Saudi Flu or Third Time Unlucky in the Desert

Wednesday 18th November 2009
Well it’s not an internet café setting, and I’m standing up as I type this but this is a new setting and new way of doing my blog entry for today.

So where am I and what the hell am I on about? Well, in fact I’m in my classroom. In front of me sit …. Well, actually there is no-one here at all except me, my bottle of water and the “entertainment pack” that I brought with me today. That comprises one mobile phone plus headset for music or radio, several puzzle books (which are all about ten years old and mostly unused) and one travel writings book (“Long Way Round” – McGregor and Boorman).
I might get onto the book. My mobile phone is nearly out of battery charge. I have started my water (and, by the way, if you’re wondering WHICH variety I drink, it is Nestle PureLife – one of my favourites!). And if standing up and typing is tiring then I will sit down and rest a while before resuming.

Sounds like I’m having a good day? Well, as days go here it isn’t so bad. It is the last day before the two weeks of November holiday which is what they call “Hajj” here. No, I don’t know what the occasion of the holiday is, and I can’t say that I really care. Holiday is what it is here and that is a break from the classroom. Yes, I suppose it will be a boring two weeks of my life here, but after my fortnight of flu bacteria I feel I am in need of a rest.

Yes, sadly you DID read correctly. I HAVE indeed had my third bout of flu here in Saudi Arabia. That makes it three times I have been down with flu in just over eight months. And that’s not all of course. If we are to count all my sick and not-feeling-well days, then it will show 3 x influenza, 1 x migraine headache, 1 x month long ear infection blockage problem and long bouts of tiredness and some amount of insomnia (though that is rare).

Normally I consider myself a fairly bug-free kind of guy. In an average year I might have the flu twice at most. But THREE TIMES? And THAT plus ear plus MIGRAINE??

It really came home to me this last week what a rough time I have had here in terms of health and wellbeing. How many of you out there get ill like I have been in the space of eight months of a normal year? Yes, you might have SOME of the things I mentioned, but certainly NOT all together in one continual spell.

There is no doubt that, for me, Saudi Arabia is a difficult country to live in in many ways. Whereas the work-related ways are well documented in these blog pages, I have not said much about the health ways. Well, generally I feel alright and I don’t feel like I’m dropping off the stage of life just yet of course. But just LOOK at what it IS doing to me!

Not only that, there is the element of exercise, or rather lack of it. Apart from the pacing up and down the classroom floor and the stage I have at the front, I have had little chance of any good walking. Well, you can’t do it when you live in the middle of the desert as I do AND when it is over 50 celsius in the summer months. I think that THIS is what I have missed most of all in living here – the fact that I pretty much HAVE TO stay in and there is no chance of going out to explore my surroundings. REALLY miss that. Not that there’s much to explore out here – unless you enjoy endless boring sand and the occasional camel. Oh, but last week there were two camels walking RIGHT NEXT TO THE ROAD when I went into town for my birthday in the taxi. A birthday surprise from the desert you could say! Hmm …. I’ve never quite seen camels up THAT close before. BIG, aren’t they?

Anyway, I digress a little as always. But hey, why NOT? Whose blog IS THIS anyway! If I wanna ramble and pontificate then what better place to do it?

Back I go then to the main theme of these last two weeks which is my flu strike-down. And WHAT a flu it was! I would describe it as a “whispering death” type of flu. It came on me very slowly and gradually in week 1 and by the start of week 2 it was a fully blown blow-yer-head-off killer of a flu which, at its height, had me self-confined in my room for four days (this included last weekend).

How did it start? Well we must go back to the start of the week beginning Saturday 7th November. It started being rather more difficult to get up in the morning, which I simply attributed to tiredness at the end of a very long period of teaching. Well, I thought, no matter because the holiday is only in a few weeks.

Ah, but it DID matter. As that week wore on, I grew steadily more exhausted both DURING the day and in the afternoons. Why could this be, I thought. It is not holiday time yet. Well, my week grew worse and worse. You know when something is up when your usually sharp-witted self in class cannot cope with student questions and when break time is always too short. Oh, AND because my head was becoming increasingly “cloudy” and somewhat dizzy. Well, maybe not dizzy but certainly there was a big slowdown going on up there. Kind of like a brain cell strike was spreading and growing. The more the week went on, I felt tired, REALLY unable and could NOT keep the day going.

But get this – there were few of the more traditional flu symptoms. I was eating normally, did not notice any temperature increase and I did not have what you would call the “muscle aches” of real flu. Instead I had extreme tiredness, a strange of hazy, dizzy feeling in my head which made any kind of thinking a tortuous process. I was reduced to the brain capacity of …. well, a old man approaching ALZHEIMER’S DISEASE!

No no don't worry – I'm not succumbing to THAT. At least not YET, and I'm sure I have many more good years of full brain power to come yet. But the feeling was that any kind of thinking took an awful lot of effort and access to certain parts of my brain were restricted or blocked.

I was not at all well. The worst day of course was Wednesday when, on waking up, I felt really bad but thought that since it WAS Wednesday I would just get through the day and then have the weekend to recover. A BIG mistake! Yes, I went in to class. But as lessons passed by (and there were only four of them on this morning), I felt worse and worse and WORSE.

By the end of Lesson 3 I knew that was it for the day and that I had to go home. It was break time and out I went to the communal area and fell into a chair. I was finished but I had to do something. So just before Lesson 4 I went to the classroom of my colleague and said to him that I was feeling bad and that I was finished for the day and that I was simply not able to do my classes after lunch. Yes, I STILL had three more to come that day!

Well, I did say I would see Lesson 4 through and that afterwards I was going home. And that's what I did. Oh, but how SLOWLY I was moving and how bad did I feel! My weekend had started early but not in the way I would have liked. Went home and, I think, straight to bed.

Now, what I haven't mentioned so far is that YES I DID go to the doctor …. at the START of the week on Sunday. It was the early stages of my flu. I already had the extreme tiredness feeling and knew I had to do something at that early stage. So over I went after my lessons and after I had got changed, I wandered over to the so-called Employee Health Center at the time they said I should go.

Procedure over there always seems the same. You come in and state your problem making sure not to tell the nurses much about it since they don't pass this on to the doctor anyway. Then into the Waiting Area which is, of course, a Male Waiting Area because the Female Waiting Area is behind a screen. You can see the ladies as you come in but you go off to the right to your Male Waiting Area while they are segregated in theirs. You can hear them talking, and if you wanted you could always peer through the cracks between barriers to see them. But NOT sit with them and certainly not talk with them over the partition. Ooofff – men and women MIXING?? Not here mate!
Now, the first thing you ALWAYS have to do is go have your temperature and blood pressure taken. Absolutely ALWAYS! And WHATEVER you go there for! Then you go back and sit in the segregated Waiting Area and wait more for the doctor to be ready. Then you are called and you follow the nurse to his room. Inside there he is sitting there doing …. something with either your medical records or somebody else's or both. Down you sit and wait till he looks as though he is ready. But you never quite know.
He looks at you …. well, I should rather say he looks THROUGH YOU with the strange eyes that he has and you don't know if he is waiting for you to talk or not. There is no word from the nurse on why you are there so any info you gave to her or any or the other nurses is useless!

OK, now time for you to talk and so you tell him what's up. I don't know, but I so often feel that these doctors aren't the least bit interested in your description of your troubles. Anyway, I told him of my symptoms and also I mentioned my migraine as it seemed relevant given it was not so long ago and such these things should be mentioned. “Who told you it was a migraine?”, he wanted to know. I said that nobody actually DID tell me but I supposed it was since it was like no other headache I'd ever had and that I had to have lights off and lie down and felt sick. Not necessarily a migraine, he said. Just a big headache because after all it is because of he climate.

Now, I am not a doctor. But to dismiss a serious thing like THAT was strange. I still consider that it WAS migraine though I have no experience of such things. And yet, from all descriptions of migraine headaches I KNOW that it must have been because of those different aspects I mentioned – dark room, feeling sick and its severity.

So the migraine was discounted. And what next? Well, the usual prescription of pills, though I noted it was on a larger piece of paper than normal. He noted down in my medical file this, also muttering the words, “healthy young man”, as he was doing so. Two of those were and ARE true, but as I know now, I was FAR from being healthy.

His last words were that I had to go home, eat a big meal then and then later eat ANOTHER big meal. And take the pills and I would feel alright in the morning. And if I was not well the next day then I should go to the clinic in the hospital.

Know what? I am more and more convinced that I myself could be a doctor. All you need is a prescription pad and a few choice phrases to give out to all who enter your clinic. Such words should either serve the function of Dismissing Your Patient In The Most Effective Way. Because you are a Busy Man and have many other sick people to attend to.

Yeah! I can do that! White Coat Land here I COME!!

Oh, and I almost forgot. You need a steady supply of antibiotics. No other medicines are required by any patient …. EVER!

I'm sure some enterprising soul out in China has a readymade DIY Doctor's Kit just WAITING for its first orders. ME FIRST!!

Ah, but there's more to add to this. I HAVE become a doctor! YES, didn't you know? Well, I was “christened” as Dr. Wilding by our Course Registrar here who attached a post-it note with my “title” to my newest weekly timetable (or something like that). This has become something of an in-joke between myself and my colleagues. And hey – I like the tag! There is one class of students who address me as either “Teacher” or “Doctor”. It's a lot better than the Wednesday afternoon nursing school ladies who call me only “Mister”.

And much better than being just plain old Teacher David as I was the first semester here with the army boys.

Anyway, back to the flu story just one last time. I DID have Saturday and Sunday off this week. For the four days of Thursday to Sunday of the week just passed I did NOT leave this room at all. My colleague popped his head in every now and then asking if there was anything I needed from the shop. That was very helpful indeed and I am extremely grateful to him, and without that help I would have had to struggle to the shop myself and that would have NOT been possible in the condition I was in. Small tasks became large ones and a tired and heavy feeling had taken over my body in those four days. So a big THANK YOU to him for helping me out.

Now then, I realised I would have to go and get a sick note from our “friendly neighbourhood doctor” as college procedure would require it. So on Sunday evening when I was feeling rather better I made my appointment and went over. OK OK – the usual procedures were gone through. When I was in front of the doctor I said to him that I needed to have a sick note for work. No, he said, he would NOT give me one. Why? Because he cannot give such a thing for days that have passed and can ONLY give it for sick days to come like tomorrow. Well, I said, tomorrow is useless since I will be back to work and I NEED THIS SICK NOTE to give them. No, he repeated, these are the rules.

What an IDIOT! That sitting there and refusing got me really angry. So I said to him, “OK, why, last week, did you just give me your pills and tell me I would be alright in the morning? Because I really was NOT alright! You could and SHOULD have given me the sick note THEN!”.

He had no answer to that and simply said that I should have come back. I was not ABLE to come, I said.

Well, should I drag my sick body from one side of the compound to the other just for the sick note? If I am SICK, it means I CANNOT go out anywhere! And what if my students or colleagues had seen me out there? They would think, “Oh, I see he is HERE but not in class!”.

The definition of Being Ill is that you are NOT able to go out and do your job. So why is it that being ill STILL means you have to go OUT TO THE DOCTOR?

It doesn't make sense, and procedure or not I don't see that I should've had to go out making myself feel worse just because I must have this piece of paper for work purposes.

Anyway, after I had said my piece, I decided that sitting here with this doctor was a big waste of time. So I got up, said, “So coming here was a complete waste of time then!”, and walked right out of the doctor's office and back home.

No, I didn't get the sick note. Do I need it? Well, maybe I do or maybe not but I do not have it. What will the consequences be of that? Probably very little, at at worst they might deduct pay for those two days since I have no “evidence” of where I was. Or if they're feeling REALLY petty then they might send me a warning letter. Probably the first of these.

Actually I don't care what they do and I'm certainly NOT going to lose any sleep over it. I no longer care WHAT goes on or doesn't go on here. What is important now is the 90 or so days I have left here before my Final Release from this Saudi Arabian nonsense.

Oh, one more thing. On Sunday morning (was about mid-morning I suppose) I had a phone call at home from the Head of Department. He sounded like all the world's troubles were on his shoulders. Actually that is how he normally sounds. But the situation here is this: we are very short-staffed and so any absence such as mine stretches the human resources of the English department to breaking point. I don't know how many of the classes on Saturday or Sunday, if any, were covered. I know for certain that the Wednesday afternoon nursing school classes were cancelled. The point here is that almost NO COVER was available for my classes. That is two days and eleven lessons between two classes that had almost no teacher cover on them. What if I had been away the whole week? It is possible. Anyway, the HoD said he's been talking with the Dean or Assistant Dean about the lesson cover problem and that this was a big problem. He wanted to know a few things – one, how was I. Two, was it just flu or …. well, the BIG ONE (Swine Flu). Three, how long was I likely to be off, and there he was VERY glad to hear that I WAS going to be back at work tomorrow, Monday. He also asked me if I had been to the doctor for the sick note. I told him I'd been last week to SEE the doctor.

I have not said that I do not have the sick note. If they ask, I will send them to that stupid doctor and he can deal with it. I'm NOT going to mess around with it!

Hehe, and AGAIN on Monday morning the HoD called me. Was I going to be in today? Yes, I said I was. But, he said, he'd been in to the teaching block and according to my teaching schedule I have no classes today. Yes I DO, I told him. That teaching schedule over there is wrong. And, he asked me, what happened with my class at 7.30am this morning? I HAVE no class at 7.30am on a Monday, I said.

Yes, another out-of-date teaching timetable problem. And this begs ANOTHER question – HOW would he have arranged cover for my lessons as it is clear he did not even HAVE an up-to-date TEACHOING SCHEDULE for me???

Once again – basic things done very badly here. And THIS TIME it is not a Saudi mistake but one by our very own Head of Department.

Is that a first?