Sickness

So, travelling abroad is nothing as glamorous as you might initially think. I have no idea why, but I always fall deadly ill with some nasty illness or another when I'm abroad for an extended period (despite my precautions and being in perfect health back in the USA). Tropical bugs seem to be the deadliest and, considering that tropical environments also usually correspond with not the best of sanitation conditions, they seem particularly easy to catch. Today, I begged Len, our ETA mentor, to take me to the hospital today, which he was more than happy to do. While waiting at the front table, trying to explain my symptoms (try explaining diarrhea and fever in a foreign language that you've been learning for a week!), I got so incredibly dizzy, my vision blurred, and I was two steps away from collapsing when they brought a stretcher and wheeled me into the hospital ER. After asking a lot of in depth questions, the doctor diagnosed me with having a virus in my gastrointestinal (GI) track. (If you can believe it, this picture on the left was during the first few days of my illness.)

I'll save everybody here the trouble and not go in depth as what my symptoms have been for the past five days. But allow me to describe probably one of the scariest moment of the experience. Yesterday, I had a fever which was probably the hottest fever in my life, though I don't have a thermometer with me to give you a an exact measurement. However, the fever was so hot, I felt like my brain was being cooked alive! Thank God for TV, as it was at this point that I remembered that sick patients with fever often have wet towels on their heads. Indeed, it was only by doing that that the fever broke. (Who says you can't learn anything from TV?) I call it one of the scariest experiences in my life because all of my ETA friends were an hour away visiting a beach and a village and I was all alone.

I'm going to focus on the positives now. I got to see what a hospital room looks like in Malaysia. I can't really compare it with a hospital room in the US, because except for check-ups and the time I fractured my ankle, I haven't visited a hospital as a patient. But, it seems that US hospitals have private rooms for most of their patients, and a couple of a double room where the patients are separated by a curtain. However, in KT, the hospital room I went to contained about 10 beds all revolving around an island in the center which the doctors and nurses seemed to congregate around when they weren't helping their patients. Interesting huh? Individualism and communalism philosophies can even affect how a hospital room is designed. The separator curtains were all pink, which I found to be an unusual and a way too cheery color choice.

Another interesting thing was that all the doctors and nurses in the ER were women. Islam wins against the West in this regard. Cultures who practice Islam have always had women doctors, unlike the West. During the medieval era in the West, witch burnings of local medicine women occurred on a large scale, and universities that produced legalized and certified doctors banned women from their establishment. It seems that only very recently has the gender ratio in the doctor profession become somewhat balanced. Compare that with Islam. Even at the height of some of the most oppressive measures seen against women, after the 1979 Revolution in Iran, women were still doctors during this era. I think that having women as doctors may be written in the Qu'ran. Actually, it sort of makes sense in Malaysia, with its large focus on gender-separation.

Here's one good thing that happened today because of my ill health. One of the hotel workers has gotten slightly frustrated with our room because we use the latch to prop open the door for each other (this hotel has given us only one key for a double room - how inconvenient is that?). Usually, he comes by 11pm to give me such a speech, though it is in such broken English that I think a 3 year old (actually, younger than that!) can best him. Today he came by much earlier, at 6pm, and was trying to get me to understand something in Bahasa Melayu. Needing to get away from the funny little man, I replied with a phrase that I've learned remarkably well over the past few days "Saya sakit" (I'm sick). These were the magic words because he looked sad and then left! I guess you have to be thankful for the little things.