Rest for the weary

There are a number of things I wished I’d known before I went to a hospital in Turkey.

First off, would it be too much to expect a hospital to have some saline solution, a contacts case, and a toothbrush and toothpaste if you end up staying the night? Apparently, yes.

Secondly, when given a thermometer, do not put it in your mouth. Doing so will invoke a string of expletives from the nurse, following which you will have to clean your own mouth out with soap. Thermometers go in your armpit. Or elsewhere.

Third, when you are told you are going septic, don’t sweat it. Back when I was on the crew team, the word ‘septic’ was the kiss of death. A rower traditionally goes septic when he or she has inadvertently allowed a blister to get severely infected. By the time you go septic, your body is in a state of shock and you have hours to live.

In Turkey, by contrast, when you are told you have septic tonsilitis, you have hours to live in the waiting room, at which point you will be admitted, hooked to an IV, and injected with antibiotics via an extremely painful shot in the butt. You will be then left to your own devices for about twelve hours until the nurse sees fit to send a round of antibiotics through the other butt cheek. In my case, this came at the rather unsociable hour of two am.

I woke up on the evening of my first day in the hospital without a fever and able to swallow for the first time in two days. By the time I finished dinner, I was feeling well enough to marvel at the bad taste of whoever decorated the hospital. My room was accessorized with a fainting couch and two Louis XV-meets-Saudi nouveau riche chairs, both upholstered in an executionary black and gold brocade (my friend Gregor was kind enough to volunteer his modeling talents to bring to you the photo at right).

My doctor came in soon after and I asked him what he thought could have caused my dramatic case of tonsilitis.

‘Did you have anything cold to drink on Monday?’ was his response.

I drink cold water every day, I responded. Was there anything else that might have made me sick?

‘I’m pretty sure it was the cold drink,’ he said.

(I am not the only person to encounter the Turkish phobia of ingesting cold things).

Diagnostic services aside, I found the level of care in the hospital comforting. It was certainly better than my only previous experience being hospitalized at Harvard. At the university with (arguably) the best medical school in the world, they routinely forgot to bring my meals, unless I surfaced from my delirium long enough to demand them. I’m pretty sure malnutrition might have had something to do with the fact that it took me twice as long to recover from a similar illness.

I’m mostly better now, though I still have to return to the hospital for injections and had to promise my boss that I would take it easy this weekend. Miraculously – or maybe it just seems miraculous to me – my $60 a month Turkish health plan covered the entire ordeal, something which I wouldn’t have been able to expect from my $500 a month US health insurance. All in all, a pretty painless process. Except for those shots of antibiotics. They were a real pain in the ass.