The day my parents left I started feeling really nauseous. Sunday I felt better, went to church but Monday felt terrible and stayed home. By Tuesday I was miserable. We went to the Dr. who said I was super dehydrated and sent me to the emergency room. I stayed there for almost 4 hours with an IV, staring at the ceiling, asking people to not sit on my bed as they visited the person in the other bed. After they ran some tests they said I had 3 amoebas! Now what is an amoeba you may ask? I don't know, but in all real meaning of the word, I had a bug. All I know is that it is very common here, and you get it from contaminated water or food. It is also very common to spend a few days in the hospital. The emergency was not a very pleasant experience so when the Dr. said I should be admitted into inpatient I begged him not to make me go. He gave me a prescription and told me if tomorrow I didn't feel better I needed to come back. I ended up going back and being admitted but to my surprise I was escorted into a private, air conditioned, TV-with-a-gazillion channel, own bathroom, ROOM! Shoot if I knew inpatient was going to be like that i would have gone days ago!
Since I had never been a patient in a hospital I didn't know what to expect, and being in a different country I didn't know what to expect. I was difficult to communicate because I didn't know any hospital lingo. Everything they asked me they had to act out, which wasn't pretty. :D The first day I watched TV, slept, the usual. What I thought that was unusual is that they didn't bring me anything to drink or eat. The Dr. had told me a could eat bread, crackers, fruit, but no dairy and no grease. Fine. Day 2 they brought me some papaya juice, "cool, tropical." By then I was getting hungry so I asked Davey to bring me some crackers, toast, and gatorade. I was starting to wonder if this was a BYOF (bring your own food) hospital! I asked the nurse around dinner if there was food at the hospital. She said yes but that I had a specific diet from the doctor (apparently the starvation diet). Day 3, when the lady brought me another papaya juice I asked her if there was food in the hospital and she asked what I wanted to eat. I asked for toast. A few hours later, I got 2 pieces of toast. The doctor came to see me and I told him I was hungry and that no one had brought me food, only papaya juice. He said "you're not suppose to drink papaya juice!"
"Well you told me fruit was okay."
"It is, just not papaya. What else have you been eating?"
"Crackers, toast, bananas..."
"You're not suppose to eat bananas!"
"Any other fruit I'm not suppose to eat?!"
He said he had written my food orders and he'd check to make sure they knew what to give me. That night they brought me soup...yay! Day 4, breakfast comes! It's some kind of porridge, I ask if it has milk and they say "yep." Can't eat anything with milk, they give me papaya juice instead, I CAN"T DRINK PAPAYA JUICE! Right about now I'm feeling for the people I used to work with at the nursing home. They all had specific food orders printed on a card and I was suppose to read the card, check the plate, and then give it to them. Sometimes, most times, we were in a rush and I didn't check the orders and the resident would be upset that I gave them something they couldn't have.
4 days and still no one knows what I can eat?! I guess forgivable.
Thankfully members from the branch brought me soup that night to last me a few days. I got quite a few visitors so the stay wasn't as long as it seemed. Day 5, they bring me apple juice...thank you. And at 12 noon I got to go home. :D
Poor little hand was all swollen from the IV.
No comments:
Post a Comment