Harry Nicolaides' Weekly Column

Exclusively for Phuket-Info.com

Almost dead, again!

My sincerest apologies to readers of this column but for reasons only revealed this week I have been indisposed. Not even Nicke, the administrator of the web page www.phuket-info.com, had any knowledge of my whereabouts. I was delirious for days languishing on my bed in my mountain bungalow under mosquito nets in excruciating pain. A kaleidoscope of bizarre hallucinations kept me entertained – obscure childhood memories, hearing the eulogy first hand at Lawrence of Arabia’s funeral, standing in a meadow, beside a Roman legionnaire viewing the carnage of a recent battle in a far flung dominion of the Republic, being on the boat with Captain Willard in the film Apocalypse Now, enroute to assassinate the renegade Colonel Kurtz in Cambodia only to discover Willard is leafing through my personal dossier and I am the target to be exterminated ‘with extreme prejudice’.

The vultures circled (OK, granted, there are no vultures in Thailand. They were more likely to have been gluttonous mosquitos fat on my blood, viewed up close) while the hundreds of species of reptilian life that I share the mountain with made their own unique call of the wild. My body was immobilised by pain while my head was throbbing with fever. I could feel the infection fester and ferment in my throat determined to block my ability to breathe. The storm outside raged, torrential rains causing small landslides. I picked up my mobile phone to call an ambulance and realised how will I ever explain where I live!! No street name, no major landmark, just lots of palm trees. I can only endure, I thought, until the storm or my debilitating pain subsides.

Hemmingway said ‘First, we must endure.’ Well, endure I did. With suffering comes wisdom. Well, I also learned a few things: When there is no one around to hear you scream, don’t scream. The reptiles will think it is your final death Knell or the hollow triumphalism of a wounded animal. Either way, the sound of a human being screaming in sheer horror on a mountain in the middle of nowhere is like the tinkling of Pavlov’s bell to his laboratory dog – a signal for dinner’s ready!! Anyway, if you find yourself out of bed on the rooftop of your mountain bungalow screaming hysterically, don’t panic. You are probably hallucinating again, this time about being a moth or something. Conserve your energy and water because both are your only sources of life in the tropics.

When your urine is ‘Van Gogh’ Yellow (that’s brighter than the yellow colour of Vincent Van Gogh’s Daffodils in his multi-million dollar, iconic painting) then you have consumed far too much paracetamol. You will begin to vomit, become jaundiced in colour and experience pain in the upper right quadrant of your torso. In short, your liver has been damaged. To ameliorate the pain, discomfort and fever usually attendant in any episode of tropical fever or infection, remove all of your clothes, stay in a small confined room with the aircon or a fan on a high setting and keep a wet face towel pressed down onto your forehead by Nicole Kidman. If you can’t manage this then put the fan on an intermediate setting. It is possible to freeze down the pain and possibly an infection, as most of these maladies grow more virulent in the heat.

When you can finally emerge from the bungalow following the storm and make it to medical services go straight to a private hospital. In Phuket, visiting an international standard private hospital for a consultation, injection (Penicillin) and a cache of antibiotics (1000 milligrams of Amoxicilin, the black label of antibotic tablets) costs approx 500 Baht and you are seen in less than 10 minutes! See a local doctor at his clinic and you are likely to pay 1000 Baht for the first visit alone and have to share a small dimly-lit waiting room with a dozen bar girls, half of whom you have had sex with in the recent past. Somehow, with a local clinic you always need to return to pay or relieve pain.

When my private doctor insisted the pain I was experiencing was normal and an anaesthetic was out of the question I was convinced he had delusions of being camp commandant at Changi Prison or that he was a certifiable sadistic psychopath. I have since concluded that the Thai people have a much higher threshold of pain than Caucasians. To most people in the West any prolonged discomfort is immediately addressed before it develops into a pain with a panoply of pharmaceutical and biometric solutions. At the hospital you will need your passport and a current address. You are issued a laminated card featuring your personal profile on completion of your first session. The card can also be used for identification just as when you are borrowing a video as I did – Apocalypse Now, to have a better look at the name on that dossier in Willard’s hand!

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