DIAGNOSIS

My wife Vivien and I were quite happily minding our own business and backpacking through SE Asia during the winter of 2009/10. We had taken to doing this for several winters now from November to March. The reason was to escape the harsh night time mountain cold at our Spanish farmhouse in Andalucia where we lived. The previous few winters we had decamped to India, Sri Lanka and Thailand, but this year we were taking in Thailand (again) Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. Three and a half months into this trip while travelling down through Malaysia I found myself for no obviously apparent reason becoming weaker and weaker, to the point where I became too weak and ill to leave our guesthouse in Singapore, other than to travel the shortest distance to eat when I felt I could manage food, and that wasn’t often. The following plane ride over to Djakarta in Indonesia became the flight from hell as cramps, stomach spasms, headaches and nausea took serious hold.

Djakarta was originally supposed to be the jumping off point for our final month of touring down through Java and Sumatra before terminating in Bali for the last week of this trip before our scheduled return flight home to Spain at the end of March. Oh the best laid plans of mice and idiots! On arrival at Djakarta airport I felt too ill to face the prospect of more backpacking, so we decided to postpone our planned Indonesian adventure for now and fly straight on down to Bali to rest and recuperate for a month. We finally arrived at Denpasar airport in Bali mid-afternoon on 23rd February 2010, but it took until early evening to find a suitable guesthouse within our budget. By now I was truly knackered, but we managed to get into our room by about 7 pm.

I needed to go straight to the toilet on arrival, only to discover a lot of blood in the bowl when I’d finished. Literally not having enough strength to clean myself afterward, I just crawled into the shower, curled up naked in the foetal position and asked Vivien to ‘hose me down’. Nice, quick, easy. But before bed I needed to detour back to the toilet bowl to be sick, and when that ran red with blood I knew something more than just being run down was afoot. This was fast becoming an evening not to forget in a hurry.

Hey ho. So the general upshot to all this blood, vomit, diarrhoea, tiredness, cramp and generally not feeling totally tip top ticketyboo was that by this point, any remaining thoughts of ‘toughing it out, being a man, sucking it up, and only ever going to the doctor were a limb virtually hanging off or already detached’ went out the window. Something was definitely appearing to be not quite right here and needed sorting, so off to the jolly old hospital in the morning it is then, health insurance or not (in our case not)!