A Scary Story Of Getting Seriously Ill In The Middle Of The Night In A Fairly Remote Town Abroad

By Kate | Permalink | No Comments | May 18th, 2007 | Trackback

Opting to volunteer abroad may place you in more remote locations or in developing countries – and in these cases getting sick is both more serious and perhaps more likely. First of all, read my health tips for volunteers, and then – if you can take it – read my scary story of becoming seriously ill in the middle of the night in a remote town in India.

I was traveling through a country in Asia; my boyfriend at the time, “D”, and I were staying in small towns and traveling by bus. I’d already “felt the altitude” at about 3,600 meters - kind of like I had just run up a couple of flights of stairs. One night I woke up gasping for breath, but I just had to calm down and start breathing again. We spent one night in a town at just over 4000 meters and then backtracked along the route we’ d come.

The night we returned to a town at 2,500 meters I had a huge meal of chow mein at the hotel restaurant; so did D. That’s right, you remembered correctly: I was not in China, and accordingly this was not particularly authentic chow mein, more like spaghetti stir fried with fresh vegetables and overflowing with coriander. I picked out as much of the excess coriander as I could, ate my noodles and went to bed, but a few hours later was awake and in the bathroom throwing up. Bad food, I thought. Too much coriander. Cooked by the fourteen-year-old left in charge of the hotel while his parents were away.

Irritated that D didn’t get up and try to take care of me, I sulked for a while and then I went back to sleep too. A few hours later I was up again…same story. This time my breathing felt strained. I sat down on the toilet to wait it out, but it didn’t go away. Soon in fact my hands and face were tingling - why wouldn’t this stop? I called out to D, waking him up and asking him to bring me the guidebook so I could look up the symptoms of Acute Mountain Sickness. I had some of them but not all. If symptoms got severe, you were supposed to descend… but where to? We might have been able to walk down 100 meters or so just following the main road, but there was nothing there …and nothing at all open in the middle of the night.

My hands and face were getting numb. D tried reception, but no one was there at that hour. We were the only guests; after D banged on the door of our fourteen-year-old proprietor, he finally opened it. He didn’t know an emergency number, but said there was a hospital up the street.

Read on for part 2 of my scary story of getting seriously ill in the middle of the night in a fairly remote town abroad.

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