Recuperating by the Mekong River: After the hospital

Spending a week not eating, throwing up bile, and escaping one country for another by ambulance to lounge around a few more days in a small-town hospital tends to wear a body down. Having been wracked with a mystery illness but soon on the mend, I have felt no guilt at all about taking a few days off from traveling to rest and recuperate at a lovely riverside guesthouse.

Since leaving Laos a couple of weeks ago by an early-morning ambulance over the border back here to Nong Khai, Thailand, life has been cozy but tentative. (Here’s that harrowing story.) After being discharged from Wattana Hospital after a few days, I walked with Masayo gingerly down sunny and dusty streets to Mut Mee Guesthouse and secured a bungalow room for several days.

It was hard to walk that first day; not having used my legs at all for about a week had atrophied them. But Mut Mee is a great place for recovering from an unknown tropical illness: the bungalow is simple and quiet, and is situated in a charming little grove of trees next to a large covered pavilion on the banks of the wide Mekong River. With reliable wi-fi and cheap traveler meals from the guesthouse, Masayo and I have been sitting at a table outside, working on various things online and waiting for me to slowly feel like my old self.

I still don’t know what the nature of my illness was – a couple of doctors said dengue fever but that was merely a guess. I don’t really think so, but I don’t have any other explanation either. The hospital gave me some medicine and I’ve been taking it regularly. And it helps; my estimation of Thai medical care is quite high after my experiences at Wattana.

One night I even ceremoniously threw away the thyroid pills I’d bought in Laos, the suspicious ones in a sun-drenched glass case at a roadside “pharmacy” that may have been what made me so sick. I rather enjoyed throwing them in the little trash basket in the bungalow room. Good riddance, poison Laos pills.

And I do feel better. I can eat anything; the sickness is gone. The only thing now is getting my muscle strength back and regulating diabetes again. That’s actually going as well as ever – which is to say, not perfect, but not 300+ all the time like it was in the hospital.

One day Masayo and I rented bicycles from Mut Mee in an effort to explore Nong Khai some more, and to give my legs a workout. This was surprisingly hard: even the smallest upward inclines taxed my sallow legs to their limits. At one point, on a back street right on the banks of the Mekong in the afternoon, I pushed myself to get over a little 10-inch ramp and had to rest several minutes while my leg muscles burned.

But it all helped: getting through the discomfort and pain made me ultimately stronger.

Mut Mee has done everything I needed it to: it gave me a quiet and pleasant place to recover and offered me all the things I need. (And not just us: a couple that often hung out at a nearby table were in the middle of, judging by their conversation and demeanor, a drug- and alcohol-fuelled mind-expanding journey through Southeast Asia. They seemed in particular to have had quite a cosmic time the week earlier up in Luang Prabang.)

And I finally feel well enough to continue the traveling. As I suspected when I got out of the hospital, Masayo and I did indeed opt not to reenter Laos for now. All in all, we only spent nine days there and three of those were with me sick in bed. We didn’t see anything besides the capital of Vientiane on the border and won’t be for a while: we’re taking advantage of our new thirty-day visas, issued to us in the ambulance, to see some parts of Thailand we didn’t get to before. Then, it will be down to Cambodia.

Sorry Laos; it just didn’t work out this trip. Maybe we can try it again someday soon. But for now the horizon will be Thai. I’m looking forward to moving on tomorrow.The mystery illness wasn’t enough to damage my impassioned love of traveling to new places!

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