The Misadventures of Nancy Miss
on When I'm 64 (Sri Lanka), 16/Mar/2011 13:36, 34 days ago
    It feels like I was away for a very long time. I have been traveling around Sri Lanka and a bit of India with my oldest friend Ruth, my batch mate from Nursing School, as they would say here and her husband Lenny.  Let me say, they were really good sports to come all this way, to a third world country to have very ambitious adventures with me. None of us realized that for them, it might be quite a trial with traveling exhaustion, extreme heat, terrible roads, very scary, high roads without railings, leeches, snakes (according to one member of our group), not first rate (sometimes less than pristine accommodations), lots of new situations where rolling with the punches is the way to manage etc. I have learned to pretty much ignore most things that I have no control over. It might be the heat, it might be the road, it might be leeches. I am not foolish, except one time on this trip, but I don't want to miss out on something because something could happen or because I am personally uncomfortable. This attitude has gotten me thru. The issue probably doesn't even come up in the first world. We don't have to think about it. I like how I am and feel I could manage pretty much anywhere. This was a good thing for me to learn about myself. I can however do stupid things. I got lots of leech bites when I went hiking in the beautiful Knuckles range of mountains. After that I started to have a bit of an infection where one of the bites had been and without thinking, when we were white water rafting on a river and I was invited to jump in, of course I did and stayed in a while..well, I ended up with Cellulitis and had to miss one night with my friends while I went to my home hospital and got some IV antibiotics. It was pretty bad and my friend Dr. S., one of the Psychiatrists who treated me said he was VERY nervous about letting me continue my trip since treatment should be 6 days of IVs in a hospital! I wasn't going to miss all these wonderful things I planned to see with Ruth and Len in SL and I am very healthy. It is interesting that on the day I got the leech bites (I won't describe poor Ruth's need to come into the shower and help me get all the leeches off and try to stop all the bleeding) someone stole $350 from me. It was quite a day but one of the best because the hike was so incredible and it was with a guide who was great and is coming to visit me here soon..a new friend. Not a new friend was our driver who made Lenny feel so safe because he was an excellent driver but for me was a nightmare, caring more about the trip being the way he wanted it, rather then allowing us to experience Sri Lanka the way I live in it. I was so happy though to see all the beautiful parts of SL that I had heard about; we had a wonderful safari in Yala National Park seeing elephants, leopard, birds. Actually in the rain forest I finally got to see a bird I have been wanting to see since I arrived, it was thrilling and worth the effort to get there and be in a pretty disgusting place. We went to Kerela, India which so many people have loved. I loved certain things we did and saw but I hated the filth of the place. It is called God's country but they totally disrespect their country and God by dropping every bit of trash on the ground. Plastic bottles, paper, anything, cover the landscape. This kind of disrespect for your surroundings, the people you live with, the earth is not something I can ignore. We all had a reaction to it. I had a long talk with a visiting doctor from India about it when I got back. He said there is an attitude in India of caring for oneself and one's relatives so you keep your own place clean but absolutely not a thought about anyone outside of your family so literally we would go outside the gates of a beautiful guest house, very well taken care of and step on litter all around us.  Do you know that so many people are drinking water in unnecessary plastic bottles, an issue created by Pepsico and other companies to make more money, that there is a new continent floating around somewhere made up of plastic!!!!!! Is it really such a problem to refill a bottle and put a filter on your tap if, and it's a big if, your water is so bad . I have to boil and filter all my water because it really is bad. So it becomes part of your life, just another routine...sorry, I have gone off on a rant but I think as the East has to wake up, so does the West.  Anyway, we ended our travel adventure with several luxurious days at one of the oldest and loveliest hotels in Colombo, it was a real treat and a perfect ending to our time together.    On my return, there were 3 days of conferences; one full day on Sexual issues and all were a twitter. People don't really discuss sex here, even psychiatrists. In the US people freely talk about sex but don't talk about money. Here people tell me EVERYTHING about money. The other big news is that after more then a year of being told we were moving to a new ward, just built, it finally happened a few days ago. The day before the move there was Pirith chanting by the resident Buddhist monk and a monk junior (about 10yo.). Many of the staff came and we chanted, some patients came, other guests. This occurred 3 times until we actually moved everything from the old place to the new. I of course supervised until it was obvious that no one was paying me the slightest bit of attention!  It is brand new and they moved in all the old stained mattresses, dirty old beds, side tables painted maybe 50 plus years ago...their equipment is the stuff thrown out of the worst of our hospitals 60 years ago. Of course there is no linen. When we moved all the patients over, it became even sadder to me because we are way over census so many women are sleeping 2 to a bed and the beds are small singles! When I talked to the consultant psychiatrist about it today he said when he was working in a medical ward he was the doctor in charge of the floor patients, the patients without beds who had to sleep on the floor! This is the country now labeled middle class.    Wow, as I read what I have written, one would get the impression that I am not happy or having a hard time..not true. I am sad to be leaving some staff. A few of the nurses apparently don't know that I have chosen to leave after 18 months instead of 24 and they told me that they each want me to live with them for a month each so I can stay! This is what I am sad about. There is still some subtle work to do around new staff, especially our new Master! Yes, the bane of my existence here, the charge nurse has been replaced. My entire experience might have been different but who knows, there's always something or someone..anyway, I think I am going to be able to fit in a quick trip to the Maldives to snorkel and maybe a weekend at the beach, not too bad huh.