Uncategorized – Page 2 – Jen Goes Rogue

By Jen Hawse on Uncategorized tagged Bangkok, Health, Hospital, Thailand

A Bout of Salmonella in Bangkok

No one wants to get sick. Yet, it seems as if illness has been a common theme in my travels thus far. Between colds to travelers diarrhea to strep throat, I’ve had my fair share of sicknesses in the past six months. Most have been minor annoyances. I don’t like being sick, I complain about it. And, I’m a bit of a hypochondriac (I can hear Jason saying, “a bit, ha!”) so I tend to overblow my illnesses at times and become paranoid over things like having the feeling of a lump in my throat (the entire goddamn day long) or minor twinges of pain in my chest (chest pain = immediate emergency, except when it doesn’t).

Yesterday was a test of my mild paranoia gone right! A few weeks back, due to those weird twinges of chest pain, I decided we were going to Bangkok and I was getting a female cancer screening. In the US, I’ve had serious trouble getting physicians to perform breast exams on me and I cannot fathom why. It’s something that if I don’t ask for repeatedly they will not do. Having a young cousin who had breast cancer makes me exceptionally aware of the risks and there just seems to be no reason other than prudishness or laziness for them not to examine me. So, I scheduled for the full package, far more comprehensive than a GYN visit in the US is, and one that would only cost me ~$217 in total (without insurance) and booked the flight.

Jason wasn’t too happy about my trip plans. He thought it was a waste of time and money to entertain my deluded phobia and that it interrupted our plans to do something more fulfilling than going back to a city we both didn’t really enjoy. Still, we went. Upon arrival I felt fine, just a little touch of diarrhea, which is so normal at this point that it’s to be ignored. However, on our second day here I developed a fever and knew it. You don’t need a thermometer to know you’re feverish, you can feel it all over your body. With fever, and diarrhea now every hour or so, I began to feel completely terrible. My heart rate soared while laying down, my body ached, and at times breathing wasn’t as easy as I’d wanted it to be. That night, I didn’t sleep at all. Every time I began to fall asleep I’d jolt up. It was like my heart wouldn’t slow enough to even let me rest. By 5:30 a.m. I was done trying. Jason and I had a 6:30 a.m. alarm for my previously scheduled appointment for that day, so I just stayed up till we had to go.

Upon arrival I told the receptionist that, yes, I am here for an appointment, but I’m not feeling well today. This is Thailand, English isn’t their first language and often times it’s limited at best, so they basically said, “We’ll do the cancer screening first, than check you up”. OK, I wouldn’t do it in that order, but I’m not going to argue because I’m in a safe space now. I go back to get my vitals check on and, low and behold, my blood pressure is up and my heart rate is 144 bpm. Upon sitting, two nurses come back over to me to check my vitals again, because they probably thought they didn’t get a good reading. Nope, reading worked, I’m just ill.

I am called into a doctor’s office that’s more office than anything else and sit down at his desk. He doesn’t touch me, except on the wrist to feel my heart rate, when I tell him in the past few weeks I’ve had heart palpitations and my heart rate is high now. He does listen twice with a stethoscope to my lungs. He asks me why I’m here, “Well, it’s for the female cancer screening, so they said I’ll do that first.” “No, you have an infection and if we do the screening the test results won’t come back properly. We’re going to admit you to the ER, are you OK with that?” I guess I am now!

When I was a little girl I twisted the chains of a swingset together at my grandmother’s house and looked up. Rust sprinkled like dust into my eye. I had to go to the ER to get it taken out with a magnet. I’ve had surgery before, minor but still surgery. I’ve been to medical clinics at few times. But, I’ve never been admitted to the ER. This wasn’t the plan for the day!

In ER admitting, they do a quick EKG (I don’t know this at the time, questions are hard to ask and are often met with nods or vague answers) and then I am fitted with an IV. Someone with much better English comes to me and tells me I’m staying overnight, so would I like a private, semi private, or dorm style room? I’m overwhelmed, Jason isn’t allowed in this area, and I feel like crap so I don’t know the right answer, but opt for the private room because we have insurance and, at worst, it’s $100 a day for the room, food, and 24/7 nursing care (not including meds). I am wheeled up fairly quickly and get started on some antibiotics and IV fluids to rehydrate me. The room is large, has a private bathroom, and accommodations for Jason to sleep on the couch. There’s a table and the food isn’t half bad actually! While I’m reluctant to eat at first, knowing what will happen, I realize I should because I’m in good hands and haven’t had a meal in well over a day. I settle in.

A new doctor, Doctor Nick, comes in hours later to tell me I definitely have a bacterial infection and he highly suspects it’s e. coli. It’s very common in this part of the world and easy to treat. Most people don’t even seek medical treatment for it (although, to be fair, I didn’t exactly seek it either, but I’m glad I got it!) they just suffer it out with fever and sickness for a few days. He says they’ll do a stool test and he’ll be back in the morning to confirm exactly what’s wrong.

During the night I have one more battle over my fever, but quickly overcome. By midnight I’m declared fever free with a great blood pressure and heart rate! I can rest easy, until 4:30 when they wake me up for vitals again. No problem. I fall asleep quickly and get about 6 hours in, which is nice compared to none the night before.

After eating some breakfast the doctor comes back (“Hi Dr. Nick!”) and tells me, actually, I have Salmonella and not E. Coli. This is my second bout of salmonella in my life, and the second time I needed IV treatment for it. The first time I was in Ocean City, MD, on a vacation with my friend Stacey. I’ve got to say, it was rougher then than it is now, mostly because we waited days for medical treatment and I was throwing up too. My mom thought, “It’s a stomach bug, you’re fine”, but with no improvement it was determined I am not fine and in fact needed some interventions. Some people react more strongly to certain bacteria than others, and for me salmonella is particularly potent.

Because Salmonella is an infection of the walls of the intestines, and because it causes blood in the stool, the doctor has asked me to stay at the ER throughout today. Our flight to Krabi isn’t till tomorrow, so sure, why not! Our hotel room really sucks anyway, and our neighborhood has either really expensive food or the highest concentrations of prostitutes outside of Pattaya. So, we stay one more day and I will make fully sure that the salmonella is kicked out of my system before going off to other tropical lands. At least this isn’t malaria or dengue. We have one more month in Southeast Asia (which includes India) so we’re going to double up on bug spray and I’m going to be extra vigilant about what I eat and where it comes from. Thank goodness Jason isn’t sick like me also, or we’d be sharing a room!

Thanks to all my friends who sent me well wishes! Being sick in a foreign land is scary. Being sick in America without adequate health insurance is really really scary. Being sick is just plain scary. I truly hope this is my last bout of illness on this adventure.

UPDATE: After spending ~72 hours in the hospital I’m back at the hotel room, just 24 hours prior to our flight to Krabi. The doctor released me, saying the salmonella is on the mend and I should be fine after taking my course of antibiotics. My only real complaint from the hospital is their lack of english language skills among the nurses, which made it scary when I felt I had a problem that I couldn’t articulate well. Thankfully, I wasn’t in much need to worry. The nurses were incredibly sweet and took excellent care of me. Jason even got them a basket of treats as a thank you gift 🙂 Dr. Nick was completely willing to answer every question I had and even helped me resolve an ongoing medical complaint that I was having with the throat lump. When I told him I was nervous about the course of antibiotics that I’m on due to the risk of tendon damage (news is out this week about it that scared me) he knew exactly what I was talking about and assured me the problem is rare, happens in people who are generally older and/or have taken this kind of antibiotic over and over again. He made me smile many times over.

For my care, I put an ~$850 deposit down. Upon checkout today I got back $221 and that’s after I was able to do the female cancer screening. That means for a three day hospital stay, out of pocket, with 24/7 nursing care, a private room, meals, and tons of drugs it cost me just about $550. Are you shocked and awed at the US medical system after hearing that? I am.

We weren’t going to go to Bangkok, but I’m so glad we did, because apparently I had been harboring the infection for a few days and by the time we got here it was ravaging my body. The doctor told me today, “I’m glad you came in, because your white blood cell count was really high! Normal is about 6,000 and yours was 16,000. If you didn’t come in today, you’d have come into a hospital soon enough and might have gone septic, which requires a 7 day IV treatment.” Whew! So glad I had the appointment and trusted my instincts to make it a priority to take care of myself.

Thanks again for the thoughts and well wishes! I feel so loved, even being so far <3

6 Oct

By Jen Hawse on Asia, Travel Philosophy, Uncategorized tagged asia, flying, food, food porn, japan, kyoto, nintendo, osaka, taipai, taiwan, tokyo, travel

The Rising Sun Has Set: Departing Japan

For those following along at home, here are some stats about our journey. We’ve been traveling now for 23 days and thus far we’ve had:

7 Accommodation locations
5 Cities visited
5 Flights
5 Museum visits
3 Countries visited (not counting China since we just had a layover there)
2 UNESCO World Heritage Sites visited
2 Typhoons missed, but several days of rain
2 Illnesses for Jen
1 Checked bag, everything else has been carry on

Travelling for the long term isn’t like going on a week long vacation. When you’re on a quick vacation you pack whatever you want, spend money like it’s no big thing, and generally just live it up hard seeing the sites, eating and drinking, and having fun. At least, I do! But, this long term travel requires a much more measured pace when possible and much more planning to save money along all available points while also trying to get the most out of every location you visit. Talk about balance!

Yesterday, we flew in from Japan after two weeks there. We visited three major cities, Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto. Each city has it’s own history and personality, along with pleasure and pain points. Getting to Tokyo itself was a bit of a struggle. Our flight was delayed by a few hours from Seoul and the train ride itself from Narita airport to Tokyo took 80 minutes. We had thought we’d arrive around 8:00 p.m., but it was nearly 11:00 p.m. when we got to the AirBnB. The directions we had weren’t “enter this address and walk there via Google maps”. It was a bit more complex than that. Thank goodness we printed out the four page picture directions our host provided!

When we finally made it, dropped our stuff, decided we should eat, and headed out for the night it was nearly midnight. Outside, there was a construction crew still working on a tall building. We were staying in the busiest nightlight district in the city, Shinjuku, so that was quite a trip to see not only this entire neighborhood electric and drunk and bright as day at midnight on a Wednesday, but a construction crew soldering and hammering and working their butts off in the middle of the night. First Japanese culture shock.

My camera phone can't capture the madness — My camera phone can’t capture the madness

Tokyo itself was a bit much for Jason and I, we have to admit. While we’re so glad we went, it was like placing NYC on top of NYC and then in some places putting another NYC on top of that. Overwhelming is the right word, expensive is another good one, delicious works too, but crowded is probably most appropriate. Every shot I took that tried to capture the scope of people failed. 13.4 million people live in Tokyo and over 19 million tourists visit Japan each year, many going to the capital to see the craziness of Tokyo themselves.

Overwhelming, but well worth it. Going to the world famous fish market, navigating the swarms, trying free samples of who knows what, and getting a big platter of the best sushi we could find was a memory we won’t soon forget. Neither is eating lean to mid to fatty tuna from a street vendor for a few dollars that melted in your mouth and required not a drop of wasabi or soy. Heaven. Getting a vending machine beer was a hit too! Bowls upon bowls of ramen will keep swimming in our minds for months to come. I hadn’t eaten much ramen before. Everyone’s had their share of Cup Noodles in the leaner times, but true Japanese style fresh ramen is different and something I began to crave after a while. One of the chain restaurants has a sign that says, “Try three times then you’re addicted!” and, they’re right! By the end I could have eaten ramen every day and will probably carry that love with me for a long time coming.

Navigating Tokyo is an art. It takes practice. They have ticket attendants at automated machines that help poor tourists such as ourselves find the right line and pay the proper fees. There are three organizations that operate lines in Tokyo, so it’s not one integrated subway system like we would have anywhere else. If you’re on the JR line you can’t just transfer to the IC line without getting off, going out, getting a new ticket, then going back in again. It’s a hassle. There are 158 transit lines in Tokyo and, according to Wikipedia, “40 million passengers use the rail system daily at 14.6 billion annually”. We stayed in Shinjuku, and again according to Wikipedia, ” Shinjuku Station is the busiest train station in the world by passenger throughput.” If you’re going to dive in, DIVE DEEP!

After a week in Tokyo we were ready to put some breaks on the madness and go to a calmer place, Kyoto. We jumped on the plane and headed first to Osaka, the second largest municipal city in Japan and still on the mainland. It was a 2 hour flight, nothing too crazy, and we fairly quickly made it to our AirBnB for the night. This place was hilariously small. Like, there was no floor space at all. The only floor space we had was in the bathroom and right at the entryway. The bed took up the entire room, and it was a double. People live here! People cook in these apartments and they have physical belongings and even raise children. They spend their lives in apartments that we’d call closets. Physical space constraints might be tight in NYC, but I can’t imagine they’re near what this was in Osaka. It was only one night, but it was illuminating to see how people there live.

Osaka is fun, hip, and artsy. We had two nights in there, sandwiching our Kyoto trip, and on our second night we stayed in a capsule hotel in Little America. I don’t know if it was actually called that, or just embodied it with the pint sized Statue of Liberty on top of a tall building, rap music, and endless streets filled with American fashion and plethora of English, but it felt like Little America. Unfortunately, I was suffering from a bout of traveler’s diarrhea, something I am afraid is about to become far more common with me, and so I had a pretty shitty time, no pun actually needed.

The capsule hotel was something I really wanted to check off our list. It’s this crazy concept where you sleep in shipping container sized room with people on all sides of you. It’s strictly in Asia, as far as I know, and I figured one night to see what all the hype is about should be fun. If I’d know I was going to be ill I’d have went for a real hotel, but you can’t predict the future. Regardless, it reminded me of staying in a hostel, only a little nicer actually. You had your own space and walls at least. In a hostel it’s bunks and curtains if you’re lucky. Much like a hostel, the women above me was loud and her alarm wouldn’t stop beeping at 5:30 in the morning. We were getting up at 7:00 so… not feeling well + annoying person above + having to catch a train to a flight = bad night’s sleep. Almost two days later and I’m still not fully recovered, but feeling much better than before at least!

Ground control to Major Tom. In the capsule hotel (double waters for the belly) in my Japanese pj’s.

Last location update is for Kyoto, the culture capital of Japan. Kyoto is temple town. There are 1,600 + temples in the city, in fact. Kyoto is shrines on every corner. It’s bamboo forests and endless orange gates. It’s hip and artsy, but not as stuck up as Tokyo. It’s peaceful while still being rather touristy. Our AirBnB in Kyoto was one of my favorites. We had sleeping mats instead of a bed, so every night we pulled down the mats and put them back in the morning to open the room up. There were no chairs in the apartment, just floor cushions that you put on legless chair seats so you could sit back. We had a kitchen, which we used to make PBJ for breakfast most of the week, and free coffee and tea, which helped us save money. There was no burner, so we couldn’t cook, but we didn’t expect to. The shower was big enough to have a curtain! What voodoo! The room felt homey and the city, the former capital of Japan (To-Kyo, Kyo-To), was lush with green.

img_20161002_180550785 — Fushimi Inari Taisha first temple lite up at night

We loved Fushimi Inari-taisha, the golden orange arch walk way leading up a mountain to a city vista. Once you get past the hoard of visitors in the beginning it’s quiet and less crowded and full of kitties! Many kitties live on the mountain, a happy surprise. Keeping with the animal theme this particular area has dozens of fox sculptures, who are regarded as messengers. Foxes holding scrolls and keys are found throughout the shrine and look mischiefly adorable.

One our last full day we went to the bamboo forest Arashiyama for a rainy walk amongst the tall, green stalks. I was feeling poorly so it was very difficult to get me motivated to move, but I’m glad we went. The sunset alone was worth the effort. If we’d arrived earlier we’d have done more, but the thing about long term travel is you do what you can, when you can, and you don’t push yourself to the limit because you are always moving and you need to preserve yourself while doing the best you can to do it all.

Today, we’re in Taiwan, a place I was feeling enamored with prior to our arrival and now am striking less so. It’s dirty. I know I’m going to see dirtier places soon, but this is the dirtiest place I’ve ever been. Last night we went to a market that smelled of very fresh sewage. Mix that with garlic, fish, and general rubbage and that’s been Taipei so far. I’m very nose sensitive, plus stomach is still crampy, so it’s taking some getting used to. I’m positive we’re going to find the bright side of this island. We’ll discover the places I know exist from my studies. But, for today, we’re resting up, getting my stomach back in order, and doing laundry (something else you do on long term trips!). Then, later on, we’ll hit another night market and wish for the best!

Sayounara for now, my friends!