Sunday, June 21, 2009

Swine Scare

Posted by John

My first foray to the Asian mainland looked like it would end in the emergency room.

The situation unfolded last week when I traveled to Singapore, the trade-oriented city-state on the Malaysian peninsula with a reputation for orderly queues and immaculate sidewalks. I needed to go there for a new travel visa, which would allow me to join Danielle on the Indonesian island of Sumatra for two months. She stayed behind in Java, leaving me alone to explore the streets of Singapore, a multiethnic metropolis of 4.8 million that has drawn immigrants from China, India and Malaysia for more than a century. The plan had me in Singapore for a week, but an unwelcome turn of events had me worried the stay might be extended involuntarily.

When I arrived on Friday evening, I went for a stroll along the riverfront, snapping photos of the neoclassical buildings dating to the British colonial era (1819¬-1960). After dinner at a Japanese restaurant, I headed back to my hotel. I was planning to wake up early the next morning and visit the city’s Chinese and Indian neighborhoods.

I didn’t make it through the night, however. I’d been fighting a cold during my last days in Indonesia, but everything took a turn for the worse around 3 a.m. Mushrooms in the Japanese meal must be the culprit, I assumed, as they didn’t make it through the night, either. Probably food poisoning, I said to myself.

By 7 a.m., however, the fever, chills and aches arrived, and I began suspecting something far more sinister. Stuck in Singapore alone in an 8-by-10 hotel room, my thoughts quickly progressed to the worse-case scenario. It didn’t take long for them to arrive at the swine flu, which began stalking international travelers not long after our departure from San Francisco in mid-April.

Fevered hallucinations were transforming my visions of a quick visa renewal into a quarantine quagmire. Would the Singapore Public Health Department keep me under watch for weeks? Months? It’s a country known for dotting i’s and crossing t’s, and I couldn’t imagine I’d be released any time soon if they found anything remotely suspicious. Would I have to return immediately to the United States? Would I ever be allowed to return to the United States? Would I be sent off to live with the lepers of Molokai?

It didn’t help matters that neither Danielle nor I were having any luck with our calling cards. She was flying from Surabaya to Jakarta, where we were to meet up in a week. After managing to patch through a very expensive cell phone call, I feebly informed her of my health situation. Fearing she would jeopardize her own research visa with an unauthorized trip to Singapore to tend to me, I promised her I’d check myself into one of Singapore’s world-class hospitals if my situation didn’t improve.

The incapacitation reached a point where I couldn’t even drag myself down to the 7-11 across the street for ginger ale or chicken soup. Desperate, I had room service bring me up a few cans of Sprite. Danielle made a series of progressively frantic phone calls, and I couldn’t report any progress.

We contemplated calling the U.S. Embassy, but were still leery of bringing too much unwelcome attention to my medical situation. The Singapore Airport was plastered with preventive messages about the flu, and medical personnel were on hand to deal with any passengers presenting problematic symptoms. I didn’t want a false positive to set off any alarms. My plans were to return to Indonesia with Danielle, and, as the swelling in my head began to subside, more rational thoughts returned. Asia has witnessed only a handful of cases of swine flu--far fewer than the United States--and even an armchair epidemiologist could tell me there was a better than even chance I had a more garden-variety ailment that rest would cure.

For the second night in a row, I woke up at 3 a.m., though this time I was remarkably pain-free. Sunday morning arrived, and the 24-hour swine scare, mercifully, passed without incident.

2 comments:

  1. John!! Thank goodness you're feeling better.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Fevered hallucinations...wow, those must have been some mushrooms.

    Amen to what Lizzie said!

    ReplyDelete