week 3-5b: sickness, cards and strangling kittens

So where were we? Oh yes- we were all sick and not doing a lot. Fun.

The highlight of this mediocre period had to be one ordinary, regular night. We played cards, I was still sick and Jimbo was sort of better: his diarrhoea had stopped completely. So, thinking that all was well, we fell asleep to hopefully awake with out bodies refreshed and cured. Instead, I was woken by the bright (relative to…complete darkness) light of our dim lightbulb and a sound which I can only explain by saying, imagine a pteradactyl being strangled after a night on a bender where it’s voice is broken.

It was Jimbo.

And he was making this noise while pacing around the room.

I looked at him as he just left the room and went to the kitchen. The sounds continued. I thought to myself “Silly Jimbo! Why’s he strangling a kitten at this hour?” and fell back asleep. I bolted out of bed a minute later when my subconscious (or Alex yelling “Wake up!”) alerted me to the fact that Jimbo was not, in fact, a proponent of animal cruelty, but rather, was in pain! And it was bad!

After a quick abdo exam and realizing that this just wasn’t going away, decided on the “let’s seek proper medical help!” option. This was all fine and dandy except we didn’t know the number for the ambulance. Oh, I’m sure it was in plain sight and plastered on every wall out in the town, but when you can’t read Nepali, it doesn’t really help. So I decided to run out and see if I could find a taxi. Oh it was 2am at this stage. Nepal normally goes to sleep at 10ish. Between fits of coughing (hey I was sick) and running, I saw ONE taxi parked in the distance. The guy inside was asleep, so I just knocked and said “Hospital! 500 rupees!” That got his attention. That was about AU$10- about 20-times what it should’ve cost normally. But hey- Jimbo was in trouble and I didn’t want any arguments.

So we’re driving back to our residence, down the narrow streets to find that… they’d disappeared! Check inside the gates: nope! Outside hiding in the cold: unlikely and nope! So, panicking and hoping that the giant monster of a dog we’d seen earlier hadn’t managed to eat two 70+ kg males, I told the driver to start driving slowly towards the hospital. Lo and behold – there’s Lexy waving the taxi down at some distant street corner.

Anyway- we stride into ED, where Jimbo was doing his elective, so treatment wasn’t a problem: just some anti-spasmodics and he was well and good. One interesting moment was just after the drug was given, but hadn’t had time to ask, Jimbo decided to quiz us on the mechanism of diarrhoea of cholera. It was something you could only expect from Jimbo: even in pain, he astounded us with medical knowledge! (Supposedly it’s due to cAMP, if I remember correctly)

Now obviously the symptoms Jimbo had were related to his gastro-intestinal tract. So a stool sample was in order. Did I mention Nepal has squat toilets? (aka. something the white boy might NOT be used to?). I’ll leave out the details, but lets just say Jimbo has been phobic of anything to do with stool samples from then on.

After all that was resolved, we headed home at the early hour of 4am. It felt like a big night out. And it was. Sadly, it was spent at a hospital.

More highlights to follow.