As you know if you read my last post, I have been sick again - sore throat, cough, congestion, fever, body aches. So after 3 days of this I decided it was time to see a doctor. I really had no idea how to go about doing this so I called Teresa, who is also a teacher at the English center (and is the director’s wife so she has been here for a long time, and is a mother so she’s always the one to call at a time like this). She told her husband, Mr. Hai, who set up an appointment for me at the doctor’s office where he and his family usually go. I had talked to Teresa on Thursday, so on Friday morning I get a call from one of the Vietnamese girls from work, Xuan, who tells me to meet her at the school in half an hour and she will take me to see the doctor. It was 10:00 am when she called me which, obviously (if you know me well), means I was still asleep. So I jumped out of bed, brushed my teeth, threw on some clothes and drove to school. When I walked in all of the girls asked how I was feeling, which I thought would have been pretty obvious what with the fact that I pretty much looked like death. I went upstairs to the teachers’ room, found Xuan, and off we went to the doctor’s office, her driving my motorbike with me on the back holding on for dear life (Vietnamese people are crazy drivers!). It’s only about a 10 minute drive and we arrive at what appears to be a house, much like many of the restaurants and stores here. The bottom floor of a house is often used to run the family business. The front room is set up as a waiting room where at least 10 Vietnamese people are already waiting to see the doctor. I sign in, collapse into a chair, and try not to breathe too much in order to prevent getting any more germs. No one asks for any form of ID, needs to see my insurance card, or gives me massive amounts of paperwork to fill out about myself and my medical history. So I just sit and wait. An hour later, just like my doctor’s office back home in the states, it is finally my turn. Xuan and I go into the very small back room where the doctor is sitting at a computer desk. There is one extra chair for me to sit down. Luckily, the doctor speaks some English so I am able to tell him my symptoms with a little translation here and there from Xuan. He nods his head, looks down my throat, up my nose and in my ears. Then he pulls out the stethoscope and listens to my lungs. More things to note: I was not first seen by a nurse who weighed me, took my temperature, blood pressure, heart rate and other such things. After listening to my breathing he determines it to be acute bronchitis and proceeds to find me the appropriate medications. Another interesting fact: in Vietnam all medications seem to be for one purpose only, so if you have a cold with a stuffy nose, sore throat, cough, and headache you will get at least 4 different kinds of medication. So the doctor begins explaining to Xuan in Vietnamese how often I am to take each of the medications, puts them in a bag and hands them to me. Since I know that one of these has to be an antibiotic, and I happen to be allergic to penicillin, I open the bag to find out what I have just been given and so that Xuan can explain to me the doctor’s instructions. I pull out the first box of pills, reading the name of the company, blah blah blah, and then there it is - amoxicillin. I momentarily freak out and then explain to Xuan that I can’t take this medicine because I am allergic. Note: if there had been some sort of paperwork filled out the doctor would have know this ahead of time. So she explains to the doctor who nods, digs through his pills once again and pulls out another antibiotic - clarithromycin. I remember that back home my doctor would always prescribe erythromycin which must be related to this one. Ok, so this one seems safe. More explanations about when to take all the pills, Xuan pays for the visit and the medicine (the school covers doctor’s visits for teachers) and we are off. After dropping Xuan back off at the school I somehow managed to get myself some lunch and make it back to my house without collapsing. It was quite the interesting experience. 8 days later I am doing much better, but this pesky cough doesn’t want to go away. I’m sure it is probably a combination of the sickness and the horribly polluted air I breathe every day. Anyway, that’s my latest adventure, and the end of my desire to continue writing tonight.
