Sick

It is not fun being sick when you are travelling on your own. Granted, it is seldom fun being sick, but I hold to the premise that it is particularly un-fun being sick when travelling on your own.

I have picked up some sort of traveler's diarrhea. (I hope - I went to the Wikipedia page on traveler's diarrhea and it said that this is sometimes confused with, for example, cholera, and dehydration from that can cause death within 24 hours of onset. I decided to stop reading.)

I keep a wee calendar in which I track my daily activities. For the past 5 days it reads: sick, diarrhea, sick, severe diarrhea, and very sick. I have decided to do nothing for the next 48 hours except lie in bed, feel sorry for myself, and eat small bites of bananas and stale bread accompanied by many sips of Gatorade. My only goals will be to avoid adding vomiting to my list of symptoms, to keep hydrated, and of course to have it all blow over.

***

I am very sick. I need to see a doctor. I have had severe diarrhea for seven days.

Çok hastayım. Ben bir doktoru görmek gerekir . Ben yedi gün şiddetli ishal oldu.

Feeling too weak to travel home safely - I don't even know if I can make it to the hostel lobby without fainting and falling over - I type the above message on my phone, get Google translate to put it into Turkish for me, wait for it to be light out, make it to the lobby, and then hand my phone to the receptionist.

I'd been planning to wait and get medical help on Monday, if needed, but Saturday night - by which I mean about 2 am Sunday morning - I know that I am so badly off that were I in Deep I'd call a friend, wake them up, and ask them to take me to emerg. I've been doing everything by the book; eating bananas and bland rice and probiotic yoghurt and drinking endlessly but it's not working. My urine is a mere dribble of almost fluorescent orange and my poop, for lack of a better word, less viscous than my urine, is an equally startlingly fluorescent green and comes in very frequent and copious quantities. It seems that for each cup of water I drink I produce a liter of green spew. (Only a Canadian, I'm sure, could have such a poor imbalance of imperial input and metric output.)

The receptionist asks if I want a taxi. Yes. A taxi arrives immediately but the driver then repeatedly demands to know which hospital I want to go to. I haven't researched this and don't have a clue.

He takes me to a private clinic. I like it. I feel safe. And 7 am on a Sunday morning is the ideal time to be there as the place is deserted. I'm whisked straight in to see a doctor with two nurses and a translator at my side. They take blood, hook me up to an IV, claim they want me to stay for 6 hours, and explain that it will cost several hundred Euros. 'No problem,' I say, feeling #privileged, 'Do you take Visa?'. (Normally they bill insurance companies direct, but not, apparently, on Sundays.) They also want a stool sample but my body, having done little else for the last week other than produce endless quantities of just that, is now apparently totally empty. 

Finally at 4 pm I suggest I ought to go, both my blood and (eventually produced) stool are fine, but they insist on giving me one more bag of IV fluid, and, to be honest, I don't mind in the least prolonging my stay by another hour. 

(And, as an aside, I report with extreme reluctance, I now know that even when my system is completely empty I'm not skinny.)