Costa Rican Version of ER

The first version of my life in Quepos, Costa Rica resembled the television show “Survivor” and then it evolved into a remake of “Where The Boys Are”. Last night it turned into “ER”, which thankfully did not include me being the patient, but rather Sally another student in my program. Last Monday, Sally arrived in Quepos, a beautiful hair dresser from California. She had a nice bright smile and she carried her bible with a dedication that I had to admire, especially in this heat. She moved in with the mother of the mother in my Tico family, so technically I guess that her mother is my grandmother. (Does that make Sally my Tico Aunt? Hmm.) I liked Sally a bunch, mainly because she tinted my Tico mom’s hair on her 2nd night here, even though Sally spoke about 2 words of Spanish when she arrived. I was the designated translator which was a scary thought, but we all made it through the process and my Tico mom no longer had gray roots when we were done. So success. Anyhow, over the course of the week, Sally began to fade and fade until she lost her smile and her eyes were just droopy and sad. The heat seemed to zap her energy, she couldn’t think and she started looking something close to death. My mom constantly asked me questions about Sally, about why she wouldn’t go to the doctor and why didn’t she think she had Dengi Fever, which is a serious epidemic now in Quepos. I was nice and made stuff up. Like that she just missed her family, I saw her eating plenty of food in town, and really, she was fine and she just couldn’t handle the heat. But the reality is that Sally wasn’t looking good to me either. So finally one night, I went to visit her and she looked even worse. We talked for a long time about her options. I could understand why she wanted to just get on a bus and then an airplane and head back home. I would have thought the same had I been in her shoes, but I was worried about her traveling alone. What if she passed out in some strange place in San Jose? Would the people around her help her … or just walk off with her luggage, passport, and all her money. Depending on the part of San Jose, I sort of thought the latter might be true. So I asked my Tico mom to call a doctor and soon the doctor was at the house, a nice man who spoke a tiny bit of English. He was patient as I tried my best to understand his questions with my Tico mom explaining with lots of hand waving and Sally constantly saying, “What are they saying?” I would always respond back with, “Well I think …. “ or “It could be….” He looked at Sally and he told me that yes, she might have Dengi and we should go to the hospital. I asked him if he could at least take her temperature and he told me that they would do that at the hospital. So, I wasn’t sure exactly what service he was providing here, but soon we had my Tico mom driving us to the hospital (after I paid the first doctor $30 for the house call). The hospital was clean and the waiting room was a big lit concrete slab with jalousie windows, like the kind I had in my house when I was a kid. There were no other tourists and so people glared at us with great curiosity. Beleida, my Tico mom, knew the entire place and she interviewed people to make sure she was current on the latest gossip. While we were sitting there, with poor Sally looking even sadder, I recognized one of the guys in the room: he was my tour guide from Manuel Antonio Park. I remember him because he was a little bit chunky and his English was just hysterical, in the way he described the animals. “Look, the birds is flewing” is my favorite quote. When I first met him, I thought he was just some kid that was doing the guides for a little extra money, but at the hospital I realized that he was trying to support a wife with two babies, one of them who looked pretty sick. Eventually, we were invited into the main part of the hospital which was insanely cold. I am not sure why they have the air conditioning turned down to something close to freezing, but the difference left me ticking through the symptoms of Dengi. We found our seat in what I thought was the secondary waiting room, but found out soon that it was just the central exam room, lots of very sick looking people, some just laying out on beds, and others hurled over or shivering with blankets. Not to mention lots of very old looking equipment. Sally said, “Might this be a museum of medicine” and we both began to laugh at the situation. Soon, a nurse approached us and my real work began as the official translator. Because the nurse was concerned I couldn’t understand, she started asking me questions in a loud Spanish. The people around us were tuned in to what he was saying because, after all, it was far more interesting then watching a huge cricket crawl across the room. These were very specific questions and I struggled through them, with the hardest and most obviously embarrassing were the ones about her menstrual cycle. Beleida tried to help the translation with a few gestures that made me really laugh. After a long tedious process with taking Sally’s blood pressure, and taking her temperature by putting the thermometer under her arm, they strapped a very tight rubber band around Sally’s arm and then we waited until it essentially turned blue. Then the nurse told me that it was good she didn’t have any spots because that would be Dengi. (Why we couldn’t do this at the house remains a mystery to me. I am sure we could have used something as the tourniquet! )After that, we received a box of stuff and the nurse gave Beleida very lengthy instructions which I knew was going to be a problem. So Beleida, Sally and I all went to the bathroom to get a urine sample from Sally. The process was hilarious … Beleida showing us with her game of charades what Sally needed to do and then handing off the appropriate equipment. I will not go into the details of it but can tell you that the equipment involved a big towel, gauze, a plate that looked like something I would use for a banana split, and then a big bottle with a very tiny hole on the top. After that, we came back out where the nurse wheeled out a cart and took blood from Sally. I held her hand while Beleida sang a song, which greatly seemed to relieve Sally. And then it was time to wait… and to watch Sally wilt some more. While we waited we watched a number of tests being done on other people. These were people that were right next to us and even included one guy spurting blood all over the floor and another woman puking in the most graphic and dramatic way. It was all making me a tad queasy, but Beleida continued to sooth us all by singing. (Not that Beleida has a terrific voice, it was just a nice change from the current scenery.) After a few hours of waiting and waiting and watching and singing, we eventually were invited in to see the doctor. I just about did handstands when the doctor spoke English because Sally had just told me that she was deathly allergic to quite a few antibiotics. (Great, I thought, “My Spanish is going to kill this poor girl.”) The doctor informed Sally that she had an intestinal infection and then went through three different drugs that she needed to start taking. We picked up all the drugs and signed a few things that I think had something to do with the bill. It was 1 am and I can tell you that my Spanish was fading and soon I wasn’t even going to even be able to muster up a “Hola!”. We drove back to Sally’s house and put her to bed…. The next day, poor Sally was on the first bus out of Quepos. I never did get to say good bye, but I knew she was gone because she gave my mother some of her clothes as a present, which Beleida proudly modeled when I came back from my morning run. (Not that Sally and Beleida are remotely the same size, but that doesn’t stop Belieda from squeezing into them. Or anybody else in the family for that matter.) So that is the ER episode of my Spanish emersion program here in Quepos. With any luck at all this will be my final story because I leave tomorrow and I really don’t want to write “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles” which I am oh, so familiar with, or possibly some Hollywood style action-drama that includes lots of FBI agents and more doctors. No gracias. I hope for sheer and total boredom. That my bus leaves tomorrow and takes 3 or 4 hours to get back to San Jose, that they drop me off at my nice American hotel where I will take my first hot shower in a month, and then at 7:15 am my flight will take off on time and I am bored to tears with the efficiency of the airlines. That we take off, I sleep and eat some horrible food, maybe watch a horrible movie and read a bit, and we land … and we do it again and again, until I am kissing the ground at the Bend airport as my unbroken luggage is unloaded off the plane, and my husband is standing there with a nice warm jacket so my body doesn’t go into complete shock when I am in weather that is less than 80 degrees. Oh yes… and let me hope that part of my return experience does not include a trip to the American hospital, when I think that one of my 8,000 mosquito bites has given me Dengi … where the doctors will think I am suffering from serious heat stroke when I put a tourniquet on my arm until it turns blue and then I look for strange spots under a light. Yes, let’s all hope…
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