I have so many things to say! I haven’t posted in so long! But I feel like this past week makes a pretty good blog post, even though I don’t really have any photos of the experience.
Some of you may know that I was sick out of my mind this past week. Like shockingly sick. I NEVER get sick. And I was down and out, not leaving my apartment for days, sick. In a foreign country. With no housemates around. So here is the adventure in Singaporean Healthcare and Painkillers.
I work with monkeys and rats. That’s a discussion we can have later, but to keep them safe from me and me safe from them I need LOTS of vaccines. All those vaccines you get as a kid, I have to get titers and make sure the vaccine actually worked and that I am still immune. Turns out I’m not quite so immune. That wasn’t the issue so much as the flu shot. I’ve never had one. I don’t get sick. They made me get one. For the monkeys. And those can definitely make you feel sick, especially if it’s the first time you’ve had it.
I felt a bit sick a few days after the shot but I caught up on sleep and felt fine. Then I went on a whirlwind trip to Hong Kong (I’ll tell you about that later too, promise). Like 2 days in the city. Supa fast. Lots of sleeping in planes. Shenanigans. It was an icy 75F and raining (cold rain, ew!) in Hong Kong. At the end of the trip I felt a bit of a sore throat. It was the beginning of the end.
On Monday I went in to work without a whole lot of sleep and felt awful all day. I got some cough drops on the way in and those helped but man, I just couldn’t focus! I had asked my friend to go see Interstellar with me so we went to that after work even though I really just wanted to go curl up in a ball and die somewhere. Great movie though. Saw it gold class. Will also tell you about that sometime. So good.
The next day when I woke up my throat was super swollen and I was not feeling great so I decided to go to the doctor. Some of you might know how much I dislike doctors. This will clue you on to how bad I was feeling but this was sooo far from the worst of the bad feeling. I figured out how to do find a doctor, it was pretty easy and there was an office right near my house. So I biked over (I was still capable of this at that point although I’m sure it wasn’t pretty) and was given essentially Tylenol. He said not to drink too much water before bed because the acid in my stomach could rise up and give me a sore throat. I might have given him a death glare. He said he didn’t want to try antibiotics yet but didn’t do any tests. I’m pretty sure he thought I was faking to get out of work or something.
I stayed home from work that day and rested but didn’t really get much better. Lots of sleeping happened. I think I slept like 25 hours from Monday night to Wednesday morning. So that was probably a start. But I woke up Tuesday and definitely was worse rather than better. I wanted to transfer an important file to a coworker so I went in to work. My boss took one look at me and was like, go home. Why are you even here? I was heading to a clinic right near work so I told him that and went over. This new doctor lady was better than the guy. She gave me some stuff to help try to numb my throat so I could eat and drink since at this point I couldn’t really do those things. I had been getting really severe dehydration headaches but thought they were just sick headaches. Then I forced myself to down a bunch of water and they went away. That was good. The numbing stuff helped me get a little more food and water in my body but again, I didn’t get any better. My friend Adji did come by and bring me tea and eat chicken noodle soup that I made with me so that was nice!
At this point, I was sure the doctors all didn’t believe me and so I didn’t want to go to them any more. My boss said he would ignore the fact that I didn’t have a doctor’s note for that day in hope that I would be better by Friday. The two doctors so far only have me a note for one day each. Here you apparently can’t just call in sick, you need a doctor to tell you that you are sick. Seems kind of silly to me but Singapore is good at paperwork… Personally I think I’d get better faster not having to go to the doctor assuming it’s not really treatable by a doctor, which most minor colds aren’t, and it doesn’t seem like the system really prevents people from faking all that much. But hey, whatever works!
I spent the next day awake, because apparently my body was done with that whole sleeping thing, and watching way too much tv because reading stopped being a thing that felt nice. At this point I could barely swallow water, it would come out my nose or at least go up it, and I would wake up all drool-y because when I was asleep my body refused to swallow because it hurt too much. I couldn’t even use throat lozenges because swallowing so much was painful. And I was STARVING. Like my stomach felt like it was eating itself. But I couldn’t eat anything! Because my throat was slowly closing shut. Like in a scary, am I going to be able to breathe? kind of manner. At some point in this process I looked up the emergency number to make sure I knew it and I locked my door in a way that I didn’t need a key to open it in case I needed to get out quickly while I couldn’t breathe.It wasn’t quite that bad but I was afraid it could get that bad while I slept. I wanted more than anything to be home and have people to take care of me. Adji came by again and I ate a few slices of pizza pretty slowly but I was still able to eat which was good. I was living on tea mostly at this point though. So I was taking lots and lots of really long hot showers that mostly involved standing in the steam breathing to try to make my throat feel better. And lots of standing over pots of boiling water. At some point I called my mom crying in pain. At some point I started taking handfuls of ibuprofen. At some point the ibuprofen stopped helping. That point was around 5 am.
When I realized I needed to go to the doctor again, when I couldn’t talk or function or sleep and was crying in pain, I found a 24 hr clinic. Glad those exist. I ordered a cab with an app, showed him the address on my phone, and spent the cab ride writing up my sick experience for the doctor since I literally was unable to talk intelligibly, let alone without pain. So I walked up and managed to explain with very little talking what I needed. Handed the doctor my phone so he could see my symptoms. I was so happy when he gave me anti-biotics. It was really hard trying to tell the cab driver home where I lived though. He was very grumpy. I was very tired and very unable to talk. Eventually we got it though. And I got home and watched movies for the rest of the night until I was finally able to pass out around 8 am. Yay!
I woke up later that day at some point and felt much better! I could walk around without getting dizzy! Look at me go! Not that I left the house. Or talked to anyone. Which I realized when I went to pick up Livy downstairs who was coming over for movie night instead of drinks and a party we were supposed to go to with Oscar since I was sick. She held it together for maybe 5 minutes before telling me that I sounded completely ridiculous. I was not surprised by this revelation. She made me pancakes, I think I managed to eat one of them in like an hour? It was super good! (Did you know British pancakes are more like crepes than American pancakes? Fun fact.) Then we watched a movie and were silly for a bit. After that, I threw up (ew) and my friend Andy showed up and hung out for a bit. Then, around 3 am, just as I was going to bed, I realized that I felt GREAT! So I jumped out of bed and promptly ate my entire kitchen just in case my throat was swollen when I woke up again. It was glorious. All sorts of badly warmed up food that I’d had delivered over the past few days but hadn’t been able to eat.
Best part, my throat didn’t swell back up! I was fine the next day and although I’m still probably not quite 100%, I’m doing pretty darn good and I am definitely on the mend! Yay eating and drinking and sleeping and walking and talking and all of the other fun things I get to do now!
Overall, my experience wasn’t too bad in terms of getting treatment, which is good to know. But I should be more forceful when I think I am infected and make sure I get tested early so that I don’t nearly die. Lesson learned!
Thanks everyone who listened to my complaining over the past few days. You are all great. <3
Funny link about expat life in singapore (not all true but still kind of funny. if you come visit you will understand!): http://obnoxiousexpatsinsingapore.tumblr.com/