It might not look like much, but I had to go scuba diving 20 meters deep below the warm, mineral-rich waters of the Andaman Sea to earn it. I was on a 4-day trip on a live aboard boat and although I noticed my left foot was starting to hurt and swell, I ignored it for a while. At first I thought my fins were too small but my right foot never really hurt as bad as the left did. And then the left one started to swell. By the last day on the boat it was visibly swollen and I couldn't have stuffed it back in to the fin another time.
3 days later and back on land, I was limping but was hopeful it was the sea that had brought on the swelling and that now being away from the sea would make it better. I thought it might be bad, but I figured I'd give it one more night and then do something about it. By morning I could hardly walk.
I ended up in a open hospital room well-suited for a Vietnam War movie. I was in an uncomfortable, dirty bed in a row of many uncomfortable and dirty beds and I quickly ascertained that I was the healthiest person there. Other people were vomiting, some had enormous swathes of bandages over an arm, leg, or their head, and then there were others I was worried maybe weren't even alive anymore.
I had been prescribed a night in the hospital on anti-biotics to kill an infection caused from not keeping my blisters clean and would be released when the swelling went down.
Two days later I was still in the hospital making do by being doped up on painkillers and reading First, They Killed My Father, a child's memoir of the Khmer Rouge. I could hardly feel bad for myself reading about the life this young girl lived through during the terror of Pol Pot.
Many Thai people stopped by my bed because they were worried about me being alone, without any friends. Family members of other patients slept next to their sick loved ones' beds on pieces of cardboard. I couldn't imagine sleeping in a spot with a better chance of being vomited on. Some of the ladies that talked to me said I I could pay them to be my friend and watch after me while I was around. I was lonely, bored, and doped up on morphine, but I wasn't ready to start paying for friends.
I would spend parts of my sedated day studying any medical terms I could find in my pocket Thai-English dictionary and trying to talk to the doctor about my prognosis. I learned words like "infection", "swollen", and "surgery." I even perfected my pronunciation of the word "foot" but made little overall progress. The doctors appeared to be doing nothing but inducing patient apathy through reuglar doses of morphine.
In the two days I was at the hospital a large lump grew on top of my swollen foot. "Cyst" was then added to my growing vocabulary. A little later when I learned the word "cut" and the phrase "no anesthetic" I knew it was time to leave. I urgently called a friend, got a ride, paid my 3-day, mere $12.50 hospital bill, and then we drove 3 hours to Phuket hospital.
Luckily, Phuket Hospital was modern, clean, and all of the doctors were well-educated. And everyone spoke nearly perfect English. When they told me, "There's a cyst complicating your infection and the only way we can get rid of the infection is by cutting open your foot to clean out the cyst." I went with it. That night I got the happy gas and I woke up with my foot wrapped in gauze and tape.
A couple days later I was wheeled out of the hospital, helped into a car and given crutches. In order to take care of my wound I had to go to a smaller, local clinic and have nurses clean the wound every day until it healed completely. The nearest clinic to my home was several kilometers away and since I had no ride, I had to hitchhike there nearly every morning. Sometimes I'd get lucky and catch a friend on their way to work, but that was no more likely than riding in the back of a pickup truck with a large group of people. I got very good at explaining my foot problem in Thai.
I got to know the nurses at the clinic well and they taught me how to say, "It hurts!". I didn't have stitches so my skin was still split wide open, leaving a small hole in the top of my foot. Every day when the nurse would clean it, she would slowly pull out the dried, sticky-stained gauze that had been stuffed into the hole. I would yelp in pain and complain that it hurts but all she ever did was giggle at me. Then, with the gauze out, as if to make me yell my "It HURTS!" as loud as possible, she would clean the wound with floods of alcohol and scrub the open wound clean. I imagined it must have been scary for people in the waiting room to hear my screams accompanied by the nurses laughter. After the entire cleaning was over, I'd hobble out of the clinic with a fresh bandage on my foot and hope to use my foot to pull the heartstrings of a new car with A/C.
Though some days I decided I could skip a cleaning or would even do it myself, most days I found a way to get to the clinic and had the same ladies clean my foot. They never charged me, only thanked me for working as a volunteer and giggled as they put my through my morning pain. Eventually my wound healed and I brought everyone some presents from the market to thank them for helping me every day. It wasn't until that day, the last time I saw the nurses, that they told me the phrase they taught me didn't mean, "It hurts!"—it was slang for "Delicious!"
