Warning: Gross Stuff Ahead!
I tend to be an optimist. Sometimes I get criticized for it, and I know that I have been overly optimistic in the past which can sometimes lead to disappointment or an unfortunate surprise. However, generally being an optimistic person has helped me far more often than it has hurt me, so I’ll continue this trend while describing our first day in Budapest. There were some serendipitous moments in this story that really made us realize how lucky we are.
So in the middle of the night I woke up a few times to use the restroom. I was feeling a little nauseous, and over the course of a couple of hours I went to toilet three or four times with diarrhea. I kept expecting to throw up, but I never did. I wondered what the reason was – I ate the same things as Kuniko yesterday, and she didn’t have any problems. Anyway, I went back to sleep and woke up with the alarm around 6 am. Kuniko took a shower first, and I lay in bed, still feeling a little nauseous but apparently there was nothing left in my stomach to get rid of. But we were in Budapest, and I didn’t want to sit around the hotel when there was so much sightseeing to do – I wanted to go explore!
After Kuniko got out of the shower I went into the bathroom to get ready, but the steamy room had a weird effect on me and I started to feel a little light-headed. I left the bathroom and went back into the bedroom, but had to lean against the wall next to the bathroom door for support. Kuniko asked me if I was OK, and I think I said something about needing to lie down, and the next thing I knew I was opening my eyes and hearing Kuniko kind of freaking out and saying my name. I didn’t feel any pain but I was laying on the floor, so I pulled myself off the ground and moved to the bed. Kuniko said I had passed out, and that there was blood on my head – and sure enough she was right! I used a hand towel from the bathroom and it came away far bloodier than I expected. What happened?
Kuniko explained to me later that I fainted and fell backwards, with my head rapping against the sharp wooden corner of the doorframe. Apparently I was out for around five seconds, and she said there was a lot of blood on the floor, but I felt like I shouldn’t get up to take a look. I was feeling much better, and the more I breathed the better I felt. Kuniko asked if we should call a doctor, but initially I said that I would be OK and we should just give me some time to drink some water and recover a bit. We ordered some juice and water from room service, and the juice really hit the spot. The room service staff came in to deliver, and asked if I was OK. Kuniko pointed out the blood and apparently there was some damage to the door frame, and he asked if it was OK to bring a cleaning crew up to take care of it. He asked if I was sure a doctor wasn’t needed, and so I figured we should go ahead and at least have the hotel doctor take a look.
While I laid on the bed with the bloody towel pressed to the back of my head, Kuniko handled everything like a champ. She talked to the front desk, answered questions about my health and what happened, and did it all with no outward signs of stress. I was glad she was there to help out since I was concentrating on staying awake – didn’t they say that if you sleep after a head injury you might die? Or was that just in the movies?
About thirty minutes later a lady came to our door and said that she was the doctor. I guess she is kind of on-call with lots of the big hotels in the area. She spoke just a little English and had trouble with a lot of the medical words, but I was glad that a professional was there to give me an honest opinion. At first she asked about what happened, then took my temperature and blood pressure. She spent a lot of time with the preliminaries before she finally asked to see the wound. And the first words out of her mouth when she saw it were, “Jesus Christ!”
As soon as I heard those words I knew that I wasn’t going sightseeing today.
So she explained that she’d like us to go to a hospital, and that there was a nearby hospital with a head trauma unit, and they could sew up the big gash in the back of my head. I didn’t look at it (Kuniko offered to take pictures of it for me but I declined), but apparently it was about the length of my little finger and it was quite a wide cut. That explained the blood, anyway. I still couldn’t feel any pain, though, so there was that.
Kuniko and I went through all the decisions with the doctor – which hospital to go to (the one she had recommended at first wasn’t available), how to get there (ambulance), how much we would be expected to pay (at least a thousand dollars and more if I had to stay for a while in the hospital), and how we would be able to pay (credit card or cash, our choice). As these decisions were made the doctor called various people and had long conversations in Hungarian. I liked the way she spoke in English – she used the word “OK” like a comma in her sentences.. “OK, OK, now I want to look at the wound, OK, and turn your head, OK. OK!”
Kuniko and the doctor went downstairs to take care of the ambulance when it arrived, so I just lay there on the bed afraid to fall asleep. Budapest is a big city, so every time I heard a siren in the distance I thought, “Oh, this must be my ride…” It actually took a long time because it wasn’t exactly a huge emergency – I just needed to be checked and patched up. My life wasn’t in danger. Finally the ambulance arrived and the staff came in the room and asked me some questions. The hotel manager also came in and gave me and the room a stern examination. No smiles on that guy – I imagine he was evaluating whether or not the hotel had some liability risks. Don’t worry dude, I’m not going to sue. This is my own damn fault.
The paramedic asked if he could see the wound, and when he looked at it he said it wasn’t so bad, so I felt a little better. They asked me if I could walk out to the ambulance, and I tried standing up and did OK. We walked down with one paramedic holding my arm just in case, and I did the perp walk through the hotel lobby. I’m in Budapest – I don’t know anyone here, so who cares? I was a little excited to be riding in an ambulance. Kuniko was there to support me and to document the experience with photographs, too.
The ride to the hospital was about 20 minutes, and I sat upright in the back of the ambulance and talked with the paramedic who had much better English than the doctor. We talked about music, and he had recently visited Japan to see some girls (!) and sightsee around Kyoto and Kobe. He was a really nice guy, and I think he wanted to make sure I kept talking and to see if I was fading out or not.
Once we arrived at the hospital we met a very nice lady who worked as the doctor’s assistant. Her job was to get us through the paperwork of the Hungarian medical system, translate between us and the medical staff as necessary, and generally be my local contact to answer any questions. She gave her name when we first met but I’m sorry to say that I completely forgot it. She was invaluable to us – she was always going up to the desk to hassle the staff and speed up things for us, and I noticed that thanks to her we were seen more quickly than other people waiting around the hospital. We were kind of like medical VIPs.
The hospital itself looked a bit old, and a little darker and dimmer than hospitals in Japan. The staff were very professional, however, and very thorough. I had x-rays of my head taken, blood tests, and I saw three different doctors who evaluated my condition. I was completely satisfied with the job that they did.
The lead doctor was a young guy that looked like he just finished medical school. He already had that air of a doctor – and he asked me a huge battery of questions. I realized that he was typing in my answers into a database, and using the database of results to find possible problems and risks. It was interesting for me to see and I was glad they were using the power of technology to help me out.
A surgeon brought me in to a room, had me lean over and then they shaved part of my hair to make some clean stitches in my head. I got four stitches, and thanks to a lidocaine injection I didn’t feel any pain at all. They applied a bandage and a net cap to hold the bandage in place, and said I should wear the bandage for at least five days. That meant no washing my hair – ick! I fell down in the hotel room before I could take a shower that morning, so they gave me tetanus shot too, just in case.
Next they brought in a neurologist who was this young woman in her 30’s who was a total knockout. She did all kinds of tests by touching various parts of my body and testing my responses. I wondered vaguely if this was a reality TV program or something – does the foreign guy realize that his doctor is actually a stripper? After about twenty minutes of examinations and questions she pronounced me good to go.
The lead doctor said we’d have to wait for the x-ray and blood results for an hour or so, and he told me to go have some lunch in the cafeteria. He specifically told me to drink Coca Cola – no juice or yogurt. He said the fizz and the sugar would help my dehydration and energy level. Eastern Europe is a very different place!
I dutifully drank Cherry Coke with Kuniko upstairs in the cafeteria, and ate the bread of a sandwich to test my stomach which was still weak. Everything stayed down OK, which was good news. After lunch we had the final interview with the doctor, and he said that I should get some rest, drink a lot of liquids (like cola), and eat carbohydrates to get my energy back. He thought that the fainting was probably due to exhaustion, dehydration, or some combination of the two. There was no bone damage to my noggin, and my neurological functions were normal. We thanked him for the help, and then went with the hotel doctor’s assistant to the back room where we handled the payment. The hotel doctor’s assistant had her own computer there in an office and a credit card machine ready to go, so this must be a regular kind of thing. It seemed on the up and up, but a little weird that we paid the doctor’s assistant and not the hospital directly. Still, I was tired and happy to be stitched up so I wasn’t going to make a big deal. Kuniko handed over her credit card, and they printed out an invoice (which we would submit to our insurance company for reimbursement later on).
Finally the assistant was nice enough to call a taxi for us, and we got a (dangerously fast) ride back to the hotel. Kuniko took me upstairs to our room and the pile of bloody towels next to the bed was a gross reminder of what I had gone though. It was early afternoon, and I had the shivers a little bit, so I snuggled deep into our bed. Kuniko turned on the heater and I was out just like that. I slept from the early afternoon pretty much until the next morning. Kuniko kept me hydrated with water, soda and bread now and then. My stomach was holding down solid food and my appetite was back. I just slept and slept and slept, turning over now and then to adjust with the big bandage on my head making it hard to get comfortable. Kuniko must have been bored stuck in the hotel taking care of me with a mysterious and interesting city outside, but she did go out to buy snacks for herself and a bottle of red wine (another Kekfrankos) to sip while watching K-pop videos on the hotel internet connection while I was in la-la land.
So I was back on the mend, and we were really lucky because it could have been much worse. A long time back we had actually booked a different hotel in Budapest – a small, artsy kind of hotel that was also actually an apartment. That place kept contacting us by email and trying to find out exactly when we’d arrive (because they needed to check us in) and since we were driving we had no solid idea. It became such a hassle that we canceled the reservation and changed to the Marriott hotel. If this accident had happened at the apartment, we wouldn’t have had a hotel doctor to arrange everything. No assistant to handle to emergency room staff and paperwork, everything would be up to us – finding the hospital, communicating the problems and dealing with the red tape. So we were really lucky we had decided to change hotels. During our two week holiday we stayed in only one upscale hotel – and it happened to be the one where the accident happened. The Marriott staff were so professional and helpful, and the only charge for the bloody hotel room was a $3 (!) cleaning fee.
The other lucky thing was that just before the trip I checked in with Kuniko and asked her about buying travel insurance. We usually buy travel insurance for destinations in Southeast Asia where the medical system might not be so good, and usually for long trips as well. In all our trips we’ve never actually used the insurance, and Kuniko was leaning towards skipping it this time because we were staying in big, famous cities and we’d likely be safe. I thought it was a better idea to go ahead and get the insurance, and in the end we decided to get it. That turned out to be a very good decision in light of the hospital bill we got. Our insurance covered everything from the hotel doctor’s first visit to the taxi ride back to hotel after the hospital, and even my doctor’s bill back in Japan to remove the stitches.
So a bloody accident could have been a far more stressful and financially painful event for us, and it ended up being really just an inconvenience. I don’t know how it is that we’re so lucky in these things, but I’ll have to be more careful in the future to avoid testing the limits of that luck.
