Singapore. Early August. 1990. Latitudinally, I’m one degree north. I have a raging fever, although I don’t know it.
It’s a Sunday, and I’m poolside at the hotel where I’m staying. I’m shivering uncontrollably and have no energy to do anything but lay by the pool, trying to keep warm, under a white-hot and blazing equatorial sun.
I’m exhausted and there’s no reason for this. Only after returning to my heavily air conditioned room, when the sweats begin, do I know something is terribly wrong with my body. My body alternates from being so cold I turn off the air con and wrap myself in every blanket there is in the room, to being so hot that I have to turn the air back on to avoid sweating rivers.
I rest a bit, have the idea that I’m sort of ok, and leave the hotel and wander around my neighborhood and decide to eat fish (I never eat fish) at Long John Silver. Only after eating, when nausea takes over and the sweats being again, do I acknowledge the need for help.
“I need a hospital,” I tell the young man behind the counter.
“Mount Elizabeth Hospital is around the corner,” he directs me.
Off I go. I’m rapidly becoming the stuff of Emergency Rooms. Luckily I have my credit card and suitable identification.
I check in. Someone takes my temperature, looks at my tongue, and pushes me into a cubicle. My fever is dangerously high, but it’s in Celsius and it means nothing to me.
They ask questions and are not pleased when I tell them I’d spent all afternoon lying in the sun.
“But I was freezing,” I tell them.
Yes,” they said, “but it spiked your temperature.”
They can tell I’m dehydrated by the coating on my tongue, and that I need antibiotics to lower the fever. I’m prepped for an IV then spend the night and a good part of the morning in the hospital. By noon, though, I tell that I have to leave, that I have a flight to catch that evening.
“But you can’t discharge you,” they tell me. “You still have a fever.”
“Yes, I know,” I tell them, “But the next available seat on this flight is in September and it just isn’t an option. I’ve got to return to my hotel, pack, check out and get to the airport.
So I check myself out, against their good judgment. I’m literally half way around the world and I just want to go home.
By early evening I’m at the airport waiting for the daily Royal Jordanian Airline flight from Singapore to Amman. It’s an absolute struggle just to sit upright. I’m still sick with full-blown influenza, but I have no choice.
It’s a full flight...and long. Twelve hours maybe. I sleep, but not the good sleep the sick need to recuperate.
I arrive in Amman early the next day. There’s a huge time difference and my body is on Asian time.
I catch a taxi to my hotel, shower and crash, waking up seven or eight hours later. It’s late afternoon in Jordan, but could be the middle of the night in Singapore. My entire body clock is off kilter.
But I feel remarkably better. And hungry. My natural curiosity tells me to hit the streets, take a look around, have some dinner. So I decide to take a walk.
Downtown Amman. Late afternoon rush hour. I’m just wandering around, getting a feel for the place, when I meet a small group of young men.
One of them asks me: “Are you a Christmas man?”
I know what he’s really asking. Am I a Christian? The irony isn’t lost on me. I love Christmas so, yes, I think to myself, I am a Christmas man.
But I don’t want to embarrass him, so I respond. “Yes, I’m a Christian.”
Passions in the Middle East are high at this moment. Kuwait had fallen five days earlier to Iraq and support for Saddam Hussein was running high.
I do not have my wits about me. I still have a fever, albeit lessened, and my body is pumped up with antibiotics.
“Are you American?” one of them asks me.
Hmm, I think. Not good. I tell them I’m Canadian, that I live in Montréal. It’s not the first time I’ve played the Quebec trump card.
"Bad,” another one says. “Friend of America,” he hisses. He catches me off guard and pushes me off the curbing, into the street. Fortunately, there was no oncoming traffic.
OK, I tell myself. Get yourself out of here…now. Just walk away as quietly as possible.
Which is what I do.
I get back to my hotel, but the seven hour daytime sleep, coupled with the who-knows-how-many-hours time difference there is between Singapore and Amman, prohibits my body from sleep.
Nine o’clock.
Ten o’clock.
Two a.m.
I dose, only to be awakened by a Muslim call to prayer. My hotel is right night door to a Mosque.
I simply cannot sleep and have heaps and heaps of time to think.
I develop a plan.
By 8:00 a.m I’m out the door. I grab a taxi to the nearest Royal Jordanian Airline office. My ticket, an around-the-world deal, is extraordinarily flexible. When the office opens at 9:00 I’m the first one in.
“Can you get me to Amsterdam today?” I ask the clerk.
She searches the flight’s database. “You’re lucky,” she tells me. “There’s one seat left in your class of ticket. But the flight leaves in four hours.”
“I’ll take it,” I tell her. She rebooks me and I grab another taxi. This time I tell him to wait at the hotel while I repack and check out. Within fifteen minutes we’re on our way to the airport. I play the Montréal trump card against his twenty questions, but this time there’s no need. He wants to get out of Jordan, emigrate to the USA, does not like living in the tension of the Arab/Palestinian/Jewish/Christian issue.
Eight hours later I land in Amsterdam. My dear friends Lomme and Ina do not expect me for another two weeks. I find a pay phone, and a phone book. They’re home.
They pick me up and for the next week I use their home as a health sanitorium. They bring me to their doctor and I’m put on additional meds. I sleep fifteen hours a day. It’s there that I recover, but it’s not for another six weeks that I feel fully back to my old self.
I have never forgotten their kindness, and whenever I see them, I remind them once again of the gift they gave me.
I was sick and I was exhausted. They opened their home and gave me the time and space to recover. And for that I am forever grateful.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment