davethegrinch.net

Sarah says:

If you had to seek emergency medical attention in a foreign country, which country would you choose? India?? Probably not at the top of your list and it wasn’t at the top of mine either but all things considered I’m a very lucky girl and I’m grateful to several people for being able to say that my emergency could not have gone smoother.

It all started over a month ago when, on our Malaysian paradise island, we thought I got sand or something in my right eye resulting in a FREAK amount of unbelievable pain that had me unable to open or close my eye without stabbing pains running through my body. You may wonder, if one can’t open or close one’s eye, how does one avoid the pain? How does one sleep? How does one live without going mad? All excellent questiosn to which I have no answers except to say that after 3 days in bed, miraculously sleeping from the exhaustion of pain, it seemed to just go away and I was able to enjoy 2 days of beach and snorkeling and we thought the whole bizarre episode was behind me forever.

More…Until the overnight train from Bombay to Goa. This pain, how can I describe it?? It’s like *intense* dry eye combined with stinging combined with the feeling of being stabbed in your eye combined with the feeling that something is stuck on the underside of your eye lid. It makes your eye tear constantly (which, by the way, makes your nose run constantly, most inconvenient) and because my right eye would not stay open, my left eye I guess out of sympathy wanted to close as well. So we had to negotiate getting off an Indian Railway train after not having slept all night, through hoards of rick-shaw drivers smothering us for business, to negotiating a ride to the small town we were headed to (bizarre coincidence, another beach town), all with David having to lead me by the hand cause I couldn’t see and was in terrible pain. It was an all too familiar sensation and I as upset that it was happening again, however, since it had gone away the last time I thought perhaps I could just sleep it off that afternon and all would be better in the morning.

Have you ever had someone stab you in the eye over and over? I tell you, it will drive you mad. I felt like a mad woman trying to bite my own cheek when David came back from buying me eye drops the next morning to find me tearing at the bed sheets in a fetal position. I don’t mean to sound dramatic - this really happened. See, while he was gone I’d come to the mildly scary conclusion that I really needed to see a doctor. The prospect of finding a qualified physician in our tiny dust-filled chaotic beach town or in the larger dust-filled, chaotic town 10kms away was just as scary as whatever the heck was going on with my eye.

Here is where the magic begins: The owner of our little hotel was a lovely woman who spoke excellent English and happened, most unpredicably, to have her own eye specialist in Margao, the larger town. She picked up the phone straight away to call and notify the doctor that a foreign guest of hers needed urgent care, she was sending me immediately and she implored that I “please be attended to”. She then called a rick-shaw driver she knew personally who was at the front gate almost immediately and we were being whisked away.

I could hear the frenzy around me as Patrick drove his little rick-shaw as fast it would go through the manic scene that is Margao. Pot-holed, dusty, dirty streets over-flowing with every imaginable auto, rick-shaw, bicycle, pedestrian and livestock, a seemingly lawless road system, a mad cacophony of sounds. He stopped in front of a building that David and I took to be condemned but it turned out to be their city hospital. He led us through a back alley of garbage and rubble, constantly having to urge us along as we stopped time and again in disbelief. We followed Patrick up an unlit and grimey stairwell, down a dark, narrow hallway and through what looked to be a closet door into the office of Dr. O. Moraes de Souza, Eye Specialist and Micro-Surgeon.

The waiting room was a marginally better lit, dark wood panelled box of a room lined with plastic lawn chairs, all of them occupied with waiting patients save for the 3 that David, Patrick and I took. Most of the patients were elderly, some barefoot and all of them - including me - were wearing sunglasses.  That was all there was to the room - no sign-in desk, no receptionist, not even a deli-style number dispenser - only a large wooden door that caused great commotion and disorder amongst the waiting patients whenever it opened. Just as I was wondering how one goes about letting the doctor know you’re there, David said, “our guy is really working hard for us.” Turns out, Patrick had barged right through the wooden door directly into the doctor’s examining room to notify her of my arrival and great “paining”.  A moment later a very young girl, perhaps the doc’s neice or something, was standing in front of me asking “which eye”. In went drops without so much as a word. I hoped they were numbing drops and then knew them to be numbing drops when some ran into my mouth and numbed my tongue. It was like a shot of morphine and instantly nothing was “paining” anymore.

I still have no idea how their waiting room system works because a moment later I think they mercifully bumped me to the front of the queue and I was being beconed through the mysterious wooden door. Inside we met the doctor - a warm and welcoming woman who had me sit in front of the only peice of equipment she had: one of those 1970’s desk-top, bright-light things that you rest your chin on. Without asking me a single question, without having me fill out any forms or health history or without even asking me my name, she got straight to work, shined her light in my eye and said, “oh dear. your eye is in very bad shape. This is much worse than you thought.” I have no idea what she thought I thought due to the aforementioned lack of form filling out, however, the important thing is the very next thing out of her mouth was a diagnosis. I had something called SPK, a very rare virus that she hardly ever sees that kind of forms pits or pot-holes on your cornea.

Just to bring the point home: we were in a ramshackle doctor’s office in the middle of India (OK, in the southcentral coast of India) that didn’t even have an eye chart on the wall much less any fancy equipment and through some devine intervention I’m being seen by not just an eye specialist but a micro-surgeon at that who is instantly able to diagnose a very rare eye condition. Her only form of consultation was to tell me not to worry, everything would be fine and she proceeded to write me out a prescription which was nothing more than a note on her stationary addressed: To Sarah. No last names required.

She handed the note to Patrick along with directions to the nearest and best pharmacy. That was it. I was ushered out of the room, paid the young girl a grand total of RS 150 (about $3.50) and we were off.  I don’t know if it’s because I was a foreigner or if there was actually a method to the madness but I what I anticipated would be a nightmare experience turned out to take much less time and seemed much more efficient than what I probably would have had to deal with at home. And I only ever had to give my first name.

Patrick rushed us to the pharmacy that David says was a rediculous amount of go this counter and then to another counter and then back to the first counter and finally to a third counter but out he came with my magic eye drops and 10 Vitamin C chewable all for about $2. Patrick then asked, “home?” and I was back in my bed away from home before I knew it.  We developed a cute little routine of David doing my eye drops every two hours for the next 5 days and all was back to normal.

In the very next town we were in, our hotel was grimy, no one spoke English, I’m sure they’d never been to a regular doctor much less an eye doctor and the nearest town was about 40 minutes away instead of 10.   As I said, if it had to happen, it really could not have gone smoother.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 1st, 2007 at 10:58 pm and is filed under Global Travels, India. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.