Hospital-ity

Whelp. It happens, I guess.

And as my friends have been telling me, it was bound to happen eventually, especially considering my love of streetfood.

I wasn’t expecting to write this post, but here we are.

If you hadn’t guessed based on the title yet, I ended up in the hospital over the weekend with a very bad case of food poisoning. It was probably the sickest I’ve ever been. After a 60-hour stay, plus a few days since then, I’m doing a whole lot better now. I’ll get more into the details in this post.

At the risk of sounding like one of those annoying people who are always optimistic, I’ll also say that it wasn’t all that bad of an experience. On the one hand, I was extremely helpless and vulnerable, but on the other, people took great care of me, and everything was okay. Dare I say, I don’t even have any regrets. Except one, which we’ll come back to later — but that actually had nothing to do with last weekend.

In this post I’ll tell you all about my exciting experience sightseeing in one of Thailand’s finest hospitals.

What Everyone Keeps Asking Me

“What do you think you ate?”

There are three potential candidates, I think.

In corner number one, we have the raw shrimp and mussel salad that I ate on Thursday night. My girlfriend, Cream, loves this sort of stuff, but she and her friend both warned me “a lot of foreigners really don’t like this.” They were referring to the taste though, which I didn’t have very strong feelings about; I remarked that I think I like them more when they’re cooked, but it was just okay.

I didn’t get sick until about 30 hours later, but it’s possible that the raw shellfish introduced some bacteria to my system which built up over that time and then, for lack of a better word, exploded.

Over in corner number two, we have the sweet pork. This stir-fried pork, sauce, and rice dish seems innocent enough, and it’s only a candidate based on proportion. Cream tried just a taste or two of it, and she got a little bit sick. I, on the other hand, ate pretty much the whole thing, and I got, well, hospitalized. So based on those ratios, maybe it was the culprit. We’ve eaten at that restaurant a bunch of times and we hadn’t gotten sick there before, but who knows.

Last, but certainly not least, we have the feisty one in corner number three. This is the one that, in retrospect, probably deserves all the glory. Our reigning champion, it’s the one, the ONLY: tofu milk cereal!!!!

On the way home from sweet pork dinner, Cream and I stopped at a little streetfood market for some dessert. She asked if I’d ever had tofu milk before; I thought I misheard her, then asked if she just meant soy milk. Instead, it’s a dessert dish, kind of like soy milk but with big chunks of tofu in it, and you add tasty little toppings.

In retrospect, milk has a lot of bacteria in it already, and the fact that I’m halfway across the world means these bacteria were probably very foreign to my system. By the way, it’s served warm, not cold, so said bacteria would have had more than enough opportunity to proliferate, especially in the large vat of a streetvendor over many hours. Add it all up, and you get one sick foreigner. At least, that’s my best guess.

I enjoyed it, yes. But I didn’t enjoy what started about six hours later.

Taste The Rainbow

This is about to get kind of graphic, so feel free to skip this part. Although, if you’re like me, you might find it kind of interesting from a biological standpoint.

Around 3 am on Saturday morning, I got out of bed, made my way to the toilet, and threw up a bit. I’ve gotten sick before for all sorts of reasons, as we all have, so I figured it would be a one-and-done deal. I wasn’t too worried. After I finished, I cleaned myself up, brushed my teeth, and went back to bed.

Not long later, I was up again, still feeling quite off. Sensing that this might take a little longer, I made my way to our downstairs bathroom, because I sure as hell didn’t want Cream to hear whatever was coming. I still thought, oh, I’ll just boot a little more and then it’ll probably be done.

I spent the next three hours puking my guts out.

It was interesting biologically because I was barfing up colors I hadn’t expected to see. While it started out clear-ish, as per usual, eventually my stomach was empty, at which point I started heaving up yellow, snot-colored bile. After about an hour of that, my puke was a vibrant green.

I started getting concerned, as anyone would, after a few hours of this. I had completely cleared my entire system, yet I couldn’t stop puking. To make matters worse, I felt like I had to poop the whole time, occasionally breaking into bouts of diarrhea. I would stop heaving and relax for a few minutes at a time, but if I drank any water, I would just puke it back up. Literally nothing was going to stay down, and I was losing all my fluids, fast.

By 6 am, Cream got up, came downstairs, and told me she was worried about me. Yeah, I was a little worried too. She asked what we should do; I said maybe we could get some Tums or Pepto-Bismol or something — you know, over-the-counter stuff to tone it down a couple notches. In retrospect, it should have been obvious that those weren’t going to work either. Maybe it was the late hour or some sort of optimism or arrogance that had me so deluded.

Cream told me they didn’t have Tums and Pepto-Bismol in Thailand (get on that, P&G), so I told her to get whatever stomach medicine she could find. At the early hour, no pharmacies would be open, so I said she could probably find something at 7-Eleven.

She came back with some charcoal pills and a powder that helps your body absorb more moisture from water, or something like that. I took one of the pills and immediately barfed it back up — black this time (because of the pill, obviously).

“Take Him To The Fucking Hospital”

There’s a moment in Fight Club, which is one of my top three all-time favorite movies, where Ed Norton just finished beating the shit out of a guy, continuing to lay into him in a maniacal rage even after the guy had tapped out. Everybody is standing there, completely shocked. Brad Pitt walks in and says “Take him to the fucking hospital,” in the most non-chalant way, like, “what the fuck are you morons doing just standing here?”

After barfing up the charcoal, Cream asked if we should go to the hospital. I didn’t use this line, but I thought of that scene instantly; like, yes, that’s a great idea, how did we not think of that until now??

She brought me some clothes to change into. I asked if she had any plastic bags we could take with us, expecting more puke in the five minutes it would take to get there. We got on her motorbike, and off we went. By pure coincidence, we caught an absolutely stunning sunrise along the way.

I managed to keep it down by the time we got to the hospital, and we walked into the ER. They immediately handed me an admittance form and a bunch of paperwork, all in Thai. By my choice, we had gone to the nearest hospital, not the one that all the foreigners go to. I groaned. Not only is that a pain in the ass, but it’s like, hey, this is an emergency room, right? Can I fill this out later so that we can, you know, deal with the fucking emergency first? My level of dehydration felt like it was getting pretty dire at this point.

I really don’t know what I would have done without Cream through this entire ordeal. She took care of the paperwork while I sat in a chair and moaned. A few other people were waiting in the lobby too, but I’m not sure what they were there for. They made some skeptic glances at me like, whoa, better not go near that guy.

While Cream filled out paperwork, I couldn’t hold it down anymore. I pulled out one of the two bags she had handed me at home and puked into it, right in the middle of the lobby. Someone on the other side of the room called me over and said okay, we’ll get you in here, just come here and let us take your weight and height and stuff first. He started preparing the scales, I barfed some more into the bag, and then they weighed me and such. I sat back down. A few minutes later, he told me to follow him. We went into the ER and they sat me down in front of a doctor.

The doctor asked “What do you need? What do you think is wrong?” In my head I thought, Isn’t that what I’m supposed to ask? I told him I needed an IV because I was losing so many fluids and couldn’t drink anything. He asked if I’d been puking; I held up the bag of green puke and said yes, this was in the lobby, and I have been all night. I’d like to think he looked impressed.

He told me to go lie down on the bed a few feet away. I lay there for an extremely delirious hour filled with frequent moans and groans. Somewhere in there, someone asked me for my insurance card. I pulled out my phone and started logging into my provider portal thing, then realizing I had forgotten both my username and password, and asked Cream, “Do I really have to do this right now??”

Eventually I pulled out the second and final bag that Cream had given me and I puked some more. Someone finally came over and gave me an IV around 8 am, over an hour after I’d spoken with the doctor. They immediately put some painkiller through it because my abdomen was a trainwreck after so much heaving.

As this all unfolded, Cream sat across the room and patiently watched, occasionally helping communicate between me and the doctors and nurses and coming over to stroke my head or hold my hand.

Oh God, Please Not That

This actually wasn’t the first time that I’ve gotten an IV abroad. When I was in Peru, about ten years ago, I got pretty bad altitude sickness in Cuzco. As any experienced hiker or any resident of Colorado knows, the cure for altitude sickness is hydration, and shortly after I received an IV, I was better than good — I was greater than Tony the Tiger.

Sadly, this time wasn’t the same.

I lay there letting the IV do it’s thing, hoping the same magic would repeat itself and that I could go home soon. Instead, the doctor came over and pressed on my abdomen in a couple places, asking me if it hurt. It wasn’t too bad, thanks to the painkiller, but he still came back a few minutes later and said he wanted me to have a CT scan.

“We think you have appendicitis.”

Oh god, please not that. Having appendicitis would, of course, mean I would need to get my appendix out. Which would mean I’d need to go into surgery and be in recovery for, I don’t know, weeks or months, probably. While it’s true that I’m here to live (i.e. I’m not just here on vacation), I still don’t want to have to deal with that. I’ve never actually had surgery before, fun fact.

All the nurses told me not to drink or eat anything which again, in retrospect, is pretty funny. There wouldn’t have been a point to even if I did, except seeing what color it would be when I puked it for #science. I was hoping, though, that maybe the hydration provided by the IV would calm my stomach at least a little bit. Please, just enough so that I could drink some water? I’m so thirsty…

‘Twas not meant to be. No water for you. They wheeled my body over to the radiology department sometime around 10 am, through the now-crowded lobby. Who knows what the people were thinking as they saw me; fortunately, I was staring blankly at the ceiling.

In the radiology ward, they started to tell me more about the CT scan. Having worked in nuclear science for so long, I had a vague idea what it would be like — some sort of imaging agent, a collimated detector, a big magnet, a middle-aged guy in a lab coat, etc. etc. I was a little rusty, admittedly; it’s been a few years. I thought you had to swallow/drink the imaging agent, and gallons of it, which I was really not looking forward to from the first time I heard the doctor say “CT scan.”

As it turns out, they would inject the imaging agent. “You might feel a little hot, and it might make you a little sick.” Oh, good.

“I already feel sick,” I said. “So maybe we should wait a little bit?”

“This is an emergency, so we’re going to do it now.”

“Fair enough. Just make sure there’s a trashcan nearby then.”

They then asked about any allergies to medications and things like that, since this stuff can be lethal if you have a reaction. I don’t have any allergies to anything, so it was fine.

The CT scan was combined, I think, with an MRI. I’ve only studied these in the classroom and occasionally taken a tour of a medical facility; I’d never seen one used, least of all, had one used on me. But basically, they put you in that big circular magnet thing and they move your body backwards and forwards a few times. Then, they injected me with the imaging thing, and moved me back and forth another few times. I felt a little warm, but it wasn’t too bad. They told me not to swallow. There was a weird metallic taste in my throat. Eventually, they came back into the room. I asked if I could swallow now, and they said yes. CT scan complete.

You Can Have A Sip Of Water Now… Kind Of

They rolled me back into the radiology ward. I still was insanely thirsty, and asked if I could have some water. They told me I would need to wait until I got the CT scan results. But by this time, I’d asked so many times that they mercifully said “But you can have a little sip.”

I proceeded to take one of the most glorious sips of water of my entire life.

They rolled me back to the E.R., through the crowded lobby again, where I would wait for my scan results. At this point, the IV had been doing some work, and I didn’t feel like I was going to die of dehydration anymore. I still didn’t feel great, but I wasn’t horrible.

By the time we got back to the ER, I asked Cream to bring me a trashcan, please. My glorious sip of water didn’t feel the same way about me, apparently. It was green too.

They wanted to admit me to the hospital but to do that, they had to make sure I was COVID-free, so they gave me a test in the ER while we waited for the CT results. Eventually, both came back negative. I didn’t have to get a huge surgery, thank god.

They rolled me a much further distance, this time to an elevator, and then to a pretty big room where I’d be staying for the night. I got there sometime around 1 pm, and they brought some rice porridge for lunch. I took about a quarter of a bite and gave up. I wasn’t hungry anyway.

Over the course of the next twelve hours, I was attended to by nurses. Every couple hours, they’d come in and check my blood pressure, heart rate, and blood oxygen. These were all normal and good. I always attribute my healthy circulatory system to my daily meditation practice.

They also would give me some medications and take my temperature. I would take the medication with some water, wait anywhere between five and thirty minutes, and then vomit it back up. I wondered if it was working.

My temperature was relatively normal, I think, but it flared up a couple times. I think I peaked around 102 at one point. They started giving me more pills, now for the fever too.

Cream went home in the afternoon to get some things, rest, and take care of the cats. I slept a bunch too. She was back by the time I woke up and smiled at me from across the room.

By the evening, I was feeling a lot better, but still not very good. Even at midnight, I still couldn’t hold down my medicine — almost 24 hours after I had started getting sick. My painkiller had worn off, too, and my abdomen was in a world of agony. They injected some more, and I got some sleep.

Day 2

The whole time I was in my hotel — err, my hospital — room, they had asked me to pee in a jar. Even when I woke up on the second day, my urine was darker than Coca Cola. I was still horribly dehydrated.

But I ate breakfast, the first food I had in about 36 hours. And I took my medication. And I didn’t barf any of it back up. It was a win. Cream had brought me two juice boxes of orange juice. 

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

This is just to say that over the course of the day, I felt better and better. I got some good sleep and was feeling relatively stable. If you really must know, and your curiosity here I find really quite weird, but I’ll tell you anyway: I still wasn’t able to poop — I have a feeling this was a mischievous trick of one of the medicines (or nurses) — but other than that, I was feeling mostly alright.

My Thai language teacher was visiting the same hospital that day for her own acid reflux treatment. When I cancelled our lesson and told her what happened, she insisted on coming to visit me. When she arrived, she laughed and told me “now you have not one but two beautiful women taking care of you.” I’m a lucky guy indeed.

After she left, I hung out, not too much to do. It was actually kind of nice. I still had a pretty solid headache from the dehydration and now fever, but it was miles better than before. Still, I had pretty much written off trying to get any work done for the day. I wasn’t going to bother taking out my laptop and continuing work on the many big projects I have going on right now. I was officially taking a day off, so I decided to relax.

Cream and I drifted in and out of sleep and had a pretty chill day. I started processing what had happened and cried a little bit in gratitude and humility for the help I’d received.

We had planned on going to a village out in the mountains that day, but alas. Sometimes things don’t always go as planned. We’re going to go this weekend instead. You know — assuming I don’t get food poisoning or anything.

Discharge

I stayed a second night and would be discharged the next morning as long as all my vitals and stuff still looked good and kept improving. Awaking on day three, I felt even better. Though it was nice in the hospital room, especially with the A/C on 24/7, I was starting to want to go home. I was getting pretty sick of the IV needle stuck in my hand, too.

I ate my entire breakfast, and later lunch. In the morning, I got on my laptop and got an amazingly large amount of work done. I have ADHD, so those times when I’m 100% focused are really special and cover a lot of ground. The added pressure of being two days behind is a blessing in disguise, forcing me to focus in order to catch up. Sometimes I procrastinate for fun.

I reviewed my health insurance policies while Cream scribbled out a lengthy complaint for the speed of the care and probably some other stuff too. This story has already been pretty long so I won’t digress down this tangent for another twenty pages, but I’ll bullet it instead:

• I turned 26 in July, and I’m self-employed.
• I got my own health insurance.
• I have no fucking clue how to find or buy health insurance, so I worked with a broker.
• I told the broker I was going to Thailand and that I needed a policy that would cover hospitalization in case of COVID as an entry requirement. (In case you’re curious, this has since changed.)
• I got supplemental insurance covering hospital visits, which she told me was valid outside the U.S., in addition to my normal plan.
• In October, not in the U.S. anymore, I cancelled the normal plan but kept the supplemental one.

I was expecting my supplemental insurance to cover the whole visit, but as I reviewed the policy, I couldn’t help but notice line 23 under Exclusions for “Care received outside the United States.” I guess my broker must have missed that one.

Thankfully, I also got SafetyWing (shameless plug — I recommend it for anyone living, or even just travelling, outside the U.S.) because the whole visa process is way easier through them anyway and I’m also the kind of moron who accidentally buys two (I guess three) health insurance plans at the same time because, yes, I admit it, I have no fucking clue what I’m doing and I think health insurance is fucking stupid anyway and I have better things to do than deal with it.

So anyway, the plan that I thought would cover my visit actually would not, but thankfully, this other one does. I mean, all-said-and-done, the whole visit was a little over $1,000 anyway. Not cheap, but not catastrophically expensive if you don’t have insurance. In the U.S. it would have probably cost at least 30 times as much. (Not to only rail on the U.S. though — I also probably would have received care a lot faster, too.)

When I mentioned a million pages ago that I had one regret, that’s the one. It has nothing to do with the hospital visit and everything to do with the insurance. I regret not reading, and cancelling, my supplemental policy sooner. But alas.

Anyway, I got sick Friday night (really, Saturday early morning), was in the hospital until Monday afternoon, and now I’m writing this on Wednesday afternoon. Today, I feel good. I’m about 95% there, I think. I’m still on a few prescriptions of antibiotics, and my poops are still a little funny (message me for pictures), but I have my usual amount of energy, hydration, enthusiasm, and, as this post hopefully confirms, sarcasm.

I’ve mentioned it a few times by now, but I can’t say it enough — I am infinitely grateful to the people who helped me these past few days, especially Cream, who was by my side through it all. To be there alone would have been extremely depressing. Instead, I’m honored, humbled, and blessed to have such a supportive girlfriend.

As weird as it sounds, this whole experience also gave me a lot of faith in my adventure and in humanity. A lot of times, people fear what could happen to them, and in that fear, they shy away from ever taking a leap or risking anything. I think it’s wonderful to get to experience and survive a “worst-case scenario” (quotes because while obviously there are worse, this one is still up there) to face that fear, learn, and grow. 

Not that I have any intention of repeating it, of course. I’ll be a bit more mindful about the foods I eat moving forward. Not to the point of overcautiousness (because that’s stupid), but at least to the point of consideration. I’m sure I’ll get food poisoning again at least a few times in my lifetime, so it’s kind of whatever. I wasn’t worried before, and this incident isn’t the kind of thing that would make me freak out and run home with my tail between my legs. Much the opposite.

Wherever you are in the world, I hope you’re in good health and spirits. Remember, if your poops don’t look like mine, you have at least one thing to be grateful for today. Just a reminder 😉

With peace & love,

Andrew

P.S.