Under the Weather

May 2010 – Phuket International Hospital

20 May 2010 – Phuket, Thailand.

I got back to Phuket last week only to discover I had a staph infection from a bug bite I got in Sri Lanka. Well, I didn’t actually discover it, I was completely ignoring it. Luckily the Gods of Common Sense intervened. [bxA]

Last Wednesday sitting in the McDonalds at the Kuala Lumpur airport reminded me of these guys I met on the same KL > Phuket flight last month. I had shared a taxi with them back to Chalong and learned they are MMA fighters training in Thailand. I didn’t stay in touch but one of them said he was starting a blog soon, so I’d been keeping an eye out for it.

KLCC Airport McDonalds (borrowed from this blog without permission).

With a couple hours to kill waiting for my flight, I messaged him on Facebook from the KL airport McDonalds to ask if he started the blog. By the time I got back to my house in Phuket, I had his blog link and was reading it from the beginning when I came across an excerpt he posted about staph infections. It was like reading a checklist of what had been happening to my leg the past few days: got bug bite, scratched it too much, it swelled, it spread, it was kinda gross, etc. Oh dear.

May 2010 – Phuket International Hospital Emergency Room.

The next day I went to the Phuket International Hospital Emergency Room – which isn’t so much of a triage situation as just a nice clean walk-in clinic. The pretty Thai nurses wear white dresses with those proper bow-like nurse hats and feminine white shoes with little white ankle socks.

The doctor took one look at my leg and said, “Aaahh. Staph.” Glunk.

Dicloxacillin 500 MG cap – 4x daily before meals and bedtime. Blech.

I’ve spent the past week ingesting antibiotics four times a day and suffering flu symptoms on and off while trying desperately not to consider the extreme cases of staph. (What if I hadn't read that guys blog!?!)

I’ve returned to the emergency room clinic every other day for the doctor to keep an eye on the situation while the pretty nurses dress my ugly wounds. Today was my fourth and final visit as it appears the infection is contained and healing, inshallah.

The bi-daily trips to the Phuket ER have brought fond and hilarious memories of the time Alyssa and I found ourselves in an Emergency Room during our first week in Beirut…

April 2009 – Downtown Beirut.

…but I’ll tell you about that tomorrow.

Meanwhile, check out the Fighter Guy’s blog – it’s really good and he writes a lot about life in Thailand: www.magicalray.com/blog