Staring at death’s reflexion

Preface
before you get started on this piece of literacy, I would like to declare that the moments describe here were experience under the influence of severe drugs (some anti biotics powerful enough to burn my veins... no shit) and some severe fever. I was subject to hallucination and half awake dreaming phases. Some point of view might/might not be dramatized by those effects. I really wish to have my laptop with me at the hospital so that I can record the moment as I experienced it. Most of what is written here is true and as it happenned. Enjoy!


The story
Oct 31st : I receive my flu vaccination
Nov 3rd : the fever hits me
Nov 5th: I am feeling better
Nov 11th: I am strucked by a sever fever again (so much for the flu vaccination). This one is much worst than the previous one. I am laying in my bed sweating like a pig while I shiver like if I was naked in an arctic blizzard.

This lasts for the whole day until someone reminds me that this could be the dengue fever. I do the maths in my head and decide that I may as well get it checked. 2330 and I jump into a cab for Changi General hospital.
“go bi where ?” the driver asks me
“The fastest way!” I shout back at him
I simply have no time to argue about street directions and I simply do not have the strength to guide him to a location that he perfectly knows how to get to.

Fifteen minutes later, I storm into the emergency room. I am officially looking like the Katrina hurricane. My vision is not good. My voice is stumbling with words. My balance is as good as a drunken acrobat. Some lady takes my temperature. 39.3! (I still have the sticker). She hands me a mask and tells me to go wait in the “fever room”.

I start walking in a direction and then she stops me “Sir! Sir! The fever room is this way leh”. I change my tangent to then get told again that I was not going in the right direction. The girl had to guide me until I saw the isolator.

I sit on some plastic seat for about thirty minutes feeling like death. Suddenly my number gets called. Errr… room 8. Where is that… I somehow headed in the right direction. I sit in some small office with an Indian doctor. I start telling her my story. She then decides to take some blood tests for dengue and others. She uses some big needle so that I can then be plugged on a machine. I tell her that the vein in my right arm is much bigger. (I fuckin hate needles and I fuckin hate blood test… makes me feel ill every time) I do my best not to look. I feel the sting in my arm. I feel the cold steel getting wiggled inside my vein. I feel some red fluid leaking on my elbow. After about 5 minutes of this I decide to look. “sowwyyy, I messed up your vein” (FFS! CUNT! BITCH! MOTHERFUCKER!!!!!!!! …. Anyway that’s what I though). So we change arm. She plugs me. She extracts the plasmatic samples and then tells me that it is over. She starts asking me if I was going to be “ok” to go home and come back the next day but when she saw that I could not really comprehend or answer her question due to being in a zombie state, she decides to get me hospitalized.

She gets me up and sends me in a direction to see some girl who sits me in a wheel chair. She then proceeds to inject me a bag full of sodium fluid or something that made me feel ill right away. I start to burp and feeling the vomit come up but I manage to hold myself. Awful feeling. They then wheel me in a night ward observatory where other patients are laying. I finally pass out.
0400 and some lady wake me up explaining me that I will be admitted into the hospital and that I need to pay a deposit of ~3000$. (just the type of thing that you wanna lay on a sick person…) no real way to know if my insurances will cover and no idea what I am getting. They decide to send me in the “type C” accommodation that is the cheapest so that I get some time to talk to my insurance company. All I know is that there are going to be many beds and no air conditioning. I am happy about the AC since I am still shivering. They sit me in a wheel chair and drive me around the hospital. We pass in all those dark corridors with flickering light. I hear myself mumble something but I cannot comprehend the words. At that moment, I have no idea what my name is or where I am going. My head is pounding like if someone was inserting some rusty needles into it. Every muscles of my body feel like they ran a marathon the previous day. My chest randomly receives some stinging pain like a spear that got sent by a Roman to finish me off on the cross.

They eventually wheel me into this room that is full of bed and people. There is no light. I can see some nurses in white dresses attending some patients. Others are running to attend one that is screaming like if someone was burning him with a horse marker. The air feels hot and humid and there’s a smell of death in the air. I see someone in an alley vomit blood on himself. They bring me to a bed and tell me to get off the chair. I lay on my flat in hope that I can finally get some rest. My eyes get snapped open by the sound of my neighbor who is coughing half a lung on his bed sheet. I then look across the row of bed and see some old uncle get up and sit on some chair. “what’s next…” I think to myself. He starts forcing and some stools pass through the chair to fall in some plastic cup placed under the chair. “jesus fuckin christ, this is a scene right out of Jacob’s ladder”.. you can imagine a Vietnam war’s red cross camp where they would bring in the casualties. Just rows of bed with seriously sick people all over and very little help is being brought to them. “errrr welcome to purgatory…” I shut my eyes. I put my blanket above my head. I pass out again with hope that this is just a bad dream and that tomorrow will be better.

“haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!! Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaafggghhh!” my eyes snap open. It is now bright day light. I am hearing some screams coming from a bed not too far from mine. I look and see some uncle wiggling like crazy on his bed and a bunch of nurses are trying to mobilize him. Some nurse sees that I am awake and come see me. She starts asking me several questions about “who I am” and “where am I from”. She explains me that a doctor will be with me shortly.

Some Indian guy rocks up soon after and asks me just about the same questions as the nurse. (hospitals are like air port… you answer the same questions and fill in the same information over and over and over…. You would think that they have a system to keep track on those but no… they still ask you the same questions) I explain him my situation with some difficulty. He inspects me and then leave.

After a while, I start feeling the pain killer fade off. I am laying in my bed whining and almost crying. The pain is very hard to tolerate. I almost sound like a small dog who’s weeping in pain. Every breath comes with a whine. Some really hot Malay nurse comes next to my bed and ask me if I am feeling “ok” (you know… the type of dumb question that they can ask). Then she asks me to identify my pain level on a scale of 0 to 10. I look at her and go… “how the fuck should I know? 10? Trust me, I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t in some serious pain”. She leaves with a pissed off expression on her face.

Another really hot nurse comes by. I do not know her race. She does not even look asian. She actually resembles some Ukrainian girl that I fell in love with a few years back. I am trying to read her name tag but I am too weak for that. She feeds me pain killer. We talk a bit and then she goes assist somebody else. I end up passing out.

Someone serves me food that taste worst than the worst coffee shop food that you might have tasted. This is seriously awful. Some other doctor comes see me and explain me that they suspect that I have a Meningitis. He also explains me that I will need to pass a brain scan and a lumber puncture. “Of shit…” I have had a friend who had leukemia when he was a kid and all I can remember is how much he hated lumber punctures. They basically take a big needle and insert it in your spine so that they can extract some spinal fluid.

So I finish that day in a semi comatic state. Drugged and terribly sick with 40 degrees of fever. They have wheeled my bed in a different location which is closer to the main nurse “HQ” since I was considered as “unstable”.

The night ends up being quite terrible again. Screams, shouts, action going in every directions. I get the nurse to sedate me. Someone wake me up in the morning letting me know that “today was test day”. Oh great…. For breakfast, some nurse comes next to my bed with a basket full of tube and she look at me with despair. She explains me that she needs to fill every single one of those with my blood. (hang on… did I mention that I HATE needles and blood test?). There was about 20 blood tests to be done. (I have the list here somewhere… I could come up with an accurate count but I can’t be bothered). She spends like 20 minutes extracting fluid out of my veins and then wonders off.

An hour later, some guy comes in and says that he needs to take some blood tests. “but that girl just took like 20 of them!” I explain. “and I’m taking some more” the man sharply answers me.

During the afternoon, they wheel my bed to some room with radiation warning signs all over. Now I am sure that you have all seen in the movie those big round machine that they slide someone in to do brain activity tracking? Yes? Good… I won’t need to describe the whole process to you. All I can say is that they are no where as scary as they look in the movie. But! No one tells you about the liquid that they inject in your veins just before the procedure. Oh man…. That stuff felt awful. I don’t know what it is but you feel it all over your body and it does not feel good at all!

I get wheeled back to my normal location. I am hoping that it is it for today. I am quite exhausted. No one has actually managed to tell me what my problem is. The brain scan comes back and they suggest that I “might” be a meningitis but that we need the lumber puncture to really tell. “why did you bother doing the brain scan then?”… I guess we’ll never know. Now for the last one, I am expecting some very formal procedure. It sounds like it is going to be quite an abortion. I get told that a doctor will come to my bed in an hour. He also explain me the procedure. He assures me that he will locally sedate me. “great! This doesn’t sound too bad… 5 minutes and we’re done right?”
The “spinal crew” eventually gets to my bed. They draw the sheets on each side. The pseudo room gets crowded by nurses and doctors who wanted to watch the procedure. The doctor tells me to lie on my side and to raise my legs in fetal position. He ends up telling me that I need to be as fetal as possible. Some nurse ends up grabbing my head and my feet and pushing on them until my feet are actually above my head. Not the most comfortable position to be in. the doctor then lets me know that he is putting the needles for anesthetic purpose. I feel a sharp object perforce my back. Not too bad I think. Then I feel the steel rod go deeper and deeper into my spine. I then feel something pricking one of my nerve “HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!” I do not know if you have hit a funny bone in your life time but this is like a funny bone times ten. And you never know where you might feel it. They passed about 10 needles just to freeze the area. At some stage my leg went completely numb. I could not feel it anymore. I am telling you… one of the worst feeling I ever had. I would chose to stab my own hand before to do that again. And that’s just the freezing part. The actual puncture was just impossible. I was screaming in pain and meanwhile the doctor was chatting with the nurse about football?!?!! And I was screaming at him “GET THAT FUCKIN NEEDLE OUT OF MY BACK YOU FUCKIN COCK SUCKER!!! HURRY THE FUCK! UP!”
Anyway, after lots of bad noise, I am laying in my bed. I am not allowed to move or eat for six hours. I am unable to force from my back anyway since my muscles and nerves are all numb. A bunch of Malay nurses decide to come see if I am ok.
“do you know where you are?” she first ask
“well I could be wrong but this looks like a hospital… am I right?” on a sarcastic tone.
She giggles and then asks me the second question
“Do you know the time and the date?”
“not a clue but I have a phone here which mentions both. It also tells the weather forecast, football score and where I can have moose for dinner” (I obviously cannot stop myself from being funny…)

Anyway after a few questions like that more nurses come by and this interview ends up in some kind of “bar chit chat” where they ask me where I originally come from and then whether I can speak French and then to say something in French for them. I obviously perform my usual little “numero” for them which makes them laugh. After a while some lead nurse tells them to go back to work so the group shrugs and leaves my bed. One of them stays to take my temperature. She inserts the gadget into my hear… BEEEP, she looks at the result and her face turns blank like if she just saw a ghost. “this has to be wrong”, she inserts the gadget in my other hear and the same thing come up. 40.5

She wonders off to find some help before I burst open. She cannot find anything. She comes back with her friend, some compress and some water. They shut the curtains all around my bed and tell me that they are going to “decompress” me. I am like… uh oh… ok. They start by robbing the wet sheets on my forehead. They are chatting with me about random stuff. I am being funny as usual. They get me to remove my shirt. They start robbing my chest. They start telling me that I am hot. I say “yeah well… 40 is pretty high” and they reply “I didn’t meant hot in that way” while giggling. They remove my pants and start massaging my legs and robbing stupidly close to my crotch. “what kind of hospital is this?” I tell myself. We eventually get on the age issue. I make them guess that I am 23 years of age. I then figure out that they are 16. They continue to rob my chest… WAIT!??!?! 16?!?!?! Oh dear… I started to slowly act disinterested. This was very hard due to the fact that they were both very hot malay girls and I think that I have repeated several time in this blog how much I am feeble against malay girls. By the way… the place was full of them. I would lie in my bed and spend the whole day staring at them. About 90% were quite hot. This is the only thing that I miss about that place.

Anyway, I end up sleeping again through another awful night. I am surrounded by old uncles who are probably sicker then me. Some of them are probably dying. This place would be where they put Malay/Indonesian patients who come to Singapore for better treatments and cannot afford too much. I can see my neighbor un-consciously coughing and vomiting on himself. The sound of cough is keeping me awake. I think that I heard one of the nurse say in exclamation that “hey we did not lose anybody tonight”. This was by far one of the most depressing scene that I have ever seen. I knew how bad I felt and I could just tell myself that if I was 70 years old, there is no way that I would survive this. It feels like hell but at that age, my body would simply give up. Or I would mentally give up. “fuck this guy… take 500ml of morphine and inject it right in my eye bulb so that I can go away in peace and prosperity.” I really could not see myself cope with this amount of pain at old age. Life seems to already suck pretty bad. Anyway, just one more picture that shows you how much your life is taken for granted and can be stolen from you in a real painful manner at ANY MOMENT. Don’t fuck with this notion. Take advantage of what you have because you might have 10-20 years or more to live but you might have a good section of those years spent in a hospital like this. Alone. In pain. With sick un-concsious neightbours. But hey… at least there are malay nurses :)

The next day, I get a visit from my bosses and the lead HR. When she sees me, she exclaims “what are you doing here!?!? You should have a room of your own! You have insurances!!!”.
“I told them that… they though that I was mental…” I attempt to reply
I could tell by the look in my bosse’s eyes that they did not want to stay to admire the scene of the hospital. There was nothing good about it. I looked like a zombie. And they had people coughing their lungs on them, very welcoming.

Later that day, they move me in a room of my own with air cond and a tv. I also had my own bathroom (no more pissing in the bottle because they don’t trust me walking to the bathroom) I am soooo happy about this.

This happiness lasted for about 4 hours until I realized that in those 4 hours… the nurses have walked in and out of my room about 20 times. I got even less happy when I realized that this did not slow down during the night. I am supposed to rest here and I cannot sleep when there ‘re people walking in and out all the time. I ended up snapping at them. I tell them to stay the fuck out of my room. I also told the doctor. The traffic slowed down a bit. I also asked for some earplugs which allowed me to sleep through someone coming in to change my rubbish bin at 3 am. You know… the type of useful labor.

The test came back negative for meningitis which puzzled the doctors. Once I had enough strength, I walked down to the 7/11 and bought a phone card. I rang my mum so that she rings my dad. The next day I get a phone call from my father who passes me my step mum who is physiotherapist. That makes her about as knowledgeable as a doctor (it’s a 5 years course on the human anatomy…). She had like a checklist of what my symptoms were. What tests had been performed. All the way to the color of the flem that would come out of my cough. After 10-15minutes of data mining, she tells me “you have a pneumonia”.

Wua!

Alright thanks… the next day I tell the doctor “I think that I have a pneumonia” and then he takes off on the idea and I now have a pneumonia. He gets me on the anti biotics. I let him know that he is supposed to analyze my flems. And a few days later, my fever dropped.
Anyway they sent me home. I never been so happy to get home. This experience at the hospital was awful.