Arriving at the emergency room

So Flo was sick. He didn’t feel like getting out of bed at all so I bought breakfast and a plain baguette for Flo. He started to feel a bit better during the morning but when I came back from lunch (Flo didn’t want to eat), his fever spiked again.

So what do you do? Pretty much all of the nasty tropical diseases start like the flu and you have no chance of telling early on which one it is. To not be “the guy who didn’t go to the doctor after being infected with malaria”, Flo was okay with going to the hospital to have his blood checked. This is the only way to tell if you’re infected when all your symptoms look like the common flu.

Flo had to lie down for measuring his temperature and heart rate

Getting to the hospital was a bit of a mission. We hired a tuk-tuk driver who asked for a steep price as it is quite a bit out of the way. I can’t ride the bike and there was no way that Flo might be able to. Finally, after a detour to three ATMs (two of them broken) to have some cash on us, we arrived in the emergency room of Luang Prabang Provincial Hospital. My god, do we take good health care for granted. And this is good health care for Laos…at least a hospital is available.

The staff told Flo to lie down, took some measurements such as temperature and heart rate and told us to wait for an English-speaking doctor. It only took about 30-40min for him to arrive. During the wait, I noticed a couple of things though. First, it is worrying if there are mosquitoes flying around in a hospital. That is a nice way to spread infection right here. Second, the infectious waste bin was not properly closed. Third, even our hotel was cleaner than that room.

Urgh. I only snapped this one picture without looking

The English-speaking doctor asked about symptoms and how long we’ve been in Laos (aka malaria-risk-region) and then asked for a blood test. The nurse who took it was nice but didn’t understand us. However, it all looked okay (as in clean) and ethanol was used.

Another 30min or so later, we got the results: No malaria, no dengue, no bacterial infection. Must be something viral so most likely the flu.

Flo was exhausted after this three hour excursion, had some food and went into bed. I played some more desktop dungeon before calling it a day as well.

All good to go “home”