My First Hospital Visit Abroad

One of the staff members took a picture of me to remember my unconscious hours.

Of all the times I’ve been sick and feverish in Korea, my first trip to a hospital abroad was surprisingly in Nepal. Two days in.

So here’s the thing. I sweat. Like, a lot. And in unforgiving, unrelenting sun, I don’t really tend to stop. Remember my Philippines trip where I didn’t stop sweating for the entire month? Well, it happened again, but this time in Nepal. And I had no fan. And I slept in a shed.

Anyway, the fan and the shed have nothing to do with the trip to the hospital, but the heat does. As you know, I volunteered in Nuwakot, Nepal with All Hands Volunteers for my summer break from teaching. For two weeks, I was part of a team building a school just north of Kathmandu, and the worksite was hotter and sunnier than anything I had ever experienced.

My first day on site, I was careful. I remembered my massive dehydration (read: unofficially diagnosed E. coli) stint during my first week in the Philippines, and I wanted to make sure my stomach was in tip top shape. Little did I know that my stomach would be the least of my problems.

Leave it to me to get massively dehydrated the old fashioned way – by shoveling and carrying buckets of gravel. In the Philippines, we would often get some shade or rain to keep us going throughout the day, but in Nepal we were exposed and vulnerable.

So the day started fine, working in the workshop area making form boxes out of wood. After our morning break (aka “tea time”), we did our first cement pour of the day, and off of a high from yesterday’s gravel shoveling team, I eagerly joined the cement prep squad. On the first day of pouring, we had four people on cement, but today we only had two, so the pressure was on. As it turns out, shoveling gravel is about the only thing that I excel at (or so I thought) on a construction site, so I figured I’d go all out. I’d fill three buckets while my partner filled two and we crushed the first pour. Water bottles (750ml) consumed: 4.

After the pour, we ate lunch, where I sat in a chair directly in the sun instead of the ground in the shade, which looking back may not have been a good idea, but still probably wasn’t the last straw. After lunch, we coated form boxes with oil so the cement could set in them but not stick to the sides, but that shortly ended to do another concrete pour. However, we first had to transport concrete from the warehouse to the mixer. Being more than capable of carrying 50 kilo bags of cement during my time in the Philippines, I saw no issue with the transfer and volunteered to carry bags to the pour site while others used wheelbarrows. Turns out my muscle memory from Tacloban didn’t stick and I ended up exhausted before the second pour.

I ended up making it through the second pour, shoveling gravel with my partner and then taking a break afterwards to refuel. At this point, I didn’t feel dehydrated, but you never know I suppose. Usually I can feel the onsets of serious dehydration early on as a runner, so at this point I thought I had nothing to worry about. (Normally, when I’m running and need water and electrolytes, my fingertips will start to tingle and then my hand goes numb. This is probably not normal, but what can you do?)

So with 30 minutes left, I joined a gravel transport team, shoveling gravel and then wheelbarrowing it over to another spot on site. While this was definitely hard work, I still felt fine after we were done. Exhausted, but that’s expected for this kind of thing.

Now that the day was over, we packed into one of the trucks to head home. This is where it started. First, it seemed innocent. As I entered the truck, my leg cramped up, but it didn’t last very long so I thought nothing of it. It felt like a normal day but about ten minutes from base, my hands went numb. Five minutes from base, my feet and legs went numb. Two minutes away from base, my arms went numb, and by the time we were unloading the truck, I couldn’t move my body at all. I got some help out of the truck and then a group of volunteers and staff fed me rehydration salts while keeping my joints moving to increase circulation. Eventually, feeling returned to my body and I thought the worst was over.

I made my way down the hill to base and kept drinking liquids, dousing myself with water, and awkwardly making dance-like moves to stay mobile and keep my blood circulating. However, my head had started to tingle, and a headache had set in quickly. I continued “dancing” for about 40 minutes, but the headache eventually worsened and I started to get dizzy. After a couple more minutes of this, I began to feel bloated and was unable to consume any more liquids, leading to nausea and balance problems. It was at this time that the numbness had returned to my arms and legs, so I got in a van to be driven off to the hospital, with my leg cramping as soon as I entered the car for good measure.

What followed was perhaps one of the most difficult 20 minute drives I have ever experienced. After only 3 minutes, my dizziness mixed with the bumpy Nepal roads resulted in me having to request an emergency stop to possibly throw up. As I stood bent over on the side of the road trying to maintain consciousness, I wished so badly for all of this to just end and everything to go back to normal. When I wasn’t able to throw up, I got back in the car and cramped up again, creating an incredibly painful remainder of the ride.

While I did manage to control my nausea for the remainder of the trip by alternating breathing exercises with brief periods of involuntary unconsciousness, I did in fact throw up as soon as I exited the vehicle just outside the hospital. Although I didn’t realize it at the time in my haze of dehydration, I guess I ended up throwing up all over one of the staff members who had brought me to the hospital. This also made my stomach muscles tighten and cramp up as I continued to throw up the electrolytes and water I tried so hard to pack into my body earlier.

As soon as I had emptied my stomach, I was whisked into the hospital by the volunteers and placed onto the bed. At this point, my hands had begun to twitch involuntarily – my fingers clenching and moving without my permission. The next 3-4 hours were a blur, but I remember closing my eyes and seeing mixtures of red and black shaped while feeling like I was shoveling gravel (go figure). I remember slipping in and out of consciousness and feeling needles stuck in me for injections, an IV, and a blood test, as well as a quick finger prick for added torture. Apparently I woke up and asked for the time multiple times as well as asking where I was. In my incoherent babbling, I also tried to explain what I was feeling with the shapes and the gravel, but I’m fairly certain I was only spewing nonsense.

The entire 3-4 hours from around 7:00 – 10:30, my hands were shaking uncontrollably, so I was pretty concerned about what was happening. Every time I regained consciousness, I wanted to lose it again. My head hurt, I was seeing shapes, and my body was moving without me telling it to. I also remember feeling panic, anxiety, and worry about if I was going to make it through the night, but I luckily slipped back into unconsciousness before I was able to think too long about the worst case scenario.

The most vivid thing I remember about these few hours was waking up to a sort of cream being rubbed on my chest and different clamps being applied to parts of my body. I remember this because I looked around the room at people staring at me, panicked and thinking that I was about to be given some sort of electro-shock therapy. In my futile attempts to remember how defibrillation worked on television, I was convinced it began with cream being rubbed on a person’s chest and then clamps being applied. I asked repeatedly what was going to happen to me, if I was actually getting shocked. I had justified it by thinking that I was passing out so much that maybe they wanted to shock me to keep me conscious for some reason. No matter how many times they told me no, I was convinced that any second someone was going to yell “clear!” and I was going to start convulsing uncontrollably. It ended up being something they used to monitor vitals, but the fear in that moment was real.

Around 10:30pm, I woke up tired and fatigued, but the shaking had gone. During those brutal 3-4 hours, I had been fed pills and not given one IV, but three IVs of sodium chloride and dextrose, which I’m pretty sure means sugar and salt water. After that, I slept and went to the bathroom every hour, hydrated but still incredibly tired. I was able to leave the hospital and return to base around 10:00 the next morning. Looking back, it could have been a lot worse, as I had it better than the woman next to me, who was suffering from the exact same thing but in her entire arms and legs rather than just the hands.

For the entire experience, the All Hands staff stayed with me, from helping me out of the truck on base, to giving me liquids and rehydration salts, and all the way through the drive to the hospital and the stay overnight. I will forever be grateful to these wonderful people who made me feel safe and cared for in a time when I thought the worst was happening, and I don’t know how I could have dealt with this without them.

Also, the actual hospital facility was great. The treatment worked, and the staff didn’t seem to mind working with a smelly, unshowered, dirty foreigner caked in mud from the day’s volunteer work. Oh, and it only cost 1,650 rupees, which is about $16.50.

I don’t really remember any of this at all.