Please Make it stop now

It has been a while since i wrote a blog post. It has also been  a while since i got dumped, had water thrown on my face, slapped or punched in the stomach. Yes, my life is getting really boring. To make my boring life a little more interesting, I decided to go back to the land where I was born.

India was so amazing, even Bangalore with all the construction work, and mysterious water that kept falling on my head from time to time. I was feeling bad that i could only do a really short trip this time, just 10 days. The first couple of days went fine. I met my friends in Bangalore (Incidentally, all were from TI. I should get back with my college friends. Hi Rach, I know you read my blog sometimes, may be next time we can meet up. Sneo, read your articles babe. Have fun in Singapore).

India was perfect until I had to take a long train journey from Bangalore to Kakinada on the “great” Seshadri Express. That train travels through the weirdest places and stops for a really long time in places like Atthilli, a town proabably the size of Rajajinagar area in bangalore.  Some where on that route, i ran out of water. I didn’t find my trusted “Kinley” brand anywhere. Thank you “Coca -Cola” for ensuring that there is no clean bottled water, in places where you actually need it.  So I came back, with the name you can trust, “Jeppiar mineral water”. I opened the bottle and drank from it, and the water very suspiciously tasted like the water i used to brush my teeth in the train that morning. May be, I was being paranoid, I don’t know. Somebody told me that Jeppiar was an industrialist in Tamil Nadu, and the water was definitely reliable. I even found out that he was the founder of a lot of engineering colleges in that state. The guy seemed genuine, but I guess the water was not.

If you haven’t guessed already, the rest of this article i about Diarrhea. a 2000 word blog on the “runs”. I don’t know what started them, I don’t think i’ll ever find out, all I want is to make it stop.

To make things worse, I was at a wedding. I was in a room that was closest to the wedding hall, and the only room without a lock. An old man walked up to me, and asked me for help coz he couldn’t find the bathroom. I thought i’ll be a gentleman, and told him that he could use the one in my room, because it is right there. I wonder why that gave the guests the wrong impression that my toilet was a public restroom. soon enough I had people barging in and just walking into the restroom, kids shouting “uncle uncle, I have to go first,”. They pissed, pooped and spat in my restroom.

At this point, I can imagine some of you rolling your eyes and saying “Oho! Mr. NRI”, to all those people, I’m gonna say “Shut Up Bitches, you weren’t there”.

I thought the worst day of my life was when I got dumped the first time, then the second time, then the third, but I realized that the worst day of your life is when you have diarrhea and you are on a 14 hr non stop flight from Delhi to Chicago, sitting on a window seat, with a 70 year old, hefty man blocking the aisle seat. He just slept the entire time. and it was impossible to wake him up. I stood on my chair and jumped over him and I had to keep doing that all night. I was like a circus monkey on a plane.

If you aren’t disgusted by this story, already, you are my kind of reader. The real fun began when I came back to America. I went straight to the clinic for treatment. It was a very simple case of food poisoning for them. Guy, comes back from a trip to a developing country, and has diarrhea and abdominal pain, It is just something he ate. They followed the rule book and did a stool test, found some bug and decided to kill the guy with a week strong dose of antibiotics. But it didn’t stop. The doctor at the clinic thought that a stronger dose should do the job, and he gave me another week of a stronger dose of the antibiotic and sent me back home. Unfortunately, things just kept getting worse. The doctor asked me to get a stool test again and tested me for the same bacteria. Everything came back negative. He was also going away for a week on a conference, so he forwarded me to his Colleague Dr. Crazy Quack and left town.

Dr. Crazy Quack as his name implies is a slightly crazy guy, whose medical credentials are seriously questionable.

Do they have malaria  in India? he asked me. I wished I could say “Duh! Do they have real doctors in america?’, but I just quietly said yes. We don’t see malaria in this country, does it cause diarrhea? This is the point where i should have left, but I just continued to listen. He Google searched malaria and started reading the symptoms online, right in front of me. I was amazed at my tolerance levels for bull shit. He found a page which said, it could cause diarrhea, and decided that it is best to test me for malaria. When the test came back negative, he repeated the test twice, just to make sure.

When, all the tests came back negative, he said, “This is not good, I mean, it is challenging for me as a doctor, but not so good for you”. ”Are you for real!!!” was my immediate reaction. I was starting to feel a little bad for myself. The guy called the Gastroenterologist at the university hospital. The gastroenterologist recommended a few tests, which included a test for C. Diff, a bacteria which is always present in the human colon, but can flare up with the use of antibiotics.

The quack came back to me and asked me, how comfortable was I with the idea of getting admitted in the hospital. “Anything that will make me feel better again”, I said. Well your hemoglobin is dropping down to dangerous levels, just sign here and the nurse outside will take you to the hospital on a wheel chair he said. I didn’t bother to think anymore, I just signed the papers and crashed on the wheel chair. The nurse took me through a bunch of tunnels (If, you are from the U of M, it was a Gopher Way, from Boynton to Fairview) and I was in the hospital.

The hospital was a different experience all together. Doctors who know what they are doing, trying to get done with it really fast so that they can get you out as fast as possible.  The doctors talked to me about getting a stool and blood culture test, and a colonoscopy in the next few days. The next thing I was put on IV and was flushed with fluids all night.

The next thing in the morning, the nurse tells me they are taking me for a CT scan and that that i should skip breakfast. I remembered my old CT scan experience, with the bottle full of Barium Contrast that I had to gulp down after fasting for 8 hours. It looks like paint, smells like paint and tastes no different. “would you like to drink the contrast with sprite or apple juice,” asked the nurse. “Can you do that?” I asked. Yah, you can’t drink the contrast directly. It doesn’t taste that good. She said. “Okay, Sprite would be great” I replied. She brought a cup and filled it with a clear liquid from a syringe and then filled the cup with sprite. “What happened to the big bottle of paint?” I asked. “Oh, the Barium, We don’t do that anymore” she replied. I was a happy man. I drank my sprite, and then i drank some more after one hour. The CT scan was done in no time. It took them longer to wheel chair me to the CT scan room.

This blog post is getting really long, and I have decided to break it into two posts. The next one coming up soon