Ridiculous

Geez, I’ve had the most eventful week, good and bad. I’ve never felt so high and so low in such a short amount of time. So the whole thing with Rahman happened and we were scheduled to record on Thursday. I was ecstatic. Of course Thursday morning like clockwork I come down with really intense chest congestion and fever. I thought, “I should just go see a doctor right away; I get bronchitis a lot anyway, it’s probably that – and maybe, just maybe I’ll still be able to record by this evening.”

I ask Faez to take me to a doctor. He says no problem, he’s right around the corner. We walk to a house where a man at the front gate tells us where to go. We walk through this person’s house, through the back door and up the back stairs to go to this tiny waiting room where we sit for 5 minutes. The door opens and he calls us in – it’s the same guy! No white coat. He asks me to sit and says “what’s the problem?” I say really really intense chest pressure and congestion, sore throat, body aches, fever. “Ah, ok.” Takes a flashlight and looks in my throat for not even a quarter of a second; just a flicker. “Hmm. Bad. Throat Infection.” Starts writing the prescription. I was like “mmm… shouldn’t you listen to my lungs?” He sighs. Sticks the stethoscope in the middle of my chest and tells me to breath once which I can’t because I’m so congested that I start coughing. He says “why don’t you breath?” I say “shouldn’t you be telling me?” No blood test. No blood pressure. No thermometer! On the upside he did check my weight and I’ve lost 19 lbs since being here which I’m convinced is all just muscle mass because I don’t look much smaller. He writes me a prescription for not 1, not 2 but 4 medications including amoxycyllin so I ask, 1. “How do you know what I have is bacterial?” and 2. “If it is bacterial, shouldn’t I be taking something stronger than amoxycyllin?” (Granted, I’m not a doctor and don’t know anything about anything, but I just remember taking amoxycyllin for ear infections when I was a kid and am usually given zithromax or azythromycin these days.)

This guy definitely didn’t like my questions and basically ignored them. If you’re thinking it was a language barrier, it wasn’t. His English was impeccable.

I got the medications and went to school and looked them up. I hate blindly taking medicine. It makes me really uncomfortable. He put me on a basic pain pill – paracetamol, a chest decongestant, an expectorant and the antibiotic. Not bad. I stayed in bed all day but even though I was taking the medicines my fever kept going up up up up and by evening I was shaking, shivering, and dizzy. It’s an odd feeling to be shivering in Chennai; not a feeling I’ve felt yet. It was actually Liz’s bday on Thursday and we were supposed to throw her an “American pizza party”. So Shasta and Robert (Viola and Harpsichord) ordered tons of pizzas from Pizza Hut, got bad whiskey from “the wine shop” and managed to somehow find party hats and balloons. I went to this event for about five minutes (the draw was most certainly the pizza) but felt so bad I just said Happy Birthday and left. I couldn’t sleep all night; I was so cold and no one had a thermometer. The next morning I started sweating so I thought “Ok good, this is a good sign.” I sweated out the fever for about 3 hours. Everything was soaked but afterward I felt so much better. My appetite came back, I had color in my face, things were looking up. The chest pressure was gone but the expectorant just gave me a hacking cough that I figured would eventually subside.

It didn’t.

The cough got worse and worse and started to taste metallic by the end of the night. I think I really started freaking myself out at that point and started getting nervous which then started bringing back the fever. It’s scary to be sick in a foreign country. I started thinking, “Christ, what if I really really got sick here and had to deal with doctors like this guy??” I started getting really nervous, then cold, then the body aches started again etc. etc. So I called another doctor and he said “come to the hospital, they’ll observe you over night and see what’s going on.” He said he’ll meet me in the morning. Ok fine.

I go to the hospital. The hospital itself was quite nice. I had heard horror stories from Liz about the hospital she went to (she’s gone twice for food poisoning) but I just have to share this experience because it is just so ridiculous. I get to the hospital and they take my vitals so I think okay good. I then meet with 4 different doctors separately and have to tell each one the same story. Not only do they not immediately check my throat and lungs, but I have to volunteer my prior health history, to which they say “Why? You’ve had something before?”

Then the “sister” comes to take my blood and she pulls out a giant 16 gauge needle – and not the kind that fills by itself, it’s the kind where you have to pull the end to suck out the blood. Oh. My. God. I look at the needle and look at my arm and I know, I just know she won’t be able to find the vein. She looks at my arm. Her eyebrows furrow. She looks genuinely puzzled. She finally sticks it in. I know immediately that it’s not in the vein. I assume she’s going to try and reposition the needle which is definitely uncomfortable but NOT as uncomfortable as when she tries to SUCK the blood directly from my arm. I was like “It’s not in the vein.. it’s not in the vein… for the love of god IT’S NOT IN THE VEIN.” She starts getting really flustered, pulls out the needle and calls the other nurse. The other nurse looks at both arms and chooses my right. She inserts the needle cleanly and it’s done in a flash.

Meanwhile, Faez and Liz were buying my saline. How funny is that – they came with a grocery bag filled with 3 bottles of saline, the IV, and bandages, set it down on the bed and then the nurse proceeded to use these materials to insert the IV. There’s a little counter next to the registration desk where you can buy everything that’s necessary. I guess this is good in a way because you know you’re getting clean materials, but it’s just odd for us – what would happen in a real emergency situation? The doctors would just wait for the patient’s family to buy all required materials? Strange. Anyway, once again the giant needle comes out and she sticks it into the vein in my hand – not at all an unfamiliar sensation but just the length and width of the needle is so alarming. I couldn’t bend my wrist because I could feel the tip of the needle a little up my arm.

I was told that I would be “observed” overnight which is the only reason why I went. I thought, “okay, my fever goes all the way down and then spikes really high every couple of hours, so maybe it’s better to just go and let them figure out why.” The minute I get there they put me on a high dosage of a drug that is basically the equivalent to Tylenol which covers up the fever completely. An hour later the nurse takes my temperature and says “fever all gone!” with a smile. I’m like… “um, but all you did was give me tylenol, I could have done that myself.” She didn’t understand and left.

I also had a chest xray. As we all know, I’m a pretty seasoned patient by now. I figured they would take a chest xray to test for pneumonia and purposefully wore the appropriate clothing so I wouldn’t have to remove anything for the test. This caused a huge stir. The man handed me the apron. I said “don’t worry, I’m not wearing any metal.” There is a heated discussion between them. He still wants me to wear the apron. I say “seriously, I’m not wearing anything inside.” More angry discussion and emphatic hand gestures. “Compulsory.” “Fine.” What kind of place is this where the doctors themselves aren’t allowed to say the word “bra,” or ask if you’re wearing one? Total and utter nonsense.

Meanwhile during the course of the night I’m getting bitten raw by really large ambitious mosquitoes while simultaneously being tested for malaria. What a cruel joke. The hospital was really clean but was just absolutely infested with mosquitoes. I slept with the sheet all the way over my head and must have resembled a giant vanilla jelly bean.

In the morning Dr. Girija finally came back and said “your tests are inconclusive. You can go.” “Huh?” “You have nothing, you can leave.” If I have a 104+ fever there is clearly something going on. “No, you have nothing.” “I clearly have something.” “Maam, you have nothing. You can go.” And then I started thinking, oh my god maybe I’m really just going bonkers and I’m having a really intense physical manifestation of homesickness etc. etc. etc. I had to admit it was possible. So I was discharged with a prescription sheet. As I was getting them filled I happened to look more closely at the sheet. Above the written prescriptions was a small box in which it said:

Diagnosis: Bronchitis, Pharyngitis

Now was that so hard?