Delhi Belly, Baby

“Have fun in India,” Neil said to me on gChat during our last online conversation before I left Tel Aviv, “try not to eat, touch, or look at anything.” I laughed and groaned at the same time, knowing full well that the Indian rite of passage affectionately referred to as “Delhi Belly” was an inevitability I’d have to face eventually. I had no idea what I was in for.

Weeks later, sitting in the bathroom of the Max Super Speciality Hospital in Saket, a neighborhood of New Delhi, I wrote the following line in my journal, “how did I get here?” I’ve always been enamored with the practice of taking a mental snapshot at the start of a big trip on which to look back on at various milestones thereafter. Looking back on a moment captured mere weeks earlier can seem like peering back ages at a different version of myself. This helps me to appreciate the degree to which my experiences change myself and my views of the world and, at the very least, always makes for a good “wow” factor. This snapshot effect was especially pronounced as I sat there comparing where I had been two weeks earlier compared to my current predicament. Five days in a Delhi hospital with symptoms --a 102+ fever that wouldn’t respond to normal doses of antibiotics or fever medication, a swollen liver, spleen, and nodes, and a torrential waterfall coming out of me that showed no signs of relenting no matter what the nurses gave me-- that all indicated Typhoid Fever as the most likely cause. And I had been doing so well.

As one week in India had become two, including a weekend excursion beyond Delhi and into the province of Rajasthan, I started to think that a mild form of Delhi Belly must have had come and gone without me taking notice. Granted, I was being careful, but not obsessive. I only ate at street vendors vouched for by ex-pats, stuck to bottled water unless a restaurant was filtered, avoided anything uncooked, and carried around hand sanitizer wherever I went. And while I knew that a fever was a possibility, I definitely didn’t foresee myself spending close to a week getting my own first hand account of India’s hospital system.

My tests for Typhoid eventually came back negative, leaving me with a mere yet severe gastrointestinal bacterial infection to blame for my woes. Was it the sip of water I took before Rahil told me not to trust any restaurant’s water? The onion masala dosa I ate that was filled with an obscene amount of onions that may or may not have been raw? The god awful mango lassi in Pushka? Did I possibly brush my teeth with tap water one night in Jaipur and not realize it? Why do most get 24 to 48 hours of diarrhea while my immune system was completely crippled for close to a week? Did it really matter? All I could do moving forward was raise my vigilance level up a few notches and try to see the experience as a set of stories I can tell and questions I can answer about my hospital stay in Delhi.

The doctors were great. They spoke English, knew their stuff, and were better equipped to treat something like Typhoid than any western physician. The facilities were on a western par and were, in general, very hygienic. Conversely, the nurses and attendants, and service in general were all pretty horrible. I’ve become used to dealing with language barriers by now, as well as the ways different cultures deal with them. In India I’ve noticed a tendency for locals not to acknowledge that they don’t understand you. “Yes,” they will answer to a question or “that way” they’ll arbitrarily point when not understanding a word you just said. While only a small nuisance on the street, this can be agonizingly frustrating when in a hospital and asking for something like “an injection to keep me from throwing up all the pills you just gave me” from a nurse who stares back blankly and insists she can speak English just fine when you ask her to send for someone else. You just had to get used to this sort of thing along with the door to your room being constantly left open, requests for items as critical as toilet paper (did I mention the waterfall?) going ignored three times over, and food trays being nonchalantly placed completely out of reach by an attendant who chooses to ignore your pleas as he walks out of the room. And while there’s a hand sanitizer dispenser on the wall, nobody uses it, so you better get in the habit of asking each nurse to put on a pair of clean gloves before giving you an injection or taking blood. And while people like the dietician who insists that sipping Coca Cola and Ginger Ale doesn’t soothe an upset stomach and calls an attendant to hand you your bag rather than grabbing it herself were often counteracted by a few very attentive and sympathetic nurses, in general my interaction with the staff was less than pleasant. But I’m out now, almost done with my oral antibiotic prescription, and able to consume solid foods again, and that’s what’s really important. I’ve also lost a good amount of weight which is always nice.

I’ve had a tendency to deal with bad traveling days with an involuntary muttering of “get me the hell out of this country” and I’ve been trying to keep that sort of negative sentiment under control, or at least confined towards Delhi, its daily barrage of 105 to 110 degree temperatures, and suffocating levels of air pollution and not to the entire sub continent. After all, I just got here. As my mood has increased over the past few days I’ve become more excited about exploring the south before the monsoon strikes in June and less anxious about what has proven to be a rather shitty immune system. I haven’t purchased a flight yet, but the plan right now is to fly to Goa on Saturday or Sunday in the hopes of decompressing by the beach and possibly rendezvousing with some Israeli backpackers (watching videos from Israel on my camera while stuck in the hospital bed made me long to hear Hebrew again). From there I’ll most likely follow the path of Alexander Frater as depicted in his Chasing the Monsoon but we will definitely take all things one day at a time.