One of our friends is about to have a baby, and I guess Stefan was feeling a mystical connection with her, because at 3 am in the morning he woke up in excruciating pain, He wasn't crying or screaming but he may as well have been, he had a sharp pain in his back or left side that didn't feel like an intestinal thing, he was inconsolable and nothing could make it stop. And Bernie had to watch and couldn't do anything to help, it was the middle of the night and we were at a national park campground in the middle of nowhere. Finally we found the manager's house and woke him up--he was quite helpful but told us that the nearest doctor was 150km away. He let us use our phone to call Stefan's emergency medical and evacuation insurance helpline, which wasn't much help at all (the first person wanted his email address to send us info, and we finally got to talk to a doctor, he just said to go see a doctor). Luckily we had some ibuprofen along with us, and we had made friends with a couple of South Africans who gave us another kind of pill. By 8 am we decided to head for the doctors office, which took about 2 hours. We weren't kidding when we said the nearest doctor was 150 km away--we didn't see a house or any kind of building until we had driven 60 km, and we didn't even see another car until we had gone another 10 km past that. The pain lessened and then came back during the drive, but by the time we were sitting in Dr. VonSchauroth's office Stefan was feeling much better. It was a little oasis of calm in a dusty and spartan grocery store building. Of course he had to wait an hour to get actually see the doctor, but after she heard his story and had him pee in a cup, she gave him the good? news that it was very likely a kidney stone that he might have already passed. Just as Bernie claims to have suspected right from the beginning! And the pill that the South Africans gave Stefan was exactly the right painkiller, and she gave him 12 more of these, and some anti-imflammatory pills too. All this for only 182 Namibian dollars, or about US$26!
What a terrible experience but oh how great that it's over and that it wasn't something worse. And by later that afternoon, we were recovered enough that we went all the way back and finally saw the Fish River Canyon--"second only to the Grand Canyon in Arizona"--you be the judge.
2 comments:
Aw Bern, you look so cute. You always do when you aren't sporting that liverwurst lip of yours!
hi boys! i've been following your adventure and it sounds fantastic so far. i understand you're to be in India soon; what's your itinerary for that country? if you're planning to visit the Taj Mahal, then try to go on the day of Eid al-Fitra, marking the end of Ramadan (around the 11-13th of october). it is (or was) free for all visitors that day (instead of the outrageous shake-down they usually hit foreigners with.
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