Mathias in hospital

As Natalie mentioned, after our full day hiking trip in the Cameron Highlands we were tired and exhausted when we reached the hotel in Tanah Rata. Moreover Natalie was either on her way back to getting a cold again or she still was not over it and it was about to get worse. We both were concerned about it, as any kind of fever could probably mean that there is a Malaria or Dengue Fever on its way. But even though she felt feverish her temperature for now was still ok. While Natalie was reading about Dengue in the Internet, I was browsing through my newspaper to catch up the latest news of the World Cup in Brasil. My eyes got stuck on an article about the massive increase of Dengue cases in Malaysia this year. It said that in the first 6 month of the year almost 60.000 people were suffering with Dengue in Malaysia. Compared with 2013 this was an incredible increase of almost 250% when only 14.000 people were infected at the same time last year.

So far I could remember it was only Natalie which was suffering with the local mosquitoes. I was barely bitten since we were in Malaysia and I just hoped she would be fine the next morning after some sleep. We went out for dinner to our favorite Indian food place and I remember that my light headache I already had during the day was getting worse. Not much but enough to feel tired. I was totally sure about the reason. We both had not have enough water during the whole day and I felt exactly the same as when we were back from our volcano island expedition in Indonesia. We went to bed in order to recover but it was difficult for me to fall asleep. Even though my body was totally tired my heartbeat was going very fast. In the end I fell asleep, but my body woke me up shortly after midnight. It was like an emergency wake up call from inside. I went through my body functions.

Heartbeat was going wild, my head was about to explode and felt boiling hot. My mind was going wild, what could it be? I got up and took my temperature, the thermometer showed normal 36,8 degree Celsius. Was I having a sunstroke? I tried to keep calm and woke Natalie. She told me to put a cold wet towel on my head to cool it down and try and go back to sleep. She herself was totally exhausted from her body fighting her cold and needed some sleep. My shirt was totally wet and soaked with water when morning rose, but my head was still burning hot. Natalie felt also not much better the next morning, but we had to make a decision about how to proceed. Should we stay here and go to a local doctor? Or take our already booked bus to Kuala Lumpur to get my sick body into a proper hospital? I definitely did not feel like a 4 hour bus ride over curvy, bumpy and narrow mountain roads. But once we had taken my temperature it was pretty clear we had to go to Kuala Lumpur to bring me to a proper hospital. My temperature was 37,9 degree Celsius. I could not even walk straight safely, because I was feeling so dizzy.

So guess what, I was not a big help for Natalie to get us ready. While I was still lying on the bed, she packed all our belongings and managed to get the hotel to drive us to the bus station. It was only 500m to walk but not for me today, not carrying my 15 kg bag pack. The first 2 hours in the bus I constantly felt like I was about to vomit and I barely remember the rest of the bus ride to Kuala Lumpur. It felt like being in trance when Natalie put me into a taxi and we headed to a hotel first to drop off our luggage. A second taxi came and the driver was not sure about the address of the hospital Natalie had chosen for me. She was really fighting for me to get me to the best hospital and jumped out of the taxi in the rain again to get one of the staff from the hotel to tell the taxi driver which specific hospital to go to. I was more falling than walking into the emergency station. A big guy introduced himself as Sony and started rightaway to take my blood pressure and ask me some questions.

Not even 5 minutes later I was lying on a bench and Sony had already layed me a drip. A doctor examined me and told me that they will take a blood probe to test me for Dengue. When Natalie mentioned that we recently have been in Indonesia, he agreed to make a second test for Malaria as well. Soon afterwards it was Sony again who tried to get some blood out of my body. I was already so dried out after the night and the bus ride that it took him 4 tries to get the little two probe containers filled. My blood was so thick that it hardly came out at all and when it did it was like red perls. Sony was just awesome and talked to me the whole time, calming me down, like my big buddy in this whole mess. He also took Natalie’s temperature as she was still not feeling better, but she had no fever so they said it was probably just a cold.

After an hour the result was there. The doctor came and told me I had DENGUE!!!!! I was too tired and too weak to actually feel worried about that fact. I was just glad to be there in the hospital to have the best possible medical support. While Natalie was outside talking to the doctor,  he confirmed to her that there is a big dengue outbreak this year in Malaysia and that this hospital is full with patients of it, also other tourists. They put me in a wheelchair and brought me into a single room. Natalie told me the hospital is so full that they had to put me on the maternity ward actually. I did not care, I just wanted to lay down in bed, sleep and get my second infusion. I was obviously dry as a desert. Natalie came back smiling all over her face when she told me that she is allowed to stay with me over night on the chair. I was so happy to have her close, I do not even know were I would be now without her. A blessing in disguise, the Malaria test came back negative. So I could focus my energy on fighting dengue, which is a tropical virus disease spread out by mosquitoes. So far there does not exist a vaccination or medicine against it, the body has to get rid of the virus by itself. You can only support it with infusions and fever medication. We knew an outbreak could vary from light symptoms like a cold where people recover easily at home to heavy fever accompanied by other symptoms that can sometimes lead to very severe problems and even death if not treated. The latter is a very low percentage when you are infected for the first time, but we did not want to take any risks. As you all know me I don’t do half things, so of course I did not have a mild outbreak.

My doctor in the hospital was Dr. Lim Chin Seng. He was doing a great job to make me feel in good hands and took a lot of time to answer mostly Natalie’s questions as I was to weak. He told us that they would take a blood probe every day from me in order to control my level of white blood cells which will decrease over the next days as a result of dengue and is one of the key indicators if the situation turns life threatening. A sudden crash of your blood cell count from one day to the other is a very bad sign. So you can imagine how we felt every day waiting for the test result to come back. The next days I spent most of the time sleeping. I had high fever constantly which was reduced with Paracetamol during the day and allowed me to sleep. During the night my fever was always worse and the first nights I barely slept. The nurses and especially Natalie were checking on me all the time. She would get up several times at night to check my temperature and make my towel wet again to cool me down.

My blood test showed the expected trend. My white blood cells count dropped for 5 days in a row. By the third day it was below 100, which Natalie later told me is when in Germany they put you under intensive control. But I was in good hands and they already checked on me regularly and did all they could. By the 5^th day it had dropped by 50% vs the first day and I felt so weak then that I could barely stood up and walk. Nevertheless my Doc was happy as my results had not fallen rapidly but evenly and my fever had reduced the last days. He told us that he thought it would get better from now on. Moreover he had already allowed me to watch the World Cup Final on the 3rd night at 3 am. I was feverish during the whole match, but somehow I was totally convinced that we were gonna be world champions. My 5^th night was the worst and I felt my body was running out of energy. I could not sleep properly due to fever again and felt dizzy on top, which worried me a lot.  Fortunately the fever had gone the next morning and my Doc also had good news for us. My white blood cell count finally had not dropped again. Better than that it had increased a little, not much but it had. And that was reason for him to discharge me. He said there is no need for him to check on me anymore, my body just has to recover now. The virus was gone, even though he said I could feel weak for several weaks. It depends on the person, every one recovers differently. I was just sooo happy and thankful for all the help and support I had the last days. It was time to leave.

Sounds easy but actually it was not. Natalie was working hard from day 1 to get the hospital in contact with our health insurance in Germany. But it looked like it would not work out. After uncounted calls, emails, chats and correcting wrong fax numbers, both sides still claimed not to have received anything. In the end she had to log into her personal account and print it out in front of the nurses. Once that was done it took 2 days for the hospital to understand what papers to send and to fill out. On the day I got discharged at lunch time, Natalie was on the phone almost constantly between the insurance and the hospital credit control. In the end, she made it and by eight o’clock at night we could finally leave the hospital with the insurance paying the whole bill. We went back to the emergency counter to thank Sony one last time who then even helped us to carry the bags down the street to get a taxi and then we were off to the next hotel to recover.

To discover medical services in Malaysia was an unexpected experience, but I am incredibly glad I was in such good hands and we had been near Kuala Lumpur. I am not sure how it had been somewhere more remotely.