Thailand

On the last day of my home-stay the other exchange student I was staying with got really sick. She had been complaining about the amount of unusual foods that she had been eating all week so when she started to vomit I knew it was food poisoning.  Our host mom was a nurse and for a week I had the impression that if I ever got sick I would feel comfortable in her hands. That image changed quickly. Over the week I had learned enough Thai to be able to point to things and form elementary level sentences based on the words she had taught me. We were able to communicate on a very basic level. When SC (because she’s from South Carolina) got sick the communication between my host mother and I went plummeting. In the high stress situation she lost her patience for English and I had lost my Thai dictionary because my host sister had secretly borrowed it to write me a goodbye letter. The lady that I had pictured as an empathetic and gentle healer was now abrasive.  SC had been emptying out her insides for a couple of hours when P. Kay came to talk to me. She, of course, was very concerned. She had taken responsibility for two girls from America and now one of them was in pretty rough shape the night before she was supposed to leave. Having had some experience with food poisoning myself and course in wilderness survival I knew that SC was going to keep on throwing up until her body was purged of whatever had upset it. Since we were in supply of drinking water and not in the wilderness, the danger of dehydration was small. To me this was not a survival situation. This was a peril of traveling. My action plan was keep giving SC glasses of water, lots of space, and peace and quite. My host mom had other plans.  P. Kay wanted to take SC to the hospital. She kept repeating to me, “She is ah vahMEETing ah vally much! You go to ah osptALL!” I kept trying to say, “No, she doesn’t want to go to a hospital, she wants to be left alone.” Every now and then SC would yell from the bathroom things along the line of, “Bridget I’m not going to a hospital, can you just make her be quite!” I felt that if I was in her shoes going to the E.R. would be the last thing on my list of things to do, so I was really rooting for her. In the end P. Kay won because she found the translation for “obey” before I could figure out how to translate “In the U.S. adults can refuse medical treatment and SC is an adult and she’s fine, but thanks anyways, now please go away.” So we went to the E.R.  There were sounds of people dying and foul smells. Nobody spoke English. They rooted around in SC’s arm for a vein and hooked her up to a re-hydration drip. I tried to ask for a cough drop for her but we were in the only hospital in the world that doesn’t keep those or suckers handy. I tried for fruit juice or Gatorade but they didn’t have those either. So I resolved to take the kids outside while P. Kay filled out paper work. I assured SC that I wouldn’t let her go into an operating room and corralled the curious children. When we got outside I heard my host sister’s speaking dictionary repeat one of the words that SC had used while they were sticking the needle into her arm for the third try. Extra curricular English lesson. I just had to laugh!  When it was all said and done SC kept on puking until she was completely empty and then she puked a few more times for good measure. P. Kay kept trying to find helpful things for her to eat but she was pretty fed up with Vietnamese and Thai food by then. I took P. Kay to a grocery store to find some saltine crackers since I thought that might go over better than noodle and blood pudding soup. SC is doing fine now, it took her two days to recover. She is currently on a beach in Cambodia.