The one thing we all dread when we’re travelling on business abroad is getting sick. Insurance or not it can be an incredibly gruelling experience.
I’ve been taken ill or been hurt in varying degrees in a few countries and believe me the treatment varies.
One episode started with a slip on a rain-slicked pavement in what they then called Leningrad (now St Petersburg) in the old Soviet Union. I stumbled and cannoned head first into a stone wall, blacked out for a second, then woke with a splitting headache and a severely bruised kneecap.
Three hours later the head was fine but the kneecap resembled a giant squishy purple grapefruit. I hobbled to reception and asked for a doctor. By midnight I’d given up waiting when there was a harsh rapping on my door. There stood a man in off-white coat flanked by two burly women resembling Rosa Kleb and her even uglier sister. All three looked like they’d come from the local butcher’s shop. Not a bad analogy as it turned out.
As I showed the local Doctor Dewhurst Zhivago my knee, without a flicker of emotion he jabbed his finger into the swelling purple mass.
I damn near became a new Sputnik in orbit and my expletives would have graced a Premier League ground. The accompanying nurses didn’t speak English but they recognised a four-letter word when they heard it. The Really Ugly One took my hand and smacked it – hard.
Ten minutes later I was in a creaking ambulance on my way to a hospital which looked like a set from War and Peace. Dim lights, packed wards, groaning patients, and every member of staff in dirty, unwashed grey smocks. They X-rayed me, and I had to bite my lip as they held the knee down at 90 degree angle from the rest of my body.
No one batted an eyelid at my pain. In the land of famine, purge and Panzer a broken kneecap (which is what it turned out to be) was neither here nor there. They wanted to hospitalise me. I said spasiba but nyet spasiba, to that. So they put a plaster cast on me from pelvis to ankle. I flew to Moscow the next day and within 48 hours the badly finished jagged cast was drawing blood from my ankle and groin. I went to a private clinic and paid to have the plaster ripped off. I was hairy and they hadn’t allowed for that. I think they heard my screams in Stalingrad, and now I know what women go through when they depilate.
I walked with an agonising click every time the knee bent or straightened. Back in Blighty the doc said the knee had set of its own accord and I’d have the raised bone spur to prove it for the rest of my life.
In New York, stricken with some mystery bowel ailment, I asked the hotel to urgently send a doctor. They warned it would cost a minimum $150. I didn’t care if it was $150,000, I was dying here. Eventually the phone rang – it was the doctor. He said he could only do a telephone diagnosis as the heavy traffic was stopping him getting across town. He recommended Maalox and asked for my credit card. I suggested he go forth and multiply.
When I came down with ‘flu in of all places, Rio, I was introduced to the highly unorthodox what I can only call the Copacabana Cure. As I shivered and sweated in my hotel bed, two concerned staff entered, discreetly dressed me in my bathing costume and a bath robe, and then led me down to the beach. Two weak to resist I let them plonk me in a beach chair belonging to one of those ramshackle bars that abound on the sands of the Copacabana.
They slathered Factor 50 all over me, whispered to the proprietor then left. As I sat there in 90 degree heat in my bathing suit, perspiring, bones aching, nose running like a tap, the café proprietor poured a series of potentially deadly but nonetheless attractive combinations of Night Nurse and 50 percent proof rum caiprinhas down my throat
For six hours I sunbathed, coughed, sneezed, drunkenly dozed, realised the girl from Ipanema was one beach down, and dreamed delirious dreams.
By sunset I felt a thousand times better and had the beginnings of a tan. If you have to get sick, do it in Rio.
