Hospital

A friend recently commented that I've gone from one extreme to the other -- from post-Soviet states where alcohol was practically forced down my throat, to Afghanistan, where it's illegal. Ironically, I'm drinking more in Afghanistan than I ever did in the Former Soviet Union. One of the benefits of curfews and lockdowns, however, is that my alcohol consumption has slowed. Never fear, I'm making up the calories with junk food.

So it was with trepidation that I stepped on a scale in an Afghan hospital today. Going to the hospital here was scary enough, without adding a weigh-in to the mix. But the scale was alternatively comforting, because it's so typical of what happens when one goes in for a check-up, and horrifying, because I just didn't want to know how much damage I'd done. (Fortunately, I'm not as fat as I thought I might be).

Why did I go to the hospital? Because I wasn't happy with the European clinic I'd visited. I became suspicious when the harried doctor suggested I had salmonella.

"Why salmonella?" I asked. "I don't have any of the symptoms."

"It's going around," she said. "Four cases this week."

Hm...

So I wasn't terribly surprised when the anti-biotics they gave me didn't work. Next I hauled myself off to a surprisingly clean and friendly western-funded hospital. Had the doctor not also been western, I wouldn't have braved it. A friend in the medical/NGO profession once told me that one of their biggest battles was to get the doctors and nurses here to stop beating the patients.

Unfortunately, there aren't good labs here, so I still might not have the right prescription. Here all the doctors can do is try one set of anti-biotics, and if they don't work, try a different one. So I can't be too hard on the clinic for failing to fix me.