I suppose I’d better describe a bit of what happen…
I suppose I’d better describe a bit of what happened earlier this week. Friday night after meeting Steve, Dean, and others at The Shannon for lunch, Gavin, Dean and I met up at the Q-bar. I had Chicken Quesadillas and two rum-and-cokes. Lightning and thunder began to flash, and as the rain began, we all went our seperate ways. I walked home. I was feeling pretty bad. By the time I got home I was ready to throw up, and my stomach felt awful. I went downstairs and threw up on the sidewalk. Nobody walking around seemed to notice. Another drunk foreigner, that’s all. I got some money from an ATM and hailed a cab to Adventist Hospital. The cabbie could tell I was in a pretty bad shape so he got me there quick, or at least before I threw up in his car.
The emergency room people gave me some medicine and put me on an IV drip. I checked in later on Saturday morning. Thanks to Dean, Kay, Mindcrime, Janice, Harry and James for visiting me while I was there. Dean brought me the Dark Knight Returns comic, which I savoured when I was able to. At first I was in too much discomfort. I couldn’t stand the thought of eating. The doctor said that my blood test indicated typhoid, and that meant a 3-day incubation period. In any case, I’m never going to eat at the Shannon, the Q-bar or Amigo again.
I was in a room with five other patients. One was a low-level gangster with very poor aim. The reason I knew this was the cleaning lady was always complaining that he couldn’t hit the toilet. He shuffled around as he walked. Another was an older guy with lots of phlegm the nurses call “Uncle”. He was always saying crazy things like “Open the door!” Another man, an extremely old gentlemen on a respirator, the nurses called “Grandfather” or “Ah-gong”. Ah-gong, who never spoke, was being taken care of by a couple of caretakers, one of whom was a Filipina who had been here for just over five months. I didn’t envy them their job. Ah-gong would start to gurgle and they would have to suck out all of the stuff from him, using several orifices from what I could hear.
Now and then the student nurses would come and try to do things. One time one of them tried to change my IV. She couldn’t get it out so she called her friend. This led to a long succession of progressively larger “friends” to try to winch the IV tube out of my arm. The last one was a burly girl who kept muttering “No! I must do this myself!” when I suggested that maybe they should find a real nurse. Eventually their teacher was found, an old lady who exerted just the right amount of pressure to get the IV out. Unfortunately the attending student nurse wasn’t paying attention and didn’t cover the wound, so that blood came shooting out. Oh, kids these days.
I began to think about eating around Tuesday, and checked out on Wednesday, although I still don’t feel completely recovered. When I returned home I found that I had no electricity, as I hadn’t paid the bill, and as I was in no shape to do it myself, Maoman stopped by the electicity company and paid it for me, which was very nice of him. I took the entire week off from work. If I keep recovering I should be able to go in on Monday. Something like this happened when I was 16, on my 16th birthday, actually. I was in the hospital for about a week then, just before my brother’s first wedding. To this day I don’t know why it happened. I don’t think it was typhoid then, just food poisoning. Whatever it is, I hope it’s a long, long time before it happens again. According to the doctor I should have built up a certain amount of immunity from this bout, but I’m not taking any chances. All this week I’ve only been eating easily digestible food and sleeping a lot. Hopefully it will be completely gone soon. Changes are afoot once again, I’d rather meet them from a somewhat vertical position.
