Just about two weeks ago I was talking with my teammate Jess and said I think it would be interesting to get to see what the medical care system looks like in each of the countries we are going to be in. Her response was something like “Don’t say that. It could happen because one of us ends up in the hospital.”
Guess what I did yesterday!?
I got to take a visit to the hospital here in Lezhe, Albania with one of my squad mates.
Don’t worry though, we are both on the mend.
There were several people on our squad that had been having issues with vomiting and diarrhea so when mine started I didn’t think anything of it. They got better. I didn’t. After 5 days I had started to get weak, and by day 7 being light headed from the dehydration was a normal part of my day. There was no more postponing a trip to an Albanian hospital. Yesterday was the day! My squad mate Emily a few days behind me in her symptoms and my team leader Molly came as well.
As we left for the hospital a few of the other girls in our room were praying for us, especially for someone at the hospital to speak English.
We walked into the hospital, obviously out of place not sure where to go and there was no desk to check in at. So we just asked the first person we saw in a pair of scrubs, “Do you speak English?” He didn’t. Thankfully someone over heard and went and found a doctor who spoke enough English to communicate.
We were ushered into a room with four beds, two were already occupied. We each took one of the beds that was empty and waited. The doctor came in and in broken English was asking us questions about when it started, foods we had been eating, the color and frequency of the diarrhea and other questions. He seemed familiar with whatever was going on because his questions were right on with our issues.
As this was happening one of the patients in the other bed left, and another patient was brought in to take her place. I cringed. The sheets on the bed weren’t changed, and nothing was wiped with any sort of anti-bacteria cleaner. I looked at the bed I was on and wondered who exactly had been on these sheets before me.
He told us we would be getting an IV with antibiotics and then he would come back. Molly had to go to the pharmacy around the corner to purchase the vials and bring them back. They didn’t just keep them there at the hospital. The nurse prepared them and put them into our IV.
Privacy was not even a thing to be considered. The patient who had come in to the bed had to get a shot in the butt. No curtains were pulled, no warnings were given. The nurse came over with the shot, his pants were pulled down and the shot was given. Efficiency was the word for the day.
Maybe an hour and a half, half a liter of fluid, and a vial of antibiotics later we were done. The doctor came back in and was able to explain a little to us about what was going on. Basically it had to do with the bacteria in our stomachs taking over and causing problems. We were given prescriptions for antibiotics, a strict diet of bread, crackers, apples, bananas, noodles, rice, hard boiled eggs, soup, water, tea, and absolutely NO meat or preservatives. At least that’s what we understood.
One of our squad leaders is a pharmacist and she said we had two antibiotics, and one anti-stomach acid pill. She said that based on the prescriptions it was the bacteria in our stomachs. We all have some naturally but something we ate just caused it to go crazy…and now intestinal issues have take over.
Now we get to take a few days to recover, rest, and write blogs about it!
