A Tribute to Modern Pharmaceuticals

January 13 – Disclaimer: this is not a happy post and thankfully unrepresentative of the majority of this trip so far.  I want this blog to be share the full picture of my experience her so if you don’t want to hear any bad news, don’t read this.

In retrospect, there are many things that happened the day before that resulted in one of the absolute worst days of my life.  While I had been feeling a little off through the majority of Myanmar, I had thought it was just getting used to the food there.  After so much traveling, heavy exercise and not drinking enough water I was extremely dehydrated, and woke up a few times during the night only to try to fall back asleep.  When I did finally get out of bed, I knew something was really wrong, so I opened the door to our room (and thankfully Sam had picked up that I was out of it) and everything went white and I couldn't support myself anymore.  Sam and some hotel staff guided me onto the bed and got me some water.  After a little while I was feeling a little better, talked briefly with my parents and then packed up all my stuff and headed down to the taxi that would take us back to the airport.  At this point I was a complete zombie and so grateful to be with Emilie and Sam who really helped me with my luggage and whatever else I needed.

Once in the airport I really started to feel bad, so Sam shipped a few of my things home while I pleaded with people in the security line to let me in front of them so I could get to the pharmacy inside the terminal as soon as possible.  I talked to a pharmacist who gave me a concoction of various pills, which I promptly took and promptly threw up.  Yup…I was that girl, puking in an airport trashcan.  Cool thing about being sick at the airport was that I got an escort that wheeled me around everywhere I went so at least there was that I guess.  So we were waiting by our gate and I was really having trouble being a functional human being so I tried to take all the pills again and made myself a little home in the closest bathroom.  Again pills unsuccessfully stayed down, and there was definitely a point where I questioned if being on a flight, bus, and then boat for the next ten hours was really a good idea for me.  Pushed through, took a nap in my own row of the plane, and started to feel better (probably because there was nothing left in my body). 

Only ate a slice of toast and drank lots of water for the next 24 hours.  After getting to Koh Phangan and getting a new set of antibiotics, I immediately felt better.  The body is really an incredible machine.  Even though I remember that I felt like I was on the verge of death, my body can’t recall that feeling anymore (thank god).  Fingers crossed that was my one and only bad health scare here.