IN CASE OF EMERGENCY

What do you do when you see an ambulance with lights on and sirens screaming?  You pull over and let him pass you, right?  Not so in Bali.  Here you continue your merry way along the narrow, winding, pot-holed roads or, you may even try to PASS him!  I'm not kidding.  The most hair-raising ride of my life and I wasn't even the patient.  Two of our friends, a young woman and her mother from Holland, spent a week on the beach where they joked about the mosquitos.  They wore long sleeves and sprayed themselves with Deet.  Still, they both came down with dengue fever.  The mother got it first and got it bad.  Doctors made daily house calls to check on her (imagine, they still do that here) and decided to hospitalize her when she kept deteriorating.  By now the poor woman had become painfully sensitive to light and noise and movement, everything that the ambulance ride offered in excess: hard stops and hard accelerations, going up and down hills, bumps in the road, making sharp turns, screaming siren...  The hour-long ride must have been pure torture for her.  Her daughter sat on the floor of the ambulance behind the front passenger's seat, cradling her, while I sat crouched on the protrusion of the left back wheel with my feet crammed between the litter and the back door.  Did I mention that the ambulance was not much more than an old van with bad springs turned into a make-shift emergency vehicle?  I should have taken a picture of the creative interior.  Instead I was paying attention to the mother's breathing (with no clue of what to do if it stopped) and invoking every power in the universe to get us to the hospital in one piece.  Every once in a while I would make the mistake of looking out the window only to freak out at the ambulance speeding to overtake cars and buses on streets that were surely meant for only one car at a time.  By at least three dozen miracles we finally arrived at the hospital unharmed and with our patient still alive.  When they opened the back door of the van, I got out and found my legs had turned to jello.

The emergency room was as you would expect for Indonesia - very friendly staff.  A large clean air-conditioned suite waited for them.  It had two beds (one hospital bed, the other a regular bed for a family member), dining table and 2 chairs, sofa, kitchenette, the works!  The nurses seemed competent here and the instruments up-to-date.  If my friends had not been sick, they would have luxuriated in their plush accommodations.

This happened last week.  Since then the mother has recovered somewhat, but not enough for discharge.  Although blood tests confirmed the daughter as having dengue fever too, she was fortunate to only experience mild symptoms.  As soon as the mother is strong enough to travel, they will return home in time for Xmas.