back in Otown

Continuation…

So that Wednesday, I went back to the doctor who told me that it most definitely was dengue and I just needed to wait a couple of days and then it would go away. Thursday, I was still feeling the same, headachy and tired. After dinner, all of a sudden, the world started to look different. I got this dizzy feeling like things were moving slower than my eyes were moving. Freaking out, I called Carola and Katie. Carola called around to get me a car and we were off to the Hospital Privado in Santa Elena, the best private hospital in the area.

Well, they checked all my vitals and I was looking normal except for the dizziness and headache. Scared to go back to the Cooperative, 40 minutes away from the hospital, they admitted me to stay overnight. After talking to CUSO, we determined that I would take the first plane of the day on the Friday to Guatemala City to seek treatment there. Carola went back to the Coop to pack some of our stuff to take with us to Guatey.

So they hook me up to an IV, wheel me to a room and plop me into bed. When they hooked me up to the IV, the nurse said “now, take a deep breath”. By the time I translated that in my head, the needle was already in. But one of the students who was observing had taking a gulping breath watching the whole thing happen and it took a lot for me to not laugh outloud. Twice during the night, my IV started leaking fluid and blood. To get their attention, I had to wheel myself (remembering I’m really dizzy) down 2-3 hallways. I had an argument about insurance with their secretary when she came in at like 3 in the morning to discuss it. The bathroom had a dripping shower and reeked of mould. The dripping kept me up basically all night. There wasn’t any soap in the bathroom. The AC was broken so it was either full blast or off.

In the morning, after ripping me off totally for the room ($300 for the night), they started arguing that I should pay in cash. Um, I don’t carry $300 worth of Quetzales around with me! The insurance told us they’d call them but after waiting over 40 minutes for a Spanish speaking person at the insurance company to call, I was going to miss my flight. They refused to take the IV out of my hand until 8am when my plane (which I didn’t have a ticket for) was scheduled to take off at 8:30. Fortunately, around 7:45am, the IV started leaking on its own so they really didn’t have much of a choice but to take it out anyway. I stormed out of the hospital as soon as I could while Carola waited what felt like an eternity for a doctor to show up to sign the forms. If I had a medical emergency, there wasn’t a doctor around to deal with it anyway!

He took forever, filling out this long explanation of everything they’d done…in Spanish on the insurance form that says “Must be completed in ENGLISH or FRENCH”. Which is stupid on the part of CUSO for having insurance that can’t be done in Spanish. The nurses had told me at the night that the doctor spoke English. By “speak English”, they meant he could say “Good morning”. Literally. Way to get my hopes up.

Anyway, Carola and I managed to just catch the flight. Despite attitude from the airline (the guy looks at his watch, squints at us, “hm, this is pretty late”. They hadn’t boarded yet and it’s a tiny airport where most people show up like 20 minutes before the plane leaves anyway) and difficulties paying by credit card (What? You don’t have $200 in cash?), we got on the flight. We were met by Dina, an awesome Guatemalan CUSO cooperant, at the airport.

Dina was invaluable throughout my experience in Guatemala City. It’s so confusing and figuring out things like cabs, which have a fixed price in Santa Elena, and where to eat would have been another stress on top of being sick. Dina rocks and I plan on visiting her again in Guatemala. Also, she’s very demanding and speaks her mind, which was EXTREMELY useful in the hospital.

I went to Centro Medico to get checked out. Right away, they did a tomography and some blood tests. We had a lot of problems with insurance (hospital’s fault) which meant I was in Emergency for over 9 hours. Not so bad for me, except I had to pee every 10 minutes because of the IV and I had to unhook my IV and walk across Emergency every single time. But poor Dina and Carola had to stand! There were no chairs except one really uncomfortable stool that they rotated. And, trust me, we asked. Some of the nurses were kind enough to get me dinner even though my insurance wasn’t figured out yet.

In the end, CUSO ended up Western Union-ing over thousands of dollars to put up as a guarantee at the hospital because they wouldn’t accept our insurance company. (Props to Tina from MEDEX for trying like crazy, though!) Without CUSO’s help, I would have had to try to pool all of my cash and credit cards to cover it, which barely would have done it. I already spent $600 of my own money on treatment and plane tickets (which will be reimbursed) and the $3000 guarantee needed by the hospital would have cleaned me out. (In the end, my treatment ended up costing MORE than that!)

The hospital was very nice. Great facilities, most of the nurses were great. The doctors frustrated me immensely. My main doctor lied to my face about what was wrong with me, I think to get me to stay in the hospital so he could keep making money off me. He told me that I had a cerebral edema and needed to stay in the hospital for treatment. Well, I now have a copy of that test which is totally normal, including a statement by the radiologists who say my brain is totally normal looking. He also told the insurance over the phone that he had done all of the tests he could do, when I had just gotten a second opinion from another neurologist who listed a number of tests that hadn’t been done and asked me why they hadn’t been done. And after that doctor told the insurance he’d done all the tests he could do, (within MINUTES) he ordered a battery of other tests. Uh…okay.

On the 7th or 8th, my headaches were really painful and none of the medication they were giving me was working. So to relieve pressure in my head and check for other evil things in my body, they did a spinal tap. HELL. Imagine having a needle in your spine and then having a doctor calling out instructions to you in Spanish when you’re only at a conversational level. It was awful. I was bawling and they finally got Carola back in the room to show me, on the floor, and describe in more simple words how he wanted me to move. MOVING WITH A NEEDLE IN MY SPINE. And because I was too tense (ya think?) they had a brutal time getting the needle out of my spine. It was a drill to get it out. The sound and feeling of a drill. Today, a week later, the most pain that I have is just recovering from that spinal tap. My headache did get better afterwards, but I think the brutal pain of my back just made the headache not seem so bad, haha. Nothing was abnormal in the spinal tap.

In the end, both of the doctors at the hospital determined that my headaches and dizziness were caused by depression. Their reasoning? I am a young woman who doesn’t live with her parents or husband and I eat a lot. Without telling me, they put me on a pill for manic depression. Fortunately, I got Mom to look it up (they never directly answered the question about what it was for, saying to take it before bed, implying it was a sleeping pill) so I didn’t take it on my own. Culturally, to them, they couldn’t understand how a young woman would actually want to go to a foreign country by herself. And the food thing is just weird –I’m an active person, so I eat a lot! Considering I’m on the lower end of average weight for my height, I don’t see how this is an argument at all. Plus, I’m very content with my life and one of the happiest people I know. Not so much on the depression.

After hearing that, the insurance company was adamant that I get back to Canada for testing and treatment. On Sept 9, I left the hospital and went to a hotel. I spent a day and a half bumming around with Carola. On Sept 11, with a nurse from Flying Nurses International (such a cool idea!), I came back to Ottawa. Kathy, a nurse from Philly, met me in the hotel the night before and we took off bright and early. She stayed with me to check my blood pressure and pulse a couple of times a flight and make sure I got a wheelchair to get me through the airports. Mostly, she kept me company. She would like to apologize on behalf of her country for George Bush. She said at least half a dozen times “I didn’t vote for him”. Haha. Cool lady.

On the 12th, saw Mom’s doctor. Did some tests which all came back normal.

Got very sick on Saturday and went to the hospital Sunday morning. Had some more tests done there. Results will be back today or tomorrow. I’m now feeling better, just with the headache and dizziness still.

It is almost certainly some sort of virus that, unless my conditions deteriorates to the point where they think I’m dying, will never be identified. I just have to wait it out. What this means for my placement, I have no idea. I want to go back to Guatemala, I intend on going back to Guatemala.

It’s been 3 weeks of this headache and it’s been incredibly frustrating. Glad to be home now with people to take care of me. A washing machine, big blankets and no bugs…ah. And a flush toilet! You knew I was going to bring that one up.

It’s very emotional being back. When we walked in the door from the airport, poor Jeffrey and Mom had to watch while I broke down. With only 2 days to mentally prepare to come back…I can’t describe it. And the reverse culture shock has been tough. I was in awe in the airports at how clean (and cold!) everything is.

Mostly this experience has made me very sad for the average person in the 3rd world. Who can afford what have now been many thousands of dollars for tests, hospital bills and travel expenses? We discovered that my positive dengue result from the lab in Santa Elena was wrong. So people are spending their Q100, which probably means less food on the table, to be tested in a dirty lab where their results are likely not even accurate! Also, a false positive could mean that something else is wrong with them, like malaria, that needs to be treated but they’ll go home just thinking they have dengue and will try to wait it out. A night in the hospital at $300…I don’t think I know anyone in Guatemala who has $300 lying around. I had people at the Cooperative to drive me to the hospital at 9pm. The microbuses that many people rely on stop at 6:30pm. You can’t just call a cab or even if you could, you likely couldn’t afford to have it drive you into town.

They do have a public health care system, which is known to be horrendous. The private health care I got in Santa Elena appalls me. I can’t even imagine what the public one is like. If you don’t have dengue, malaria, parasites or pregnancy, they have no idea what to do with you. At the cooperative, they have a trained “nurse” at the clinic who took my blood pressure incorrectly. All of these things are adding up to a population of people who can’t afford treatment or are getting the wrong treatment based on inaccurate diagnoses.

I am so grateful to be in Canada with our health care system and to have access to health insurance, both for travel and prescriptions.