That quick pinprick pain on your foot. You know the one. When a small critter sinks his teeth/stinger/dagger right into you and for a split second the only thing in the world that matters is slapping the hell out of the affected area. Well I had that today, and after it happened my sweet Winnie Wild Flower said "Well, lets hope it doesn't get infected like last time." What she was referring to took place almost exactly 12 months ago when I woke up one morning and felt a slight pain on the corner of my lip.
I spoke to Oodbilav about it as he was a Triage Nurse before moving to India but he couldn't see anything wrong with it and so he sent me on my slightly less than merry way.
A day later the very corner of my lower left lip swollen and was painful to the touch.
A day later it was half of the left side of my bottom lip, it was hard as a rock and my 2nd back molar was giving off quite a bit of pain. I googled it and the verdict was pretty much unanimous; an abscess under my tooth. Now this is bad news regardless of what country you live in, but in Varanasi this news means having to see a dentist, and that is almost as bad as it gets.
We rang around and found the best dentist we could and went in to see them right away. Her office was clean and so was her equipment so that felt like a good start. I told her what the issue was and she took her scraper thing and poked around for a bit. But then it got all India. She took her little mirror, the one that's attached to the end of a little metal rod and turned it upside down so that she was holding the mirror in her hand with the metal rod sticking out from her fingers. Using this metal rod, she then gave a strong and decisive WHACK, right on the sore tooth. I gave off a shocked and slightly pained shout but by that point she was already taking off her gloves and walking away, totally satisfied with her work. She said "You need a skin doctor, not a dentist. If that was an abscess you would be crying on the floor right now, and you're not, so it can't be an abscess." 100 bucks says they don't teach you that in any Dental school in Australia! So off we went to find a skin doctor.
I'll skip past some boring bits like plenty of searching around and sitting in waiting rooms and go to when things began to pick up when we finally got in to see a really great skin doctor. She told me that what I had was an insect bite of some sort and most likely from a spider, and that it had turned into Cellulitis and thus she prescribed a ridiculous lot of tablets. It was a Friday afternoon and she told me to come back after the weekend if there wasn't any signs of improvements.
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| To be taken 2 or 3 times daily |
Saturday morning the growth was so bad I could hardly speak.
Sunday morning turned out to be worse. I woke up early but found that I was unable to speak a word. The skin on the left side of my face had stretched as far as it could outwards and so had began to stretch the only other direction possible, inwards. I couldn't put the teeth on the left side of my face together as my cheek had swelled about an inch into my mouth in a giant painful bulge. On this morning for the first time you could actually see a small white headed pimple right at the spot where I first felt the pain and so I began to do what one does when they have a pimple, I squeezed it.
What came out is almost too distasteful for me to describe.. but I will, cause hey, that's the kinda guy I am! Wave after wave of thick, off white, semi solid puss oozed out from deep within my face with each squeeze. The process was intensely painful but with each squeeze I could feel the bulge inside my mouth lessening and the ability to open and close my mouth was improving and so I'd give myself a few moments to get psyched up to get through the pain and then would just keep on squeezing. On a couple of occasions the tiny hole became blocked and so I sterilized some tweezers and literally pushed them into the hole in my face and pulled out semi-solid masses of puss. After about 40 minutes I had filled up a small glass cup about a third of the way.. I offered to show it to Wild Flower but surprisingly she was not even slightly impressed with me.
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| Hellooo Ladies! |
Oodbilav made a call and took my to see the Doctor again that morning as I was in too much pain to wait another day. She saw me sitting in the waiting room and called me straight in and I must have looked quite a sad sight as she didn't bother with any examinations but instead told me that she was going to have me admitted to the hospital immediately.
Going to hospital in Banaras is never good and in general I will avoid it at all costs, however today I really felt that I had run out of options. The hospital she wanted to sent me to was not a good one, in fact it has a terrible reputation and Oodbilav voiced this concern with the Doctor. She replied "in all Ponds there are good fish and bad fish. The hospital I am sending you to is filled with mostly very bad fish, however the specific fish you want to see is the best fish there is!" She had proved herself to be a very capable and trustworthy Doctor up to this point and so I took the gamble and trusted her.
Getting checked into the hospital was a typical Varanasi bureaucratic nightmare. A forty-something minute wait at the front counter to pay your first pointless "welcome" fee. Another long cue to pointlessly hand over your receipt at another counter in a different part of the hospital and pay another fee. Another long wait with the thousands of other sick patients on concrete benches in a cavernous underground room that apparently disdains natural sunlight in order to see our specific Doctor. Finally seeing the Doctor and being assessed by him at the same time as he assessed two other patients with horrible (and smelly) skin infections and then offending the Doctor by asking him to please use new gloves before he put his fingers into my mouth after he had just been poking an open wound on another man's leg. The list goes on.
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| Angelina Jolie Sold Me Her Lips |
I was finally admitted to a private and quite decent (decent by Banaras standards of course) room with the help of Oodbilav who really was my hard working hero throughout all this. They brought in an IV drip with some cocktail of antibiotics and after a couple of failed (and painful) attempts managed to get it into a vain, and slowly things started settling down. Or so I thought.
I had fallen asleep around 11pm and at midnight the nurse came in, woke me up and asked what every single other person who had entered my room that day had asked; "Where is your family?" This question was fine, it was the second question that was really the kicker; "Where is your medicine?" I did my best to wake my mind up and managed to grumble out "huh?" She asked again. I naively responded through swollen lips "My family is sleeping at home, and aren't you the nurse? Aren't you suppose to bring me the medicine?" And here came my introduction to the Indian medical system!
You see, in Banaras when someone is sick or injured and is admitted to a hospital this turns out to be a whole family affair. And for good reason! You see, the sick person lays in bed while the family members do all the running around as Indian hospitals don't provide you with food, or water, or medicine, or medical tests! This is all to be done by your family members! And as I didn't have any family members with me and it was too dangerous and unthinkable to call Wild Flower and get her to wake up Little Feather and make the trip this late at night, I had to go for a walk, with the IV still attached to my arm out of the Hospital and up the street to the nearest store that sold medicines. I didn't get to sleep for another couple of hours.
The next day was pretty uneventful. The swelling seemed to have stopped and maybe even come down a little and so I watched a couple of movies on the computer and read for a bit. At one point the nurse forgot that she had turned on my IV and so about an hour after it had finished I went wandering through the halls looking for someone to take the tube out. At one point blood from my arm started flowing out and down into the tube so I squeezed the tube to prevent further flow. When I found the nurse and she came back to my room and took the tube out, I asked her if she would get me a new tube to which she rolled her eyes, said she would clean it, then walked to the corner of he room then held one end of the tube up in the air to let the blood splash out onto the floor in the corner. When Wild Flower and Little Feather visited I made them keep their shoes on and sit on my bed.
That day I made sure I had all my medicine in advance so as to avoid the post-midnight stroll into town to buy some and was settling in for a quiet evening. I ate some dinner (sweetly brought in earlier by my dear wife and daughter), watched a movie and curled up and fell asleep. But sure enough, jut after midnight, in walked a young student doctors who wanted to take some blood samples. His first question "Where is your family?" His second question "So who will take your blood to get tested?" Yep, at 12:30am I was told I would have to walk out onto the street, hop in an auto rickshaw, traveled to the next suburb (still with my IV in) and drop off my blood samples to get tested. Oh India!
The next day was Wednesday and it was a pretty drastic improvement. It was my third day of being routinely treated with IV antibiotics and by midday the swelling had come down to the point where if you didn't know me you might not have noticed any swelling at all. The little hole in the corner of my lip (from where the puss had made it's grand exit) had now opened up a little and if I pushed it from behind with my tongue the skin would open up just enough that you could actually see into a cavity inside my face! Very bizarre. They gave me an extensive list of medicines to continue using for the next couple of weeks and to my great joy discharged me sometime later that afternoon. Getting out of there and arriving home was a huge relief and thankfully within a couple of days all swelling was completely gone and I was the Elephant Man no longer.
So tonight, as I'm sitting typing this up and looking at the little bite mark on my foot I'm rather thankful that I'm not sitting and thinking "hummm, so which hospital would I like to stay in this time!?"
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