Thailand had been in the back of my mind for a long time as somewhere to explore. The food, the warmth of the people, the combination of old and new, the landscape. Fern and I both felt a certain excitement as we made our way across the Cambodia/Thai border. As we frequently do, we stopped in a couple of towns along the way, not because of any major tourist attractions but to break up the long bus rides and to get a more genuine feel for a region’s culture. Second stop was Pattaya, a small city a little bit to the southeast of Bangkok.
Pattaya is a unique place, with a reputation as a sex tourism destination – perhaps more so than anywhere else in Thailand. With so many older western men coming to Pattaya looking for a girlfriend, wife, vacation home, or place to retire, it has developed into a relatively modern city with fancy hotels and condos, western style restaurants and bars, fully stocked supermarkets, and good hospitals. It was not our intention to spend much time there but it was a good place rest, clean up, and stock up on anything we might need as we made our way toward the southern coast.
By the second night Fern wasn’t feeling well and the next day her abdominal pain got even worse. I mistakenly thought I might be able to find some good strong pain killers at a pharmacy but ibuprofen was about as strong as I could get, and that was clearly not doing the job. I did a little internet digging to find out if there were clinics or doctors that might be able to see her the next day, where the nearest hospitals were, and what we could expect from them. Later that evening I brought back some dinner for us and then went for a walk to cool down and clear my head. It had been a long hot day.
It was getting late and I was tired so I headed back to the room. As I walked in I found Fern on the floor of the bathroom, moaning with pain, her arms and legs shaking. She needed to get some medical attention right away. The front desk called a taxi to the hospital for me and I gathered up anything that I thought we might need and got Fern down to the lobby. The driver hauled ass to the hospital and Fern was admitted to the Emergency Room.
The ER staff spoke some English but it was still pretty difficult to understand them most of the time, and this was a hospital that was accustomed to treating tourists and expats. If the taxi driver had taken us to another hospital they may not have spoken any English. They put her on IV morphine which still didn’t seem to be enough pain relief. I thought maybe she had a kidney stone, since I had one a while back and the symptoms seemed somewhat similar. They did an X-ray and couldn’t tell for sure what was going on but the doctor didn’t think it was a kidney stone. He said he needed to do a CT-scan, for which we would have to pay on the spot if he was going to continue. Otherwise they would just send her home.
Suddenly some big decisions needed to be made. A CT-scan was going to cost quite a bit of money. And what if they didn’t figure out what was wrong from the scan? Could we be sure this would be covered by our travel insurance? In and out of consciousness, Fern was in no condition to make big decisions but ultimately it was up to her so I got on the phone with the insurance company and talked with the doctor and encouraged Fern to go ahead and get the scan. She really had no other choice. They weren’t going to keep her doped up in the ER forever without taking some action and she was in too much pain to leave. She agreed and they took her away for a scan of her digestive tract, which involved a whole lot of very unpleasant things that I won’t describe in detail, but the whole process sounded traumatizing.
Eventually they brought her back out and she was a mess, physically and emotionally. It’s not easy to see someone you love at their breaking point and not be able to do anything to alleviate their suffering. I tried to comfort her as much as I could while we waited for the scan results.
ER doctors are a special breed. I can only imagine what they see and do in a routine day, making critical decisions all the time. They must develop a pretty thick skin. They can also have an almost inhuman coldness about them. This particular ER doctor eventually shuffled his way over to us, in no particular hurry. I’m almost surprised he didn’t have a cigarette dangling out of his mouth. We asked him if he had learned anything from the scan. He casually informed us that he had detected a “mass” in Fern’s intestine, which was creating a blockage. He didn’t know what the mass was made of – it could be cancer, or some other type of growth. A bowel obstruction, regardless of what it’s made of, can be a life threatening situation and she would need to be admitted to a room in the hospital where a surgeon would take over her care and consider whether surgery would be necessary.
By that time it was about 4 a.m. and Fern was dozing off. They’d be moving her to her room soon. I went back to the hotel for some decent rest and came back in the morning…
jim@snorkelbandits.com