A few words on being sick abroad

It´s the worst. Well maybe there are worse things in the world, but since I´m a big fat baby, being sick abroad is the absolute Worst.

Last Friday, I journeyed from Baños to La Concordia, where my friend Veronica and her family live. I started feeling a little queasy on the bus ride, but I thought it was just the winding roads and scary hairpin turns that were making me ill. That night, I was up until dawn with shivers and a ferocious fever; not fun.

Now, I´ve been down this road before and I learned my lesson. As much as I WANT the local remedies to work, I´ve learned the hard way that my fragile North American digestive system really needs good old western medication. It´s the sad truth.

(Last time I was in Ecuador, I drank a few cups of chicha at a village celebration - a fermented yucca drink - and immediately fell ill. I drank a tea made out of this concoction for a week without any results. I finally ventured to the nearest city, found a doctor, was prescribed pills, and felt immediately cured. Sad, but true. I´ll gladly accept Vero´s mama´s delicious healing teas of oregano, onion root, mint, and my favorite - manzanilla, or chamomile as you might know it - but I know it´s not enough.)

So, the morning after my feverish nightmare, Vero took me to see the local doctor for the fever and a weird upper abdominal pain. He did some blood tests ("No es dengue!", he told me when I came back for the results. Yay, I don´t have dengue!) and prescribed me some medications for the fever, the pain, and the intestinal infection that I apparently had (have?). I expected the immediate results as I had had previously. Not the case. The pain persisted. A few days pass. Another sleepless night. I tossed around best and worst case scenarios. Maybe I just had a little indigestion. Maybe I was suffering from internal bleeding! What if I had to go home early? How much would that cost? Would I be able to survive the bus ride back to Quito?? In the morning, I was a wreck. I went back to the doctor. I started crying in his office. "I´m scared!", I whimpered;"it hurts." (Remember, I told you at the beginning that I´m a Big Fat Baby). He adjusted my medications. Maybe one of them had given me stomach pain. I don´t know! I´m not a doctor!

This was yesterday. The pain was alleviated most of the day, but then it returned in the evening. Sitting in Veronica´s family´s convenience store, we talked with a friend, Hermann, about my situation. People stopped by and told me what they thought it might be, because their sister once had a similar pain and she drank some papaya seeds in milk for a week and it went away and why don´t I try that. Hermann suggested that perhaps I had Helicobacter pylori, an increase of a bacteria that already exists in our system. I started getting freaked out again, and we decided I should visit another doctor in the morning.

Cut to Tuesday morning, 5am. Hermann comes to pick Vero and I up in his taxi and drives us to the neighboring town, La Independencia. We´re going to see Doctor Henry Olvera, and apparently we´re not the only ones. He only takes the first 10 patients, and we find out that we´re number eleven when we arrive at 5:30. Some people have been waiting since 4. The doctor won´t arrive until 8, but he´ll be there half the day seeing patients before going to work at another location in the afternoon. He only takes ten, but that´s because he takes the proper amount of time with each of them, somebody explains to me.

I woke up with minimal pain and it doesn´t look like I´ll get seen that day so I wonder if we should bother staying at all. "Ya estamos aquí." We´re already here, Veronica tells me, imploring me to wait a bit longer. We shoot the shit with our fellow patients, one of whom is the young mother of a 2 month old baby with a runny nose. She´s number twelve, but they say the doctor usually makes exceptions for babies and small children so hopefully she´ll get seen.

An hour or 2 passes, and Veronica and I go to sit at the front entrance of the clinic. She knows where the doctor lives so every so often she goes to look and see if he´s coming. A few minutes later, I see her coming up the path with the doctor, explaining to him very rapidly my situation. He shakes my hand and continues to walk briskly towards the clinic. We walk past the group of waiting patients and he motions me into his office. It´s 7:30am. I am astonished by my friend´s take-charge attitude. "Eres mi heoína," I whipser to her as we sit down. You´re my hero, Verito! He looks over my blood test results, assigns me a few more tests, pokes me a bit, asks me more questions, and it´s over just as quickly as it began.