Beware the Ides of Ice

Technically, the Ides is the 15th, but work with me. I had the ice on the 15th and ended up cooling my heels in hospital for four days with a roaring case of food poisoning, fungal infection of the lower intestines, bacterial infection and diarrhea that was… Well… There’s no way to politely put it. I’m sure you can imagine.


Thursday evening after we got home, I was feeling like death warmed over and so after paying my dues to the porcelain god, I went to bed. Friday morning I woke up around 1030 feeling crappy. After taking my temp which read 38.5+C (101+F) and feeling pretty low, I decided to get out my handy dandy Indonesian grammar book and write a note to Ibu Sum – to be read by my oldest – asking for someone to call Mama, get me to a doctor and generally keep me from dying.

My brother-in-law happened to be home, intercepted the note and drove me to the nearest hospital where I was triaged and seen by an internist in under 20 minutes. From the time I was triaged until the next day, I was delirious and alternating between having chills and feeling like I was on fire. Blood work was done, urine samples were taken, even stool samples were eventually taken.

I didn’t – make that COULDN’T – eat anything from Friday until Sunday morning. If I ate ONE BITE of anything, within 5 minutes, I was running for the border, dragging my IV line with me. I was hoping that I would get to go home before Sunday, but it was not to be. Which really added insult to injury because my husband – whom I had not seen for three weeks – was arriving Sunday morning. The absolute last thing I wanted was for him to see me laid up in a hospital bed with IV lines and a portable toilet by the bed. But, he arrived and I swear I started to feel better the moment I saw him. I could have eaten him up with a spoon!

There were a couple of things that kept me going while I was in hospital: 1) a forum I’m on had a thread about “Child hits doctor” which ran into the thousands of posts and it was so unwieldy that “cliffs notes” had been posted summarizing it. I remembered a lot of those threads just to keep from going crazy while I was bed-bound. 2) the portable potty seat was labeled “Dharma”. I kept thinking that the label was all wrong! Instead of looking like this:

it should have looked like this:

Yes, I really was that delirious. But by Monday, I was raring to go home. Not just because my butt was sore from laying in a hospital bed, but also because Wednesday morning we were leaving for Bali and I was NOT missing THAT for no reason. Nuh uh.