I don’t know, maybe it was hubris. You expect to catch the traditional airline cold when you’re crammed into a marrow metal tube with hundreds of other people for sixteen hours at a stretch, so I had half-figured I would get sick right after I got here.
Then, if that didn’t happen, you imagine that any local bugs you don’t have any immunity against will come after you right away, while your defenses are down. But that didn’t happen either.
So maybe I was feeling a little invincible, and didn’t worry about it as much as I should have when I accidentally forgot my bottle of hand sanitizer at the famous Chinese restaurant last week.
But it was probably only a matter of time. Riding the BTS every day packed in cheek by jowl, constantly immersed in teeming crowds, using gym equipment and swimming pools with other people… it now seems inevitable that I would pick up the flu here.
I felt it coming on yesterday after I worked out and went for a swim and tried to convince myself for a few hours that I had just gotten too much sun. But the sore throat started to hit over dinner, and I knew I was done.
It’s difficult to tell here if you have a fever or if it’s just the regular Bangkok heat, but I am pretty sure it’s a flu, not a cold, both from the sudden onset, the aches and pains, and what I imagine is a fairly high temperature.
Everyone’s mind leaps to some exotic foreign disease when they start feeling unwell in a foreign country, but just like at home, the most common maladies are relatively benign. I got my shots before coming over but apparently the flu vaccine that had been worked up for this year’s flu season didn’t match the strain actually in circulation, so I skipped it.
So now I’m left with old-fashioned treatments, namely laying around moaning and drinking a lot of fluids.
I brought some medication with me but nothing for nighttime, which can make all the difference–being able to sleep soundly is a huge secret weapon. The travel nurse has assured me I’d be able to find over the counter medications here easily enough, but after hitting three different pharmacies and countless 7/11s that proved to not be the case. There’s nothing like Nyquil to be had, apparently.
Fortunately, I’m not averse to rolling my own, so I got some paracetamol (acetaminophen, in the states) and a decongestant/antihistamine and dosed myself up before bed last night.
But it turns out that medication dosages here, just like restaurant serving sizes, as scaled to a smaller frame than mine–I had a pretty rough night, never really getting completely to sleep and still feeling enormously crappy. I probably should have double the dose, which I will try tonight.
The timing could be worse, but it could be better, too. It would have been no fun at all if this had come on next week, when I am due to head north to Chiang Mai, or the week after, when heading for the beaches–traveling with a flu is no fun.
But I was supposed to go tour the Grand Palace this weekend and then head up to Kanchanaburi for a couple of days, and those excursions aren’t going to be nearly as enjoyable as they would otherwise have been.