very serious, very quickly.
My fever seemed to be higher than before, and I was covered in an angry red rash all over my body, another symptom of Dengue, but one that normally happens a few days later.
I asked the hotel staff to get me a taxi to the hospital after taking nearly 10 minutes to descend the 4 flights of stairs.
I did a quick Google search and found an expensive international hospital. Kathmandu is mostly rubble as they are still recovering from the massive earthquake in 2015 and another that hit them a few months before I arrived. It does not look the sort of place you want to be in need of medical treatment.
It took 40 minutes to get there by taxi, about the same time it would take to walk it. Cars have to drive slow as the roads, well they are not really roads as we know. Some potholes can swallow a scooter, I have seen it happen.
I paid the driver about £2 and slowly made my way to the doors, I was met by this lovely caring lady the same as I was at Chiang Ram hospital in Thailand.
I love this, from the moment you walk in you have people looking after you, no waiting about for hours on end.
Again, just like Thailand I was very well looked after. I had 18 blood tests and was told to come back in 4 days to get the results, I explained that if this was Dengue, 4 days would put me at the critical point. They said “if you get worse, come back”
I left.
The way the payment works in Nepal is that you pay for each doctor once per week, no matter how often you need to see them. When I returned 4 days later I didn’t have to pay again. The bill so far was £350.
I scanned through my results on the way to see the doctor, they looked clear to me, normal platelet count, everything normal, negative HIV. wait, exactly what have I been tested for here?
It turns out they tested me for everything and billed me for everything.
I was feeling better but still had the rash. I was told that I needed a biopsy of the rash, a chest X-ray and a bunch of other tests.
I explained that I was feeling better and the rash was fading but they kept insisting, I managed to put them off until Monday for the extra tests, I really didn’t fancy going under the knife for a biopsy. I was convinced by that point I was being used as an ATM.
The rash cleared by Monday and I didn’t return to the hospital. On Wednesday I climbed my first mountain, Yangi peak, the highest peak in the Kathmandu valley.
On my return to my hotel, the staff asked me if I needed to go to the hospital again as I couldn’t walk for a week. That’s what mountain climbing is like and that is a story for another day.
Oh and once I got bitten by a dog and was treated for rabies, but only as a precautionary.
During my travels, I have spent more time in a hospital than I ever had while in the UK. The level of care in all the countries I needed medical assistance was absolutely amazing.
I would like to recommend my medical insurance company Safetywing. They paid up every time without hassle. With the current COVID virus, they have flown a lot of my friends back to their home country free of charge.
