A stay in a Tashkent Hospital...

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I will copy and paste the email that I sent out first, and then explain.

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Hello, colleagues and friends!

I wouldn't normally mass-mail to such a diverse group thus, but the events of the weekend and the near future warrant it.

Friday evening as Mayzie and I were preparing our dinner, I began feeling a dull pain in my chest. For about an hour, the pain grew in intensity and locale, never sharp but with an increasing sense of tightness and pressure. Of course, I figured it was just the side-effect of some bad sausage I'd bought earlier in the day and tried to ignore it. After the first hour, the pain was strong enough that I could barely stand, and I lay down on the couch to tough it out. (bad sausage? not so
likely..)

After another hour of this Mayzie asked if we should try to see a doctor and I said no. Maybe less than 30 minutes passed until it became unbearable, and she called an ambulance. It quickly arrived and the doctor immediately determined that I was in a bad state; they gave me an injection of something right there and whisked us off to the hospital.

Upon arrival, just a few minutes of discussion passed (where does it hurt? does this hurt? does that?) before I was taken to a little room with two beds, one occupied by a Kazakh policeman, the other mine. I was immediately given two more injections, hooked up to an IV full of novocaine to reduce the pain, and told to try to sleep.

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Morning came and I felt, in general, fine, except for feeling like I'd been kicked in the stomach the day before. More injections (guess where is the favorite place..) and finally, tests to see what was wrong. After one extraordinarily unpleasant procedure and a handful of others that were not as bad, the diagnosis: gall stones!! (gall stones?? i'm not OLD!!) So, diagnosis having been made, they kept me there for another day full of injections and IV drips. My kazakh roommate was replaced by an iranian. I was allowed no food. Time passed. Sunday morning came and, after collecting a list of about five different things I have to take for the next few days, as well as a list of immediate dietary restrictions, we went home.


So, of course, now I feel fine, and all is (mostly) back to normal.

Except for what happens next.


After a little reading-on-the-internet of what you'd imagine are reputable sources, it turns out that gall stones are common (present in up to 1 in 4 people), but don't usually act up. When they do, it's in the manner I experienced to a greater or lesser degree. They may never act up again, but if the attacks are recurrent, then usually the gallbladder is removed. It's not a vital organ, and if one has it removed, odds are strongly in one's favor that after an adjustment period, one will be able to return to one's old diet of brightly colored foods with invented names. Some groups of people (americans, brits, swedes, to name a few) are more prone to experience gall stone attacks, but within a group there isn't a strong link to any particular diet or other health indicator (at least, not any that would indict me..) Gall stones are less common in people under 20, but have been found in people of all ages (including not-yet-born children!) I think I just lucked out.


What happens next, we don't yet know. The clinic here can remove it using the current favored technique (laparoscopic surgery) and indeed does so several times a week. But surgery is surgery, and it's kind of a scary thing to consider having done in a developing nation. We're looking into what my traveler's insurance will cover as far as traveling out of the country is concerned, and of course I'm looking for all the nutty home remedies I can try (first, turn out all the lights and lie in a bathtub full of vinegar, then take a big piece of cheese and ...) to hold onto my precious internal organ. But, in the end, if it must go, it must go, and the question only becomes where and when.


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So... I'll follow this up in a bit, not really with updates because there's not much new to update, but with more detail on things.


Later, I have a list of three things to post about:
1) Bukhara
2) The office
3) Tashkent Tower

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