Monday night I got a ride with one of my friends. She took me down roads I now recognize easily and then down some side streets I have not been on before. We pull up next to an open-aired shop where there are about 15 blue plastic chairs sitting in haphazardly in the street in front of the shop. Thai people of all ages fill these seats. Some are talking quietly to eat other but many just sit there quietly. My friend leads me to the desk at the front of the shop and writes my name in Thai on a piece of paper. Then she leads me to a cushioned bench seat just inside the building where a fan whirs quietly on our faces.
I look around. The ceiling is high and painted off white. The floor is dark, smooth, cement. At the front desk, there are three women. One is dressed professionally and is handling note cards and paper clips. The other two women are siting down handling various medications and are dressed head to toe in white. In front of me are two "rooms." A pretty wooden divider creates these rooms, similar looking to dressing rooms in the states. The walls are only 7 feet high and the ceiling is open air. In place of doors there is a curtain that stops just 2 feet from the ground. On the wall there are two posters. One is about Acute Artery Disease and the other is completely in Thai. So this is what a clinic looks like in Thailand.
My friend tells me quietly that there are no appointments here, but rather a que. I have no idea where I rank in the que and there is only one doctor so I settle in. After 45 minutes I am called by the professional receptionist to sit on a wooden stool by the front desk while she takes my blood pressure. She also goes digging into my clothes on my left shoulder. Turns out she wanted to put a thermometer into my armpit. After she writes down the results on my card, I am sent back for more waiting.
Finally my name is called and I step past the curtain and seat myself on a chair next to the doctor's desk. He says hello and says he speaks a little English. He then looks at me expectantly and I figure out he wants to know what is wrong. I have been ill for the past week and came to the doctor since I wasn't not getting better on my own. I explain what is going on and he asks a few questions, some of which he asks my Thai friend, who then acts like a translator. He then looks at my medical records and asks to examine me. Every time a doctor has touched me in Thailand they say 'sorry' or 'excuse me.' Then when the doctor had to lift up my shirt to examine my stomach, a nurse was called in to watch, and the doctor looked away and only went by touch. After the examination he sat down and wrote down some things that he handed to the nurse. Then he tells me that he thinks I have an organism in my intestines from food. It took enough to get that clear to me so I was not even going to bother looking further. The doctor then spent a loooot of time explaining things to my Thai friend. I looked at her expectantly and she said I was to eat food with no taste for a while. Then the doctor said no cheese or milk because very bad for medicine. Alrighty. I got my medicine from the front desk and then had the ladies tell me what the medicines were in English and how to take them since everything was written in Thai. I wrote down the names phonetically and we left.
Before dropping me home, we stopped at 7-11 and got some new food and bottled water for me. Tasteless for Thais means rice porridge and nothing else. Not. Gonna. Happen. Sooooo. NOT. gonna. Happen. They tried rice porridge on me when I had the motorbike accident. You remember, the one with tentacles in it? Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. My friend tried a few more times to get me to buy it but there was not even a chance. So we went around the store and she said no to most of the foods. I got plain fried rice and pb and j. That is my food for the week.
When I finally got home, I pulled out Google and my meds to figure out what they were. I had to pull up a list of antibiotics and compare my name to the list. I had a medication that sounds like "pennafox" and then I came upon Xifaxan. Is it bad that I have been in Thailand long enough to be able to recognize that to them, those two are the same? They absolutely cannot pronounce the 'x' sound and they leave off the last syllable of the word. I knew it immediately. So, I have E. coli. I have been ill since coming back from Chiang Mai so I either ate or drank something bad there or it came from the water in my building. They have been doing a lot of construction on the pipes around here and the water I drink comes from the building's chlorine filtration system. Either way, I am buying bottled water until the construction is done. No worries, I am doing better already thanks to my medications and I should be fine to go to school tomorrow. Today is the last day of vacation :-(
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