When I got sick last week in Turkey, I did what any educated person in the twenty-first century would do. I went on the Internet and scared myself silly.
It started with trying to take care of myself. Last Tuesday I had a long work day followed by an hour and a half Turkish conversation class. I love my teacher. We finished at 6:30 pm and I knew it would take me close to an hour to bus to my neighborhood and climb the hill to our apartment.
Normally I would suck it up and cook dinner after that, but this time I asked myself, why not eat out? There are several dozen restaurants within walking distance of our house, most laughably inexpensive. So Sankar and I agreed to meet at a little Turkish kebab place about halfway up the hill.
We had a good meal: soup and appetizers and then kebab (Sankar) and chicken (me), and then climbed back home. I went to bed at about 10:30, feeling rather full.
When I woke up in the morning and got out of bed, my head started spinning and I fell onto my knees. “What’s going on?” Sankar asked. “Are you okay?”
I sat back down on the bed and tried to focus my eyes. “I’m so dizzy,” I replied. “Why am I dizzy?” I also felt nauseous, but after a few minutes that passed.
There wasn’t a lot of time to ponder my condition because we had a 7:30 am ride to work. Somewhat oddly, I felt better after breakfast, and I had the morning at work to recover. By the time the afternoon rolled around, I felt better and was able to teach.
On Thursday, I felt fine, but on Friday the dizziness was back. As before, it got better over the morning, and the afternoon and evening were fine. Saturday was a lovely sunny day, and Sankar and I explored the Old City most of the day with no problem. As I closed my eyes in bed Saturday night, however, the room began to spin. “I’ll think about this tomorrow,” I told myself, and fell asleep.
Sunday the dizziness was back in full force, and no, with more time to consider what was happenening, I became concerned. I had discovered on the Internet that dizziness can be caused by food poisoning, and I left Sankar at the breakfast table to check further.
I entered “food poisoning decision chart” into Google, and a table of various types of food poisoning: bacterial, viral, and other came up. The third listing under “bacteria” was Claustridium Botulinin, and its symptoms read: “Headache: Double vision, vertigo or dizziness, loss of reflex to light. Weakness, droopy eyelids, constipation, dry mouth, muscle and respiratory paralysis.”
I Googled botulism. That entry mentioned also mentioned nausea and dizziness: “These are [all]symptoms of the muscle paralysis that is caused by the bacterial neurotoxin. If untreated, these symptoms may progress to cause paralysis in various parts of the body, often seen as a descending paralysis.”
The article went on to mention treatment, which involved the administration of an antitoxin.&nbsI got up and walked back into the kitchen. “I think we’d better go to the hospital,” I told Sankar.
There is a special kind of dread when you feel ill in a foreign country. It is partly from knowing that you are unable to express the kind of subtleties that could make a difference in a medical situation. And part of it involves all the local health-related comments and beliefs that you have run into.
Sankar and I have heard over and over again from Turkish acquaintances that exposure to cold breezes causes colds, coughs and even influenza. We have watched Turks bundle up with wool scarfs and heavy jackets when the temps fall under 50 degrees. Turks have told us about receiving injections for colds, fevers and even anxiety. And a friend who teaches at a prestigious private high school tells us that whenever a student goes to the nurse’s office with a complaint, (s)he gets hooked up to an IV.
With these concerns and my Internet reading top of mind, I found myself thinking, “I am going to be put on life support here. I am going to die far from friends and family.”
We called a cab to drive us to the American Hospital in Nishantashi, an elegant suburb about 15 minutes away. Several people were seated in the tiny emergency entrance when we arrived. We were immediately ushered into a clean, somewhat-dated-looking exam room, and a nurse who spoke passable English came in to take my vital signs.
Five minutes later a doctor came in, about forty years old and fluent in English. After asking me my symptoms, checking my heart, breathing and reflexes, and asking me to do some simple balance tasks, he told me he thought my ailment was probably due to an inner ear disturbance.
How could he miss the obvious? I told him of the detective work that had led me to the botulism diagnosis, and he listened respectfully. But he would have none of it, instead quietly emphasizing that I would be much more violently ill if that was the case. Although I didn’t agree, I nodded. I planned to sound off to Sankar later.
The doctor wrote a prescription for Dramamine, suggested I visit an ENT specialist the next day, and gave us a phone number he could be reached at. No IVs, no injections. Not even a prescription for anbiotics.
Back at the entrance, we showed our insurance cards to a dapper young man seated behind a desk and made our copay, about $35. The whole episode had taken about forty minutes.
It wasn’t until we got into a cab to return home that I began to feel a little sheepish. A serious toxin like botulism would definitely have made me feel horrible, worse every day rather than hitting me on an every-other-day basis. Why had I latched onto this gruesome condition? Perhaps because feeling dizzy was completely new for me. Probably because the Internet and my cultural alienation had heightened my fears.
After I got started on an antibiotic, I felt better within a day. Apparently I had been living with low-grade amount of congestion for so long that it had begun to seem normal. Only when dizziness ensued did it get my attention. My head now feels clearer than it has in weeks, and I am not so tired any more, a condition I had blamed on my teaching duties.
I haven’t found a remedy for Internetus Panickus or Overseasius Dramaticus yet – but perhaps awareness is the first step.
