Picture this. It's 3.30am Thursday morning. You're sitting on the toilet with a bucket in your hand. It's the third time you've been in this position in 2 hours. Your body is ice cold but your head feels like a volcano. Despite the obvious noise of projectile vomiting and explosive diarrhea, no-one in the hostel is waking up. You desperately need some hydration but you don't have a water bottle, so you steal someone else's. You need it more than they do.
An hour later, you vomit the water up. You know you need to go to hospital, but the front door of the hostel is padlocked and you don't know where the staff sleep. You're panicking, and obviously not thinking straight enough to just turn some lights on, make some noise, wake some people up. At 6am, two American girls knock on the door of the hostel. There's still no staff awake to let them in, but the local drug dealer comes to the door and tells you that there's a basket full of keys under the reception desk. You fetch him the basket and he pulls out the right key, first try, and opens the padlock.
One of the American girls gives you her Gatorade, you grab your bag, and the drug dealer (who also happens to be a rickshaw driver) takes you to hospital. During the admission process you're so weak you can barely stand, and you vomit up the Gatorade you had half an hour ago. The toilet in the hospital's emergency room is utterly filthy. You feel like you're going to get more diseases being in the hospital than you already have. When you're finally admitted to a ward, you have to be taken in a wheelchair.
You spend 3 days lying supine in a private ward. You get jabbed with so many needles, it would make the Red Hot Chili Peppers blush.
Ultrasound scans reveal an abnormal thickening of your stomach walls. All you want to do is go to Ranthambore and try to spot a Bengal tiger in the wild, but as you lay in hospital, June ticks over into July and all of India's tiger sanctuaries slam shut for the summer monsoon. You're going mental being stuck in a lonely room, attached to machines that prevent you from even getting up to go for a piss without the assistance of a nurse. You eat nothing but plain boiled rice and bananas for three days.
Finally, the doctor comes in, at 6am on Sunday morning and tells you that you can leave at 8am after breakfast. You go down to reception to pay your bill. 36,000 Indian rupees.
I'll say that again.
Thirty six thousand Indian rupees.
That's a solid €500. Kind of puts the "cheap" 20 rupee meal you ate on the train from Mumbai to Udaipur into perspective.
This is India.
It's ironic, isn't it? We go into hospital feeling like shit, and we leave feeling pretty good, yet we hate being there.
Somewhere tonight I think I saw you ask about whether this piece worked if written in 2nd person voice. (Don't make me go back and discover where I saw this. Please!!) I'm here to say I am not a fan of 2nd person voice usually, however this one works splendidly!! It makes your reader part of the action ... it makes him / her experience exactly what happened to you in ways I don't think you could achieve otherwise.
This piece would lose a lot of its power if you put it in another voice. This one works nicely. You did a great job with it.
Thanks! You must have seen this in the Steem Engine's post promotion channel on Discord. 2nd person can be a bitch to work with, but I think imagining yourself violently ill is probably something most people can relate to. It's not something I'm gonna do regularly, but I'm glad it worked here.
That's gotta be it. I'm the curator there. (Gonna find a home for this one somewhere. Count on it.)
Awesome!
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Really well written @donnymurph! Ending up in hospital is one of my greatest fears while travelling but always a story to tell later on I guess.
They never ended up telling me what was wrong with me. I'm presuming it was salmonella poisoning.
That's rough! All that money and no diagnosis.
Luckily I've avoided hospitalization in developing mations, though my girlfriend at the time ended up in an hospital in Vietnam. Similar horror stories, but fortunately cheaper.
I think the rickshaw driver took the opportunity to take me to the most expensive hospital in town, probably for a commission, and then the hospital took liberties by putting me in a deluxe ward while I was too incapacitated to say that the basic ward would have been fine.
They'll do that!
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The joys of eating on the subcontinent. I have not been there, but many of my friends have, and the stories I have heard. But nothing as severe as this. Were you able to catch up on missed travel opportunities, or was it back home after that?
The 2nd person POV works (I saw your request for feedback on Steem Engine), and didn't feel it jar me or throw the flow of reading out at all. I do a lot of creative writing, but I've not tackled 2nd person POV yet myself, as I do know that it is neither easy, nor everyone's cup of teas. So for me it was handled well.
I write, but not really about the content you've requested. Basically fiction, and creative writing. I do have a 'travel blog' - but it is a fictional and humorous take on the genre, which I publish once per week.
Thanks for the thoughtful response! As with most travel bloggers, I generally write in 1st person, but I find it can get a bit boring and dry to read sometimes, and I get sick of writing that way as well. 2nd person is a different way of engaging the reader, but the content needs to be just right; I think equal parts exciting and relatable makes a good recipe for 2nd person writing.
In June last year I set out on a mission to travel from India to Germany without using a plane. While I was laying in this hospital, I very nearly gave in and booked a flight to Berlin, but I held firm, and you'll be pleased to know that I was ultimately successful in my mission after 6 months. Now I'm in Mexico where I'm studying to become an English teacher. I'm essentially a full-time traveller at this point.
I'm on way my to class, but I just flicked through your profile, and you reference Led Zeppelin and Philip K. Dick in your titles, so I'll have to at the very least give your stuff a read on my lunch break. Also, the idea of a fictional and humorous travel blog sounds pretty fun! I really need to get back into the habit of reading fiction, since it's a good way to keep my own writing sharp.
Hey, great to some new stuff from you! I hope the teaching training is going well!
Another great story. The 2nd person point of view worked quite well here. I'd say you pulled it off nicely. Do not envy you at all for that experience.
I was lucky enough never to be hospitalized or even properly sick during my travels. I had a motorbike accident once, but I'm grateful to say that I came out with only some missing skin. I was once at a place where other people were dropping like flies, with days of diarrhea and vomiting, from the same food that I ate. But somehow I got away with nothing more than a couple of hours of stomach pain.
I'm glad you were alright in the end!
I don't think I can use 2nd person all the time, but it definitely adds a different element to the right story. I think it incites a bit more empathy, perhaps, having the reader imagine themselves in a situation that is somewhat relatable, even if they've never experienced it themselves.
My timeline is a bit whacked out as far as these blog posts are going, but essentially I picked up the diarrhea the day I left Hampi for Goa, got some Imodium for it in Mumbai, and then once the Imodium ran out it came back with a vengeance in Udaipur. After this, I was a lot more careful with what I ate, and by that I mean no street food and I went to McDonald's more often, because while it's shit food, at least it is handled to a certain globally acceptable standard. I also stayed for a week with some friends in a Sikh town in the north of the country, and they fed me a lot of home-cooked dahl, although that gave me painful wind.
Motorcycle crashes are one of the other very common traveller's misadventures, along with the bus crashes and the food poisoning. I always groaned when people warned me that I'd get kidnapped or killed in Pakistan (spoiler alert: Pakistanis are the nicest people I've ever met), and I'd try to explain to them that I was much more likely to die from bad food or bad roads. But fear of violence is so ingrained in our psyche now that it's hard to get people off of that. Glad you got away with only minor injuries. One of my friends has just had a crash in Vietnam and done some more serious damage to her leg, but she's still riding around the country having a blast nonetheless.
Yes, there's a reason the 2nd person is used very infrequently. It can be a tricky one to pull off. But you chose the right story for it.
To be honest, in Asia I trusted street food more than restaurants. The reason is that on the street you get to see them making the food, and if it's a popular vendor you know the food must be relatively fresh as they have a high turnover rate. Restaurants, on the other hand, usually do the cooking in a back room, and they have the capacity to store a large quantity of food, so it is not necessarily fresh. McDonalds is different though, as you said, and I can certainly understand being careful after such an experience!
Actually the reason so many people get Montezuma's revenge when traveling is because of the different microorganisms present in different regions. It can even happen at 5 star resorts. India seems to have some nastier than average bugs, though. Africa too. Anyway, what I wanted to say is that, ironically, the best way to protect yourself from getting diarrhea is by getting diarrhea. Once you've had it and recovered, your body has adapted to the new microorganisms and there is much less chance of getting it again (of course it can and does still happen, but the chances are lower).
I agree about the sources of danger. Bad roads especially (and of course the crazy drivers inhabiting them). The thing is that stories of westerners getting kidnapped or killed catch a lot of media interest and go viral, so if it happens once or twice, people think it's a common occurrence. But nobody talks about how many people die from the food or from accidents. It's really a shame that the media operates as it does, but of course it's the people's fault. We love drama.
That was actually my initial rationale before I arrived in India, although it proved not to be the case there - the restaurants were usually much cleaner than the street food stalls, with even the popular ones often very fly blown and visually quite grotty. Hygiene really is a very major issue in India. A meal in a restaurant would cost me about €3, compared to the 50 cents or so for street food. I was happy to wear the difference. It's a shame, because you get some delightful street food there, flavour-wise.
After this particular run-in, I did handle everything I ate very well, even as I moved into other countries. I was also pretty mindful of building up my tolerance, initially only drinking and brushing my teeth with bottled water, before moving on to drinking filtered water and brushing my teeth with tap water. Bottled water is an environmental disaster.
You're right about loving drama. I don't know what your musical taste is like, and I'm sure you've figured by now that mine is quite eclectic, but I'll leave this here.
Interesting. I guess things do work a bit differently there!
Thanks for the video. Not entirely sure what to make of it as I couldn't understand the words, and the closed captioning didn't seem to work. But interesting visuals to be sure! It's not my usual cup of tea, but I didn't mind it. I don't have well defined music taste, except that I'm a big fan of classic rock and I dislike rap and country. Mostly I'm just inexperienced. I've never explored most of the genres out there.
It's a song by Tool, a rock band from the US. Their lyrics and the soundscapes they produce are very cerebral. This is far from their best work, but the lyrics are relevant here. The song starts with:
And then a little later in the song:
Ah, thanks for that! Now I understand. :-) Definitely relevant and smart lyrics.
What an experience. Gosh must have been nerve wracking. I'm utterly surprised that an Indian hospital could be so expensive.
Well, I figured out afterwards that the rickshaw driver took the liberty of taking me to an expensive private hospital - presumably for a commission - and then if you look at the bill they gave me it's full of ridiculous stuff, like a quick visit from the doctor was 2000 rupees, a "special" visit from the doctor was 3500 rupees (I never had a doctor in my ward for more than 5 minutes), the ultrasound was expensive and I even had to pay for the lubricating gel they rubbed onto my skin before the ultrasound, the bed in the deluxe ward was 8000 rupees per day. Crazy stuff. They took advantage of the fact that I was too incapacitated to say that I'd be happy in the general ward for 1500 rupees per day, so in a sense, the situation had some elements of a typical traveller's scam. But, when you're fucked up and you want to feel better, you kind of don't care.
That's a really shitty scam, taking advantage of people who are not in a position to think clearly or even give a damn. But...not surprising, I guess. I'm sure they get a lot of customers that way.
You're so nice for commenting on this post. For that, I gave you a vote!
Hahaha the name of the account that just upvoted this comment... classic.
Yeah, it's not ideal. I wouldn't consider it a full-blown scam because I went in sick and came out better, but it was definitely overpriced; especially considering I went for a tetanus shot in Mumbai after scratching myself on a rusty bin and that cost me all of a dollar.
Lol. I saw that..bot? or whatever it is, upvoting a spammy comment, and I thought it was supposed to be some kind of ironic joke. But maybe it's just upvoting comments completely at random? Not quite sure as to the purpose of it.
Many of the scams that hit travelers are of this kind. You get proper service, but at several times the normal price. And/or there are some extra charges added on here and there that nobody realizes are unnecessary.
I ran into such a scam in Thailand, when I first started my travels. I purchased a bus trip at a travel agency pretending to be an official tourism office. They were using the same name but with 1 letter changed. The bus was real and got me where I wanted to go. But I found out during the trip that other passengers paid 1/3 the price that I did. Otherwise I would have never known I was scammed.
Oh travel hospital stories. We raked some up during our 6 month in Vietnam. Glad everything went very well and that it didn't break your bank too much.
The intro of the article could be a setting for the beginning of a movie, it drew me right in!
hahaha what a story, and then after you see the bill you vomit again :P
Hahaha I should have vomited on the bill and given it back to them.
haha then you would have to pay 500 more for unethical behavior :p
Also, your bill for this in an American hospital could easily have hit $50,000. For 500 Euros (I think that's the symbol you used) ... you got off cheap! You don't dare get "hospital-sick" in the United States without plenty of insurance!!
Wow. Just wow.
What was that thing your comic book president said about other countries last week?
The man is a f**king idiot. You can quote me.
A dangerous idiot.
I'm living in Mexico at the moment, working in an English language school with a bunch of well educated and highly intelligent Mexicans. The looks on their faces when someone mentions Trump are priceless.
You should see some of the looks on faces here. (Yes, I know. He scares me, too.)
Wow - glad that you are better! That does not sound like a fun way to spend time in India. Did they figure out what caused the thickening of the lining of your stomach? Yikes!
They never told me what was wrong with me. I'm guessing it was salmonella poisoning, or possibly typhoid. They just pumped me full of saline solution and antibiotics for 3 days and sent me on my merry way.
Wow, that is so wild! Glad they were able to help you out. Not fun to be sick away from home!
From a philosophical point of view, I'm always at home.
One of the reasons I don't like to travel (but only one) is the thought of winding up seriously ill in a foreign country having caught God knows what along the way. The one time I left the country on a trip to Mazatlan, you don't want to hear about. Seriously, you don't. That pretty much did it for me and "faraway places with strange sounding names."
Those of you not discouraged by such memories or put off the idea totally by experiences like yours (described above!) I salute your hardy spirit of adventure. Me, I'm totally happy to just stay at home and hear about it.
This excellent post made its way into my new curation project The Inbox Runneth Over. You can find your post showcased at this link. Stop by when you have a minute and see what else I found along the trail. Your companions here are all interesting in their own way.
I absolutely love getting into travel misadventures. To me, they are what life is all about! But I totally get why it's not everyone's cup of tea.
Thanks very much for the feature. I've resteemed the post.
Damn @donnymurph that sounds like quite the adventure you had. I'm assuming you're not from the United States eh? Cuz that €500 would have easily been $5,000 USD (or more) over here.
That's a win from where I come from!
Glad you made it through though - great story man!
Nope, definitely not from the US. That treatment would have been totally free in Australia or the UK. (Well, technically not totally free, since it's taxpayer funded, but still, you get the idea.)
Main thing is I lived to tell the story!